“But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of the soul. She knew that there were a lot of things she didn’t know how to understand.”

— The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

I don’t believe in kismet and I don’t believe in invisible strings. I don’t believe in 11:11s and dandelion wishes either, and I only pray on planes when the turbulence begins to feel a bit too much like an engine spontaneously combusting in the sky. I hope for the best and prepare for the worst, which most times ends up becoming just preparing for the worst and hoping I land somewhere, somewhat dry and safe. I move through life like a lightning rod waiting for bad weather—maybe that’s clinical depression, or maybe it’s just good storm preparation. I’m so terrified of endings because I don’t believe good things come back. I chase memories right until they slip into nothingness and I actively miss someone even when they’re in front of me.

It’s overwhelmingly cynical and sentimental, the way I am. I understand that those two adjectives may seem antithetical, but it’s always been like that in my mind. When my boyfriend and I broke up earlier this year, I kept repeating, “this is it? This is all there was to everything?” The breakup wasn’t sad, it wasn’t devastating. It was empty. It was incredulous. It was anticlimactic. It was irreconcilable with the five-act story structure we learn as kids that all stories have, and this one was a story too, right? It was amicable, like we could forget last twenty four hours and nothing would have changed. The next day while roaming the streets of London in a fit of unexpected tears, I called him against better judgement. I said, “this can’t be it. Nothing’s changed”, to which he replied, “We broke up. Everything’s changed”.

Here’s a list of why it felt like nothing had changed for me: I still have his address as my mailing address and he will continue receiving books from publishers who won’t see my email requesting the change until maybe June. I think my sister is still making him read her poems. He came up with the nickname my family calls me. I have four bottles of shampoo and a hairdryer in his bathroom. My concert ticket for June was bought on his account. He was my best friend first and my boyfriend second, and falling in love with him felt uneventful, much like our breakup—except that it wasn’t anticlimactic, it was just peaceful. I’m not sure when it even happened. Months ago, I told him that it finally felt like my mind was quiet when I was with him, that my mind was always riddled with anxiety but in his arms, I felt calm.

It feels like such a corny, fairytale-ish thing to say, to write out like that, but it wasn’t. It was just simple. I think being in love was just simple, is simple. The day before we decided to break up, he sent me a poem he wrote for me on Christmas day, where he tells me his mental picture of me is when I’m tipsy and barreling towards him, uncoordinated and giggly, while he’s laying on the carpet of his apartment (which I did a few times). The day after we broke up, I manically scribbled down a post mortem of our relationship, of inside jokes and random things that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but us, wouldn’t make sense to us maybe two years down the line, and sent it to him. When we called, he asked me not to throw away his poem. I asked him not to throw away my list. He told me he’d keep it forever.

There’s no reason to get into why we broke up because it was truly about semantics. There was no big fight or big hurt or big anything. Open the textbook and we had the exact reasons leading to an amicable breakup: the distance was too much, we wanted different things in life, the distance was too long, I sobbed for two days straight before we had to part, we wouldn’t be living in the same city for at least two more years, the distance. If we lived in the same city, we would still be together. In the end it doesn’t really matter because a breakup is just a breakup is just a breakup. Days later, while on a weekend trip to the Lake District with my best friend (in which I promised her I’d only cry once a day), I wrote out a list of reasons why I missed him on my notes app at four in the morning.

The main reason became that he was there for me, patiently, in the worst hurricane storm of my life. He held my hand and held me close and told me it was going to be okay. That reassurance became such a part of my routine that I felt lost without it; somehow, in the last year, him holding my hand had become some kind of anchor for me. And that realization retroactively terrified me, because hadn’t I always been my own compass? While my hyper independence is oftentimes my most glaring character flaw, it was something I prided myself on, my stubbornness and determination in tandem. And now—where was it?

Panic growing in my chest, I texted one of my best friends about how I missed that, how I was increasingly fearful that I needed him as the compass, for the reassurance. Niña, in return, replied this:

Last year, Niña and I spent a lot of our conversations talking about love and its aftermath. At the start of this year, she published this beautiful essay about her past relationship, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this line: “I am spilling over with faith and I don’t know where to put it.” I am not a religious person, but I think faith transcends boxes and boundaries; like energy, faith cannot be created nor destroyed. You spill over with faith outside a relationship or connection that has run its course, but there will always be empty boxes. At least, that’s what I’ve realized. What do you do with all this faith? You begin to believe in something else.

While I was in London in January, I stayed with at her apartment for ten days. While waiting for her to come back from work, I browsed around her collection of books, stumbling upon a copy of Everything I Know About Love that I had annotated for her twenty second birthday.

Three years down the line, flipping through the pages and seeing my scrawls and thoughts felt like trying to read a foreign language. In that moment, I felt like I could look into a mirror of myself and no longer recognize who I was. Not necessarily in a wholly negative way, of course. I liked the fact that some aspects of my scrawls and thoughts were unrecognizable. My naïveté felt endearing, written months before my first full time job, only a year out of college and fresh out of my grad program. Before any real romantic relationship, because any guy I went on two or three dates with out of boredom didn’t count.

That’s the Tumblr quote I stumbled upon, that’s been a permanent fixture in my mind for the last few years. I’ve rinsed and repeated this thought ad nauseam in my brain:

“In another universe, my window is laying open and I am laying on the floor. I am twelve years old. Nothing bad has happened to me.”

That’s what reading Elle’s copy of the book felt like. The birthday card I had written for her at the end of our trip together in Seoul back in the summer of 2023. It felt optimistic, hopeful, with convictions written in the sand that have long since been washed over by ocean waves. I think I began to hear a needle of a clock ticking and began to feel scared because I had no idea what it was counting down to. But the constant ticking has lingered in my mind, that it’s counting down to something, that I won’t know what that something is until it’s too late.

Last March, almost exactly a year ago, I wrote this in my journal (that I later posted on Substack):

there is a ticking bomb in me. can you hear it? no? hold your breath for a second, count to three in your head. you hear it now, right? i must have swallowed it a little while ago. i didn’t realize that was what it was when i did, and i’ve been trying to dig it out of my chest cavity ever since. regret has bled into resignation, but i have a fear that it’ll multiply, metastasize, start thundering inside of me. i’m afraid that i won’t know when to squeeze my eyes shut and hold my breath when it inevitably explodes.

i didn’t notice it at first. i think it grew inside of me. a perfect environment for it to find a home in my organs, root itself inside of my veins, replace my arteries with its tangled red wires. but one night i was laying in bed and i began to hear it. the ticking. it thrived on cognizance, flourished on apprehension. the perpetual paradox of inadvertently feeding it by trying to rid of it, by being too aware of it, the monster under my bed. i learned how to perform surgery on myself, dissecting every inch of my body with a sterilized scalpel, collecting empirical data. i prayed that the size of the bomb would be proportional to its volume, the decibels of the ticking increasing each and every day.

[…]

i’ve spent so long listening for it that i don’t recognize the cadence of my heart anymore. but i won’t ask for anything else now, i understand that it’s inextricable, a red string tied around my ankle. all i ask is that i know when it’ll explode. i always look at the needle when it pierces my skin. i need to know when the bomb inside of me will detonate. i thought it would have years ago, but it hasn’t yet. the countdown terrifies me more now to the point where i need to relearn how to walk because i don’t know how to take one step without trying to match my footsteps to the tick, a perfect and steady 4/4 time signature.

i swear, i’m not imagining it. please believe me. please don’t look at me like that. my body is a minefield and as soon as i locate all the explosives, i’ll be okay again.

Being terrified of an imaginary timer is an almost comically bad way to get through life, but reading that annotated copy made me realize that’s all it’s been. Waiting for destruction, waiting for metamorphosis, waiting for something better, waiting for something. I chase memories because I keep waiting, I open every door and every window and every drawer in my room at night because I wait. I was waiting in the pages of those books for my real life to begin, to be a real adult; almost four years later, I’m still waiting but I’m not sure what I’m waiting for anymore. I’m still a lightning rod, but for what this time?

I crave familiarity and feel myself scrambling when I lose it, and everything in my life is changing. My own life, my desires, my career plans, my goals, my friendships, my relationships. Everything is changing, the carousel keeps turning, and getting off is not a choice. It can’t be a choice. Sometimes I meet up with a friend for the first time in a while and I panic because it feels unfamiliar for a second before we ease into things again. The day after the breakup, I felt myself floating, drifting terribly, because I saw a snail and I couldn’t text him about it. Instead, I texted my sister and she replied, “tiny snail”. The next day, she sent me a picture of a snail she saw on her walk. A newfound sense of familiarity began to settle in.

My baby sister is on the brink of turning seventeen. She’s not really a baby anymore, although I continue to call her that and my friends all refer to her as ‘the baby’. She’s the most precious and important thing in my life, and for the last sixteen years, I’ve built my life around her. It was the easiest thing in the world to do so, to be a sister. The process becomes simple when she’s the easiest person to love. She changes too, and I’m so thankful for it, because she’s becoming this wonderful, kind, brilliant, real person on her own. I see hints of my parents in her, hints of me. We sometimes go on walks together or we lay in bed, side by side like a camp sleepover and we take turns talking about uncertainties. We scribe each other’s brains like a journal with a lock because that’s what sisters are for.

In the gaps between our heart to hearts, I see her become more secure and grounded in her personhood. I know that she doesn’t see it in the moment, but it’s strange what perspective being older gives you. She voices her worries, and sometimes I struggle to find the right balance between validating her thoughts and telling her not to dwell on them too much because age and time will miraculously solve most things. She thinks everything is a cliffhanger but I know for a fact that it’s not. Oftentimes, age is a bandage and time is a salve, and it’s easy to see that fact when talking to my sister. I try to tell myself this too, that maybe the ticking in the deep subconscious of my mind isn’t anything to be apprehensive of. I have trouble processing that one though.

My big takeaway from my twenty fifth year, is that navigating life is losing and finding yourself, that compass, again and again. The unfamiliar becoming familiar, the familiar becoming unfamiliar. The state of being unanchored sometimes feels familiar, but I should never let it feel too familiar. Because that’s a depressive episode. In my attempt to find the eye of the hurricane storm I was entrapped in, I made a visit to the psychiatrist a few weeks ago. Medication is not the panacea for everything, especially depression or anxiety disorders, but I just wanted a professional’s opinion. Half the time, I convince myself that I’m being dramatic about my life, so who better to ask? It’s not supposed to be this hard, is always what I tell myself. It’s not supposed to be this hard is what everyone in my life has told me. So did my psychiatrist, and offered me the choice to take up medication. I told her I’d sit on it for a bit.

In my stubbornness and refusal to be helped (which darling has described hopefully affectionately as a personality akin to an old Korean and/or Somali uncle), I told myself that everything was fine and nothing in my life was wrong until I felt like I was isolating myself off from everyone. “I’m an island,” I told my then boyfriend a few months ago, half asleep on the phone at 3am. “I’m an island and I’m all alone and everyone is so far away and I don’t know what to do.” I felt like I had a loudspeaker in my hand but I could not for the life of me figure out how to use it. I’m sure that’s the secret of life, using the loudspeaker, being more present in your own life. “I’m right here, on the phone with you,” he replied, to which I said, “not in my mind you’re not”.

In his book The Age of Reason, Sarte describes a character who has led a toothless life—he’s had teeth but he never used them, never bit into anything because he was waiting. The act of chewing is not finite, we don’t have a certain amount of times we can chew throughout our life, but I act like there is. In my mind, if I chew something once, if I really bite into it, I can’t do it again because it won’t be as good. In this excessive forethought, I’ve been so passive in my life, maybe even without appetite. I’ve always believed that my accomplishments and successes in life were attainable because I have this drive and vision and determination. I have a five year plan written in my journal and I keep three planners because I structurally know everything there is to know about my life and future. But it’s never been about drive, but more about passivity. I’ve done all these things because it seemed like the most reasonable thing, not because I’ve had crazy motivation.

For over a year, I had this conversation with my ex that it felt like a routine, a game we played almost daily. Three in the morning my time, I’d wake up in inexplicable panic and call him, thankfully afternoon his time. “Everything’s going to be okay, right?” I’d ask. I never specified what everything was because I didn’t know. “Everything’s going to be okay, I promise,” he’d answer. I’d hang up the phone and go back to sleep.

My twenty fifth year did not come in seasons or shifts, they came in colossal upheavals. They were not etched into my five year plan, nor were they the most reasonable or logical course of action. Because of this, at one point in the last quarter of the year, I had no idea what to even wait to bite into. I have teeth I think, I thought, but only the illusion of food and maybe even the illusion of teeth. I dusted off my dream of being an author from the deep recess of my brain and signed with a literary agency. I saw a psychiatrist. I finally stopped treating the city I live in like a place I would move away from the day after tomorrow. I reconnected with old friends, joined clubs, made new ones. I had a cancer scare. I quit my job. I had more health scares. I ended up in the hospital more times than I can count. My grandpa died and I missed the funeral. I decided not to go to law school.

In my multitude of annual five year plans, law school was always on there. It wouldn’t necessarily be an end goal, but it was there because that was my future, engraved in stone and neatly varnished. I made sure of that. And that was the root of everything, my determination and drive. I worked my job and side hustles tirelessly, time blocked down to the minute for three years, studied and got an almost perfect score on my LSAT because that was always the end goal. While I retrospectively think that I have been toothless, I have always been good at working towards a goal, on autopilot. I pushed it off for years, but I told myself that I was saving up to pay for the tuition. Staying at home to spend more time with my parents and sister. Investing. Waiting to take that first really good bite.

Except for the fact that by the time I opened my teeth to take a bite, it didn’t feel good. The food had dehydrated and withered away, become something else that I had developed an allergy to over the years. I didn’t want to go to law school anymore, and that terrified me because the tree that had grown its trunk and branches and leaves since I graduated college, the tree of being an adult, existed because of plans for law school, of being a lawyer. So without that, who was I? I wasn’t used to this sort of change. I was used to weathering the storm when terrible ordeals happened to me and I was used to weathering other people’s storms. But I wasn’t used to changing my life like this on my own. Decided and executed by me. I planted trees and would plant them again in the exact same spot if a hurricane tore it down. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I played the hand of God in my own life. The tree, I concluded resolutely, would not exist the day after.

Changes happen. Growing up for me has been acknowledging that fact, or being forced to acknowledge it. The world doesn’t end when I think it ends, and my hope is that I’ll stop being so scared that it will. I outgrow people and people outgrow me. In the month after the breakup, I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not I truly knew him. Or vice versa, did he truly know me? Over time, I will change and so will he, and we will know less and less about each other. I will think of our perfect moments together with rose colored glasses and lose track of the anxiety and sadness underlying it. Or maybe I’ll forget about our perfect moments and only remember the bad ones. I will remember that he was the driving force in giving me the confidence to pursue something other than law school. I will always love blue a bit more than other colors but I will forget why.

I am trying to wrap up my twenty fifth year in a neat bow in hopes that this chapter of my life can completely close, but I know that’s a futile effort. I think of the quote in Conversations with Friends often:

“I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.”

I talk about suffering a lot in this essay, because it happened to me and I felt it. Talking about it doesn’t transform it into some mediocre life lesson that feels like a requisite in tandem with pain. I don’t believe in suffering for one’s art, and I don’t believe that any of what happened to me last year—the multitude of hospital visits, the near death experiences, the breakup, my grandfather’s death, any of it—makes me a better person or a better writer. It makes me a changed person, I see the world a little differently than I did previously, but good movies and books and late night conversations change my paradigm of life too.

But with suffering came change. In the gaps between bad events, I patched myself up in small doses. I did some puddle jumping, rediscovered awe as an emotion, had small conversations with the moon when I couldn’t fall asleep. In my twenty sixth year, I will continue patching myself up, blowing on scrapes, putting tiny tiny bandaids on places I didn’t know hurt a second ago. I’ll have dinners with my friends and catch up on life. I’ll stop waiting, stop opening doors and windows in hopes that someone teaches me how to use my teeth. I’ll humor life and I’ll bite, I guess. I’ll stop making bargains with the universe, mourning in advance, mourning in retrospect. I’ll make a list of things that make me happy and learn to do things halfway. I hope to get a bunny named Edward Hopper and a tiny sausage dog that my sister will inevitably call hot dog.

It’s the day after tomorrow, and the tree still exists. I still exist. And so another year goes by.

prelude

“Dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks.”

— The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1912

The first time I ended up in the emergency room, I was seven. I had the most excruciating stomachache and I was convinced that I was dying. I told my parents such five times, and them, being adults, told me that I was not dying, I probably just had appendicitis. Either way, an ambulance was called, and I sped my way to the hospital while sobbing and clutching my stomach. After ruling out appendicitis and an hour of me waiting on a hard hospital bed with a IV drip, the doctor ordered a blood test and an endoscopy.

For those of you who are not familiar, an endoscopy is when a tube with a camera is inserted down your esophagus and into your stomach to examine the organ. According to the results, I had multiple stomach ulcers and the doctor was going to run a biopsy for potential cancerous cells. “Stomach cancer is very rare in children, but so are ulcers like these,” he explained, and for a week, I lived in complete terror. The results were more confusing to the doctor than me, I think. The ulcers were all stress induced, and it made no sense for a child my age to be under this much stress.

I think I’ve always been full of stress, in flight or fight mode from sunrise to sunset. Maybe it’s from my perfectionist tendencies, or maybe it’s from my stubbornness to give up even a single thing in my life even when I physically feel it wreaking havoc on my nervous system. The stress lives in my body, dormant at times and terrifyingly alive at others. It’s not longer just in my brain but my brain shares space with the stress, maybe even pays rent to the feeling. I was convinced for so long that living like this was normal, worrying about every hypothetical and having fifteen backup plans in all situations. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that the way to prevent myself from experiencing further stress was planning everything down to the second and being in control of everything—but the anticipatory stress simply turned into real anxiety that would burrow into my skin.

The hospital visit when I was seven began a very long, very tedious, very painful ordeal with recurring, stress induced ulcers. It usually happens every two years—when they come back, I’ll feel extremely nauseous for a week or two, start experiencing insomnia after that, and then finally, end up in the hospital after the pain paralyzes me, delirious and in agony. The routine has become a part of my life for me, almost too predictable in a way. I’ll have an endoscopy, the doctor will tell me I have multiple ulcers, test me for cancer and H. pylori, and when both come out negative after a week of nail biting anxiety, they’ll tell me that it’s all stress induced. I’ll be advised to be ‘under less stress’, and then I’ll ask how? and nobody will have an answer for me.

Last year, I was sick so many times that I felt hopeless and genuinely insane during some parts of the year. It wasn’t just constant stomachaches, but lengthy durations of extreme fatigue, heart palpitations, and a plethora of other symptoms. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a state of panic, terrified of something, not really sure if it was anything, but something. My nervous system wouldn’t ever calm down and the constant white noise of anxiety in my brain wouldn’t shut up either. For me, the stress wasn’t just in my brain but coiled in every cell, every nerve, and it felt terminal and incurable. It’s probably survival mode born of definitely diagnosable anxiety, and I wasn’t (and still not am) sure of how to slow down.

Stress had lived inside me for so long that it had taken over my body and I was simply an unwilling participant; it had transformed from stress to anxiety to something big and dark that loomed over my shoulder and became a weight on my back. Anxiety medication would of course help in some part, but I knew that something had to be done on my part as well. I knew I needed to slow down, to rid of my habit of trying to live forty eight hours in twenty four, to maybe alter my stubbornness that put ambition and productivity above all else.

I decided to take things step by step and to clear my head first, to push past the dense forest of hopelessness first because what was I going to do if I couldn’t stand being in my own head? Something I’ve always done when I need to think about something and hear my thoughts clearly is go on a walk—so that’s what I did. In A Philosophy of Walking, Fréderic Gros writes, “Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional. […] When you are walking, there is only one sort of performance that counts: the brilliance of a sky, the splendor of the landscape. Walking is not a sport.”

From my 2024 essay, “the case for a long walk”

There is something about the act of walking that quiets down all the extraneous murmurs in your brain, and everything suddenly morphs into clear cut clarity. It’s not a miracle cure, but it sometimes is the only thing that works and allows you to see your life at a distance. You can’t see the full panoramic view of a meandering river if you are sitting closely on its banks.

Why does walking feel like the best prescription to any sort of distress? It grounds you in a physical way, I think, feeling your feet literally touching the pavement with every beat of your heart. In that moment, you become something bigger, a part of every sprawling nature landscape. Something in your life that felt so overwhelming suddenly feels small in comparison to the sheer magnitude of the world around you. And in the open solitude, the frequency of your thoughts begin to change, and something that didn’t make sense, the gray areas clouding your head, presents itself with an answer in startling technicolor.

Walking to ruminate is not a new concept at all; in fact, it is perhaps one of the oldest philosophical exercises in the world. Authors have written about this again and again throughout centuries. Almost every one of Jane Austen’s characters reaches an epiphany while taking a walk. One of my favorite depictions of a good walk is in Mrs. Dalloway, in which Clarissa, the protagonist, takes a walk through 1925 London, in preparation for a party. During the walk, the city comes alive, an immortalization of how different a metropolis can be almost exactly a century again. We delve into Clarissa’s thoughts, the past and present of her life folding dimensions into one single plane. The act of walking in itself translates to a type of modernist stream of consciousness.

As a (mild…ish) control freak, there is something glorious about how walking is the only form of locomotion where I can fully be in control. I can adjust my pace and walk for hours upon hours. Automobiles, whether that’s a personal car or public transportation, is a passive form of moving. There are so many external circumstances at hand, and you will never be able to be in full control of the way in which you move. Even running, which is the same feedback loop as walking but just at a higher frequency, is not entirely within my control because intense exercise tires bodies out faster.

That being said, there is still a case to be made for running, but within the bigger context of routines. Almost every morning for the last two years, I’ve been going on a morning run for approximately four or five kilometers. I live by the beach, and there’s a picturesque little path that winds around it. It’s one of the parts of my morning routine that I cherish the most, and one of the reasons why I sorely missed being back at home when I was traveling last month. When you get into the habit of a good routine, there’s a certain addiction to the groundedness of it. That despite whatever is going on in your life, there are these series of constants you can stick to, rinse and repeat, no matter what. I especially feel this way about morning routines, because I’m a corny believer in the theory that the way you spend a morning defines your entire day.

Walking is one of the oldest things we know how to do, both as individuals and as a human race. The act of walking, as locomotion, precedes humanity, actually. Bipedalism developed in human ancestors dating back to six, seven million years ago. Before our ancestors developed language and fire and civilization, they walked. The simple motion of putting one foot in front of the other without bending our spine, having two legs and two arms instead of four legs, gave humans and our ancestors a unique sort of autonomy that led to change after change—me writing this post on my laptop and you reading it in your email inbox or Substack site.

This was the first measure in learning how to slow down. Putting my phone on airplane mode for a bit and going on a long, beachside walk in the morning. While slowing down literally means slowing down, it also means being intentional and conscious of my actions and what I’m choosing to say or hear. For me, a walk, especially a morning walk, goes such a long way to reduce stress. Multiple scientific studies back this up, results pointing to the suggestion that “nature-based walking interventions can indeed improve adults’ moods, sense of optimism, mental well-being, and nature connectedness. They simultaneously mitigate stress, anxiety, and negative rumination.” It makes sense. Walking, or any physical exercise releases endorphins, which increases blood flow to your brain and reduces cortisol levels.

All physical exercise is beneficial to one’s physical and mental health, but walking requires such low energy and effort that it’s slow, in a good way. The activity makes you a part of something bigger, of the landscape around you. Putting one foot in front of the other feels conscious and purposeful and not rushed at all. Your legs become a part of the ground below you and your surroundings absorb your vision. The focus on walking mitigates any worry or distress as a priority in the brain. The small habit of going on a morning walk is also a way of building consistency, which allows for the feeling of accomplishment that could lead to other good habits as well.

The second small measure I decided to take is listening to a full album from start to finish, no shuffle or skips on these walks. Since last year, I’ve been making a conscious effort to be mindful in the way I consume media (as you can probably tell by my Substack archive, although I really dislike that phrase). I had a realization about a year and a half back, mid Twitter-doomscroll, that flicking through short form media and text have started to affect the way I think, or even do anything. It’s not even the issue of my attention span frying and singeing by the minute, which is of course, a problem by default, but rather the way my brain processes any sort of information that enters my consciousness. It’s become too surface level, too superficial. In other words, in my mind, the curtains have started to just be blue.

Instead of throwing on a playlist when I go on walks, I listen to one full album, new or old. A good album is a piece of art, architectural blueprints for a pretty house—the order of the tracks are purposeful and full of artistic intent. It is a sequence and a journey, much like a series of paintings, or a five story arc from a good narrative. From my habit of making a playlist for every occasion and mood, listening to a full album has been a big shift in how I view music and art as a whole. You spend a bit more time and intentionality with the artist, and in return, you see the full shape and feeling of its original message. Through listening to the full album, you are allowing the artist to finish their thoughts, placing songs in context in tandem with each other.

To accommodate this new habit, one of the biggest and best changes I made at the end of last year was getting an Apple Music subscription. I do still make playlists on Spotify, but most of my daily listening is now on Apple Music. I did this for two reasons: 1) I wanted to focus on only listening to an album at a time, all tracks in order, and 2) I really liked the album suggestion feature (instead of song suggestions like Spotify). Also, the sound quality sounds much better in my opinion. I try to listen to one full album whenever I go on a morning walk, which is around five times a week. If I really enjoy the album, I’ll pin it and listen to it more throughout the days. At the end of the month, I’ll unpin all of my albums so I have room for new ones to really love next month, as the application only allows you to pin six at a time.

Morning walks and full albums definitely have not completely eased my stress and anxiety, but they have allowed me some breathing room, a semblance of peace even for a bit. In the open air, my stress is no longer confined to my body and four walls, and dissipates into the landscape. My thoughts about the past and worries about the future, revisionist history and hypotheticals ad nauseam, subside a bit. I’m walking. Enjoying music. Present tense. Everything else around me is in present tense too, the people walking besides me, the trees rustling in the wind, the ocean waves. It reminds me that I am a part of something bigger than my worries, something bigger than my stress, the breadth and depth of the sea and the height of the sky.

(a list of my perfect, no skip albums you should listen to will be posted as next week’s postcard!)

interlude i: what i read this week

I reread A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros and Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, both fantastic books that detail the history behind walking as a philosophical practice. There’s a lot of overlap in the books in a way that it feels like reading one big book with different essays and perspectives. I highly recommend reading both books as a pairing. I’m now making my way through the Neopolitan Quartet (finally). This has been on my to-read list forever and I think I made it halfway through the first book back in 2022 until I pulled three all nighters at work and ended up moving onto another book after (it was rereading The Infernal Devices). I want to write an essay on the quartet when I finally finish, so I’ll reserve all of my comments for later. But so far, it’s incredible.

Here are some articles to read this week:

• The Grammar of a God-Ocean by Eli K P William
  To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness.

• Feminize Your Canon: Forough Farrokhzad by Joanna Scutts
  “In 1954, a nineteen-year-old poet walked unannounced into the office of the literary editor of Roshanfekr (The Intellectual), one of Iran’s most prestigious magazines. Her fingers were stained with green ink, and she trembled with nerves as she handed over three poems. One of them, the twelve-line “Sin,” described in explicit detail her affair with the magazine’s editor in chief.”

• The Profession That Does Not Exist
  Writing won’t make you a living.

• Portrait of my Father by Ali Smith
  ‘When people are dead, graves aren’t where to find them. They’re in the wind, the grass.’

• The Divine Comedy of Roman Emperors’ Last Words by Mary Beard
  In the end, godlike aspirations often met with all too human final moments.

• The House is a Work of Art by Andrew Deming
  Frank Lloyd Wright exalted the individual and made ordinary life beautiful. But his life was marked by scandal and grief.

I include more articles in my weekly syllabus posts that include one or two themes and books, essays, scholarly articles, movies, and video essays to correspond to said theme. Here is what I am planning on reading and watching this week:

interlude ii: what i watched this week(ish)

Here’s a list of movies I’ve watched since the last time I wrote a postcard (a month ago ish). The ones I like/recommend are bolded: The Nice Guys, The Big Lebowski, The Devil Wears Prada (rewatch), Crazy Stupid Love (rewatch), Wings of Desire, Hamnet, Sometimes I Think About Dying, Peppermint Soda, Sorry Baby.

Some video essays I watched: why modern life is designed to keep you anxious, a brief history of gemstone amulets, the problem with making wuthering heights beautiful.

postlude

things i love: sleep. i haven’t slept for more than three hours in weeks. i want to sleep. this is me speaking it into existence. please.

prelude

here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

— here’s to opening and upwards by e.e. cummings

The thing about spring is that you’re never aware of its arrival; it is only when you’re in the heart of a picturesque flower field, or hear songbirds at your windowpane, or when the sunlight feels less ephemeral and more eternal, that you realize the permafrost sadness of winter has finally thawed. Suddenly, you have eight months of being alive again, until the blue gray melancholy seeps into your bones, casting shadows that are almost as long as the endless days in which the sun dips below the horizon as early as four in the afternoon.

Winter, by contrast, is marked by its colorlessness, from the gray nights to the blinding white glare of the snow. It forces you to retreat inwards, seeking a semblance of life from within. It’s selfish in that regard, the cold and darkness will puppeteer you into wallowing, stretching moments into millennia between each second. I think that’s why the incandescence of spring has always felt too brief for me, especially because I rarely recognize springtime until it’s five months into the year and the hourglass is nearly empty by the time I am done dealing with winter’s stubborn aftereffects. A signifier that I have come out of my winter hibernation is when I turn my thoughts inside out and start thinking about the people around me—what I mean to them, and what they mean to me in return.

Spring is thus the most reflective and romantic time of the year to me and is of course, my favorite season. My explanation behind this is what my baby sister calls the ‘Goldilocks theory’, because winter is too cold, summer is too hot, and fall gets a bit too cozy for me. The pre summer warmth filtering in through my windows finally wakes me up from my bona fide winter hibernation, and I I finally creep out of my hermit shell just as winter removes its stubborn clutch on the Northern Hemisphere. My March is always morning runs and weekend brunches with friends, in tandem with early sunrises and nature reawakening in pastel brushstrokes.

I keep myself busy because sometimes that is the only way to shed seasonal depression and winter blues. Sometimes, the feeling lingers all the way into May, which feels like something bitter leaving a bad aftertaste in my mouth. This is the first spring where I don’t have a 9-6 corporate job anymore (because I quit, good riddance), and I am working a smattering of freelance jobs and working on my book. I get to schedule my own day and have more free time than I have had in the last three years, where working overtime so much genuinely landed me in the hospital. It’s disorienting and exciting, which mirrors how I feel about spring exactly.

Most of the things I am looking forward to this season is just resetting my life and recovering from what I genuinely think is the worst year of my life. I want to rewire my body not to be anxious every time it feels like my heart beats weird, and not feel physically winded from just getting up in the morning. My body’s adapted to a system of constantly being on high alert, and it’s so exhausting. Focusing on my health is the most imperative thing on the agenda—eating properly, getting movement in properly, sleeping properly.

Moreover, just reading and watching and listening to things that keep my brain alive and keep my will to live going, as well. The adjectives that I am focusing on for this season’s reads and watches are: introspective without being too bleak, warm, beautiful prose and cinematography, meditative, and self-help-y in a non actual-self-help way. Here’s the mini guide!

LISTENS //

I gravitate towards light and airy songs, or songs that feel like they’re on the precipice of becoming a true and blue summer hit. Music that sounds beautiful and optimistic and sunny in the first few hours the sun is up. Anything that I can turn on while having the window open at 8 in the morning, the spring breeze settling in. Here is a seasonal playlist I’ve been adding songs to since 2021:

I used to live at my grandparents’ house when I was very small, and my grandpa used to turn on classical music early in the morning with the windows open. Many of my earliest memories include sleepily sitting on the couch bright and early, watching the trees outside and the curtains inside dance around in the breeze as the orchestral music drifted in and out of my ears. A few years ago, I asked my grandpa for the CD and compiled the list of pieces on the disc. It’s still a perfect morning soundtrack. It also sounds like falling in love. Something peaceful, something wistful. The first piece from the playlist below is probably my favorite piece ever.

Last week, at the nadir of my depressive episode, I asked my best friend how I can stay afloat. She told me, with the most love in the world, that I need to stop listening to sad music with sad instrumentals (which is, unfortunately, 90% of my saved songs). This is a playlist I love to leave on in the background in during spring and early summer afternoons because it’s mellow and idle enough to keep my mood stable.

This playlist is my family favorite, a.k.a what my parents request that I put on the living room speakers on a weekend morning. You can never go wrong with a beautiful jazzy track most that are from decades ago and still remain stunning and timeless.

And lastly, in an attempt to over-romanticize my life this season so I can overcorrect it back to some semblance of normalcy, here is my most coveted early 2000s movie playlist. The Devil Wears Prada opening montage and the motorcycle scene from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days go triple platinum every spring in my bedroom, as they should in yours as well.

READS //

Anything Austen…but you already knew that. For spring reads, I focus on anything that feels light and is best to read during a picnic or day outside, drenched in sunlight. Nothing too dark or atmospheric—any classics on provincial life, slice-of-life contemporary fiction, and children’s classics are on my priority reading list during springtime. My birthday falls in spring, so I also gravitate towards meditative nonfiction books that hopefully contribute to and even change the way I see the world because every good book should do that just a little bit.

My weekly syllabus for last week generalizes the sort of books I like to read during this season, minus the regency era classics. I always do a mix of reads and rereads, so here are is my to-read list of books I have not read before.

I’ve been meaning to read Laurie Colwin because loves her, and I blindly trust anything Emma recommends to me (because we have the exact same taste in books). I’m also making my way through all the Toni Morrisons I have on my shelf, and I feel the same way about her that I do about Jane Austen, in that I want to read all of her books expeditiously because they are excellent but I’m also terrified to finish them all (which is why I haven’t started Sanditon and only will do so on my deathbed). I’ve heard incredible things about Lost Lambs, The Book of Goose, and Pond as well. I really enjoyed Checkout 19 by Claire Louise Bennett, so I hope I enjoy Pond too.

My reread list is boring and the same old books repeated into oblivion if you’ve been subscribed to me for long enough. If you’re a new subscriber, I’m sure you’ll get bored of me talking about them after a while. Wallpapering the first row with my three springtime Austens: Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion. I urge you to read Persuasion in the third week of March on a particularly foggy and overcast day. Pride and Prejudice should be read in April when the sun feels like a more permanent fixture in the sky. Emma should be read in May when the mild weather gives you confidence that you can tackle a large book at the outdoor seating of a coffeeshop. I read Beautiful World, Where Are You with every single year (four years and running…I think) in the space between her birthday (January 1) and mine (April 20),and this is my very public proposal for that to be early April this year. Anne of Green Gables and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn both altered my perception of life in little ways at different ages, so I want to revisit them as well.

WATCHES //

I’m in no way special or unique when I talk about how much I love watching rom coms or New Girl in the spring time, and I do every year. This year, I want to change that a bit—shedding the thought that spring should only be about pastel hues and lightheartedness. I watched La Chimera last spring and rewatched Petit Maman and loved both—I want to focus on quiet (ish) and reflective movies that are good to put on while winding down for the night.

Here is a list of movies I want to watch or rewatch this spring. You can find the Letterboxd list link here.

interlude i: what i read this week

I finished Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, which is essentially a meditation and philosophy of walking. I read A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros last year around this time, which was a similar book (I just love any literature about walking and nature and philosophy all in one). Both books speak about walking as not only physical exercise, but a cultural, religious, and political practice. Walking, although not as autonomic as breathing, is a bodily rhythm and alignment in itself. There is something about the act of walking that quiets down all the extraneous murmurs in your brain, and everything suddenly morphs into clear cut clarity. It’s not a miracle cure, but it sometimes is the only thing that works and allows you to see your life at a distance. You can’t see the full panoramic view of a meandering river if you are sitting closely on its banks.

I love reading about things I love doing, which leads me to my second read: I’ve also been reading The Possessed by Elif Batuman, which is part literary criticism and part travel memoir about Batuman’s experience reading Russian classics.

Here are five articles you should read this week:

1. How Jane Austen Pulled It Off: On Emma
   “The pleasure of rereading Emma lies partly in seeing how Austen pulled it off—the red herrings and double entendres that mislead both Emma and the reader about what is really going on.”

2. Just a Pale Blue Dot
   When we see the Earth as ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ what do we learn about human significance?

3. The Darkness from the Darkness
   Pain and passion in the limbo of suffering.

4. Making Food Out of Thin Air
   On the outskirts of Helsinki, a pioneering factory is harvesting natural, scalable proteins all from fermented bacteria. Could this be the future of food?

5. What Perfumes Reveals to Us About Power
   And the olfactory ethics of nostalgia.

I include more articles in my weekly syllabus posts. Here is my most recent one, which is very on theme for this specific post as well

interlude ii: what i watched this week

I watched Synecdoche, New York a few days ago, and it confused and gutted me at the same time. It tells the story of Caden Cotard, who has a debilitating unspecified chronic illness who decides to recreate a replica of New York as he sees it for a play. As his own life diminishes and his illness eats away at him and his sense of reality, the play set grows and grows until the two are no longer distinguishable. I’m still deeply confused and will continue to be confused until a few rewatches, I’m sure. I’ve been thinking a lot about derealization and feeling like the head you live in isn’t a true way to see the world, and I think the movie conveys that beautifully. In Caden’s head, real life and art mix, alchemizing into a sort of purgatory. In the movie, time is too malleable and it portrays this desperate want to connect to those around us and the subsequent exhaustion that comes with it through the main character. All I could think about was the monologue from Shakespeare’s As You Like It that begins with “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players”.

I also watched The Muppets Take Manhattan while extremely sick and slightly loopy from pain meds, and that was the perfect way to watch it. I love Muppets and I love Kermit in particular. I’m glad he believed in himself in the end because I always believe in him.

I’ve also been watching a smattering of New Girl episodes (mostly from season four, including Background Check and Goldmine arguably two of the best episodes). I’m always so pleasantly surprised at how well the show ages. Nick anxiously sweating his pits out while singing Landslide will always be endearing to me.

postlude

things i love: chicken noodle soup, early sunrises, mango mochi, celine’s dans paris perfume, my penguin jellycat keychain, paintings of houses, anecdotal essay collections, milky blue caremelo tea from mariage freres, kiss all the time disco occasionally.

NOTE: If you are a paid subscriber, please DM me on Substack or Instagram and I will extend your paid subscription by three months. Please don’t hesitate to reach out, even if you cancelled your subscription in the last two months! In consideration of my absence, I’ve also lowered my subscription price to $5 this month.

a brief note on 2026 resolutions for this substack:

Happy Lunar New Year! Traditionally, this was the new year celebrated in Korean (and many other Asian) cultures before the Gregorian calendar’s January first. As someone who missed the mark on starting the year off on a good note and felt like I was carrying the burden and stress from last year, this is a good starting point for me.

In celebration of that and the theme of a fresh start, I am making this post a free postcard for the time being. I was a serial bullet journal user and always enjoyed being creative with it back when I was in school, but gave it up for a daily journal diary and a store bought planner when I started my job. Recently, I’ve been adding more fun pages into my journal in between my daily pages for nostalgia’s sake, and I thought I’d share some with you!

For updates, as I mentioned in this month’s journal prompts post, I’ve had a bit of a year. I finally caught up with one of my friends for the first time in months yesterday, and that’s what she said when I was done filling her in: “you’ve had a year”. I am still kind of going through the thick of it, but one thing I am focusing on is my attempt to make Substack fun and less scary for me again so I can use this as something to destress with. I didn’t really make resolutions this year, but I really want to start posting casual, shorter posts on my Substack this year like I used to do back when I didn’t really have a large subscriber count. To be really honest, I think the larger my newsletter got, the more I felt pressured that I had to have very complete and thorough posts, and I think I increasingly became anxious every time posted.

All in all, I’m trying to make my Substack more approachable (for myself) so I can post frequently without as much pressure. This way, I can definitely post more free content as well. I know that I haven’t really been writing my weekly postcards lately—while that’s mostly because I had to prioritize paid posts since I have been having a pretty continuously rough time since maybe last January, I started this newsletter because of those weekly postcards. So I’m rerouting!

Here are some things that you can start expecting through the spring season, divided into free tier and paid tiers:

free tier:

• a postcard every two weeks with the usual format—a short essay, ten articles to read, updates on what I read + watched, and also a painting I liked that week.

• an occasional post of something I think is important enough that it needs to be a public post (for example).

paid tier:

• weekly syllabus

• monthly journal prompts

• monthly wrap ups of favorites & safari tabs (you can see this one I did from last April)

• my how to get smart again series posts

• deep dive essays into books, paintings, authors, movies, and various specific topics.

• chapter by chapter recaps of big nonfiction books, especially in history and art history (this is a big big big new years resolution for me)—starting with E.H Gombrich’s The Story of Art.

• media collections of very specific moods and feelings

• recommendations on books, films, and art

• list of favorites and just lists in general

pages to add to your journal:

(also, check out my ‘for a better life’ tag for a collection of posts I think have upgraded the quality of my life ever since writing them)

1. scrapbook of labels of teas you enjoyed

2. dopamine menu of things to do when you’re stressed

3. your perfume notes (top, middle, base) — link to a guide to get you started if you’re unsure about what that means.

4. receipts from good restaurants you’ve visited

5. mind map of everything on your mind

6. isbn numbers of specific book editions you want

7. ins & outs for each season

8. book starter pack for favorite hyper specific moods

9. art that inspired you that week / month (inspired by Rama Duwaji’s monthly Instagram posts)

10. seasonal produce

11. morning playlist

12. fruit stickers from the fruit you’ve eaten

13. weekly dream log

14. current hyperfixation recipe

15. movie ticket page

16. literal envelope with a letter to yourself

17. polaroids / photobooth pictures

18. bucket list

19. favorite episodes of a tv show you’re binging

20. movie watchlist

21. to read list

22. series watchlist

23. a full page of a single quote that’s been resonating with you

24. list of favorite articles from that month

25. headlines from that week / month

26. habit check in

27. cool vocabulary glossary

28. small moments you want to immortalize

29. about me page (favorite books, movies, songs, artists, paintings)

30. mood tracker

31. favorite albums at the moment

32. wishlist

33. sleep tracker

34. water tracker

35. random ephemera you want to keep

36. one paragraph book reviews of the books you read that week

37. rabbit holes of topics you’d like to remember and research

38. ten new vocabulary words of a language you’re learning

39. twice a year, divide the page into six squares - and write down five things you’re proud of at the end of each month

40. everything you’re enjoying at the moment

41. perfume wishlist

42. permanent pantry restock items

43. weekly reset routine

44. boarding passes from places you traveled to

45. ongoing list of lyrics that resonate

46. workout tracker

47. envelope of favorite postcards collected

48. holiday gift ideas

49. packing list for travel

50. subscription tracker

I’m not really a summer person, as you can tell in my summer rainstorm essentials post (this post’s greener sister!), but I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed the bone grabbing chill of the winter. I actually dread it so much—the new year starting in January, the longest month of the year, seems like some cosmic joke. The weather cooling down every late October is exciting because I get to wear all of my favorite transitional light jackets and cozy up in bed with Shirley Jackson books at night, but the threat of the miserable months to come, Looms Large above my head.

Here is everything I reach for as soon as the sun starts setting at 4pm (diabolical of the sun, if you ask me)—including books, albums, movies, perfumes, clothes, tea, candles, skincare, and more small trinkets that make my life better. Long post ahead!

books

(I’ve talked about all of these books before, so I’ll just make a list for the sake of saving space and keeping the post concise, but you can find all of my reviews with the search button!)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

Her Bodies and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

The Girls by John Bowen

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ladies of the Rachmanioff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Don’t Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

Autumn by Ali Smith

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Ghosts by Edith Wharton

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson

Immortality by Milan Kundera

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offhill

My Work by Olga Ravn

tea & coffee

milky blue caramelo tea from Mariage Freres

vanilla bourbon tea from TWG

pecan flavored coffee beans from The Coffee Exchange

hot apple cider tea from The Republic of Teas

rooibos orange tea from Teakanne

vanilla chai tea from Bigelow

new york breakfast tea from TWG

caramelo morning coffee from Bacha Coffee

giant steps coffee from Blue Bottle Coffee

movies

House of Hummingbird

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Gone Girl

Loving Vincent

Little Women

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Columbus

Mistress America

The Double

The Quiet Girl

Certain Women

Yi Yi

Sabrina

C’mon C’mon

Before Trilogy

In the Mood for Love

Anatomy of a Fall

home & candles

noistier candle from Diptyque

sunrise alarm clock from Lumie

handmade mug from Etsy

choco marscapone candle from Byredo

bunny from Jellycat (mine is called maisie)

classic percale hardcore sheet bundle from Brooklinen

Brooklinen bedding was the one splurge I made with all of my tutoring money back in college, and I have never once regretted or disliked it. The bedding is 100% cotton and has that crisp white hotel room feel, which makes me so excited to go to bed in the evenings. I own their bedding in all white just because I have so much going on in my room with my books and trinkets. Here is the link to my bedding set!

This post is sponsored by Brooklinen, which is the first brand I’ve ever worked with (for anyone who’s been subscribed to my Substack / following me on Instagram for some time, you’ll know that I have never taken a brand deal before, so this is how you know that I really love the brand). You can get 15% off your first order, no link needed!

perfumes

chai epice from Le Monde Gourmand

black tie from Celine

super cedar from Byredo

tihota from Indult

lait et chocolat from Chaubaud

almond from Caswell Massey

by the fireplace by Replica

clothing

pound alpaca sweater from Nothing Written

thermal pro mockneck hi-hip zip-up from Aritzia

lil doozy fray jeans from Mother

reversible opal puffer from Damson Madder

heat tech from Uniqlo

aretha jumper from Sezane

albums

(full postcard on this coming soon)

For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver

songs by Adrienne Lenker

End of the World by Searows

So Tonight That I Might See by Mazzy Star

Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

Already, Always by Bess Atwell

Unsent Letters by Lucy Blue

Emily Alone by Florist

evermore by Taylor Swift

Forever is a Feeling by Lucy Dacus

Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys

A Quiet and Harmless Living by Matt Maeson

Better Oblivion Community Center by Connor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers

First Two Pages of Frankenstein by The National

Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers

Like a Damn Dog by Sarah and the Sundays

skincare + bodycare

atobarrier cream from Aestura

advanced night repair serum from Estee Lauder

cicalfate repair cream from Avene

crème de corps body lotion from Kiehl’s

almond shower body oil from L’occitaine

overnight collagen mask from Biodance

healing ointment from Aquaphor

base prep serum from Yunjac

Happy September! This is part 2 of a seasonal postcard series I’ll be doing throughout the fall season (or at least fall for those in the Northern hemisphere like me). Here’s a bit of a long postcard on my favorite music during the fall season, from my own playlists to albums to Youtube instrumental playlists I love to leave on in the background at different times of the day.

I’ll have a second postcard with albums and also the weekly article recommendations in a few days. Stay tuned!

general

pop/indie rock playlist that’s a mix of 80s/90s rock and contemporary pop rock as well. the cure, the smiths, arctic monkeys, briston maroney etc.

revisiting my 2014 playlist for songs i listened to ten years ago (aka my massive vampire weekend, arctic monkey phase)

morning

coffeeshop jazz; jazzy pretty contemporary & vintage pop vibes for the best morning.

opening credits of an early 2000s movie

afternoon

coffeeshop acoustics. popular melodies that are easy on the ears.

indie folksy songs; think: noah kahan, mt joy, hozier, the civil wars etc.

night

quiet acoustic songs for a quiet night. anything that has a singular instrument, whether that be a piano or guitar. very very stripped down songs or covers of songs.

In the twenty five years since Gilmore Girls first aired, the show has managed to mass a cult following and a large population that rewatches the show (or the first three seasons at least) every single fall. There is an enduring appeal and charm to this show, most of which comes from the seasonal quality of it. Set in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, the show is a concoction of everything that feels autumnal and nostalgic, from Rory’s dedication to academia, to the pre-polysterification sweater weather, to the small town coziness of it all.

Gilmore Girls is still extremely prevalent in current day pop culture, as new generations of teenagers every year refuse to let the show fade into oblivion. I first watched it when I was fifteen with my high school roommate and remember us both being absolutely in love with Jess (perhaps as we all are as fifteen year olds). My opinions, especially on Rory’s three love interests, have grown and evolved in the last ten years, especially as I’ve watched bits of the show over my little sister’s shoulder every fall, but one thing that has not changed is the fondness I have for Rory’s unapologetic love of reading.

It’s September, which is fall, so here is every book Rory is seen reading throughout the show. I organized the list in sub genres and alphabetically, as it is a massive list. I have also highlighted my favorites and put a star after the title! This took me way longer than I expected and has pretty much been a monthlong project, but I’m excited that I finally have this to refer to (this list was honestly for me as much as it was for you).

I don’t like a lot of the books on here and think that you should not read them (The Fountainhead, Churchill’s biography etc), but I just included and categorized everything. Please keep in mind that some of these are extremely outdated in terms of political correctness (and correctness in general).

side note: if you enjoy reading and things that intellectually stimulate you, check out my how to get smart again series, in which I try to tackle post grad brain rot and my diminishing attention span from short form media. here is the lineup! the first four parts have already been posted, which you can find in the link above.

I’m also doing weekly syllabus posts of books, lectures, essays, podcasts, movies, and video essays I want to visit for the week, so check that out here!

pre 19th century classics

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Beowulf

The Bhagavad Gita

19th century classics

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Emma by Jane Austen ★

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen ★

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen ★

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë ★

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë ★

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ★

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky ★

Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens ★

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens ★

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Cinderella by The Brothers Grimm

Snow White and Rose Red by Brothers Grimm

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol ★

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley ★

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy ★

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy ★

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Celebrated Jumping Frog by Mark Twain

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ★

20th century classics

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov ★

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

Summer of Fear by Lois Duncan

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco ★

Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides ★

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner ★

Sanctuary by William Faulkner

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ★

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Marathon Man by William Goldman

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson ★

Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Trial by Franz Kafka ★

Ironweed by William Kennedy

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Carrie by Stephen King

Christine by Stephen King

The Shining by Stephen King

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera ★

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham ★

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier ★

Beloved by Toni Morrison ★

The Group by Mary McCarthy

Fletch by Gregory McDonald

Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller ★

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath ★

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger ★

Shane by Jack Shaefer

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith ★

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ★

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Sophie's Choice by William Styron

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan ★

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut ★

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams ★

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton ★

Roman Fever by Edith Wharton

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf ★

contemporary fiction (21st century)

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon ★

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ★

How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland

Nervous System by Jan Lars Jensen

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Atonement by Ian McEwan ★

The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin

How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett ★

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

memoir

Monsieur Proust by Céleste Albaret

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom ★

Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter by Simone De Beauvoir

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion ★

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister by Julie Mars

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

My Life as Author and Editor by H.L. Mencken

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov ★

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath ★

Memoirs of General William T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The Opposite of Fate: Memories of A Writing Life by Amy Tan

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

philosophy

The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir ★

The Art of Living by Epictetus

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

The Bhagavad Gita

Candide by Voltaire

Ethics by Spinoza

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche

Walden by Henry David Thoreau ★

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

essays

The War Against Cliche by Martin Amis

Notes of A Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler ★

The White Album by Joan Didion ★

I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

The Art of Fiction by Henry James

A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy

Sexus by Henry Miller

The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach ★

Lisa and David by Theodore Isaac Rubin

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind

The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000 by Gore Vidal

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

history & historical true crime

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry ★

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ★

The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duffy

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh

The Archidamian War by Donald Kagan

The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ★

biography

Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon

The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, and Nikki Sixx

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume I: Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 by William Manchester

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume II: Alone, 1932–1940 by William Manchester

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume III: Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 by William Manchester

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman

plays

The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer ★

The Mourning Bride by William Congreve

The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman

The Iliad by Homer

Hamlet by William Shakespeare ★

Macbeth by William Shakespeare ★

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part I by William Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part II by William Shakespeare

Henry V by William Shakespeare

Henry VI by William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare ★

Richard III by William Shakespeare ★

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams ★

poetry & letters

Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning ★

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos by Julia De Burgos

New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson ★

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913–1965 by Dawn Powell

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke ★

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton ★

The Sonnets by William Shakespeare ★

Letters of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

[unedited and very me centered postcard this week because I am taking a page out of and Sue’s books to post something personal and in Sue’s words, “to let go of the obsessive chokehold I have on how I am perceived, and to put my honest thoughts out there.” A portion of this was previously posted, as it was a journal entry of mine back in June.

I think I’m just trying to process all of this by writing, so this isn’t really polished or for anyone but myself. There’s no real ending or moral to this post, and I think if I asked my friends in advance what they thought of it, they’d as me, “are you sure you want to post that for 100k people to read?” but it’s also 3:40am and I’m jetlagged and I’m really sick and my grandpa just died, so my decision making skills are severely compromised.

Maybe I’ll wake up and freak out. Even in my sleep deprived state, I get really anxious when I post personal things so I might paywall this later.]

I got home from a three week trip in Chicago last night, and my parents told me that my grandfather passed away last week. They didn’t tell me when it happened because they wanted me to have a good time and I would have missed the funeral anyway on the flight to Seoul. Which, fair. Nothing would have changed, apart from the fact that I would have just been sad a week earlier, moping around someone else’s apartment instead of mine. It was something that had been on the horizon anyway, he didn’t pass away peacefully in his sleep, but it didn’t happen out of the blue. His lungs filled up with water and his heart stopped. It hadn’t been painless, but it had been quick. His death was something I had been anticipating, preparing for, for months.

As soon as it happened, I backtracked to my room, more dizzy with shock than grief, and called Griffin. “My grandpa apparently died last week when I was in Chicago with you,” I said, “He was dead and I didn’t know. Isn’t that so fucking weird?” I think I was laughing because it was so ludicrous that my grandpa had been gone for a week and I had just gone on with my life thinking that he was alive. I hadn’t even known my family flew out to Seoul for a funeral. The call lasted one minute. I don’t really remember what I said other than “my grandpa died”. And then I texted Elle and the group chat with Sue and Nana and just said, “I guess we really are at that age”. I texted Em after that and I said “I’m okay” because I really was, and then she asked me, “are you sure? are you okay?” and I just replied “I’m okay really, we weren’t that close”. I was more concerned about the fact that I had fallen sick in the past twenty four hours and I was worried that she and her boyfriend, who I had spent time with, caught it from me as well. My close friends have all said “I can’t imagine how you must feel” but I can’t really figure out how I’m feeling either, so there’s that.

I’ve never had someone close to me die; the closest relatives who passed away were my great grandmothers when I was 11 and 16, and I saw them maybe every two years. Most of my memories of them aren’t even about them, but their houses in the countryside, my childhood memories intertwined. I remember when my great grandmother passed away when I was 11, I felt an odd mourning for my childhood even though it wasn’t over, like nostalgia scrunched up into a ball in the pit of my stomach. I’m never going back to that house again, I remember thinking as I listened to my mom cry. It was such a selfish thought and one that surprised me. Someone close to me had passed away, and all I could think about were my own idyllic summer memories.

On both occasions of my great grandmothers’ deaths, I cried because my mom cried. The day before my great grandma passed, my mom received a phone call from my grandma saying that the doctor told our family to ‘prepare ourselves’, and I remember thinking how strange of a phrase that was. How do you prepare for someone’s death? For the next few hours, I tried to imagine what that would feel like. I imagined a life in which my great grandmother was not alive, and I was relieved and a bit disappointed to realize that nothing much would change. My life would change because my mother would be grieving her grandmother and my grandma would be grieving her mother; my life would change adjacently because I would have to watch people I loved be sad, but I wasn’t really sure that I would be particularly sad because I hadn’t been close to her.

Last summer, my grandfather’s Alzhiemer’s got worse and he was placed in a nursing home. I was never very close to my dad’s side and I saw them maybe three times a year because I didn’t live in Korea growing up (or now). Ironically, I had grown closer to my grandfather because I interviewed him about his experience in the Korean War for my senior thesis in college a few years back. It was on the precipice of his diagnosis and he slowly started losing his memories after that, in and out of time slips. I thought about what the doctor had said about my great grandmother when I was eleven, to prepare yourself, and I started rehearsing it in my head. The phone call that he had died. How I would feel.

I thought about it and felt a drop in my stomach that I hadn’t felt before. There was an interview that Andrew Garfield did where he described grief as “unexpressed love”, and I saw a quote a few months back where someone said that grief was “love with nowhere to go”. I registered the pit in my stomach and thought, maybe that’s the love. But the grief in this case, in my case, was like a phantom limb because it wasn’t real. There was nothing to really grieve over because my grandpa had not died yet. It’s anticipatory grief, there’s a word for it, but wasn’t that a bit morbid in itself, mourning preemptively for a travesty that had not happened? And a bit selfish?

My first thought when I heard that my great grandma had died was about myself. But in a sense, isn’t that what anticipatory grief is? Trying to predict fine tune your own reactionary emotions, like you’re an instrument and you’re trying to press down on the keys or play notes until you find the right one? It really is inherently selfish in a way. You’re imagining your reaction to something that hasn’t happened yet. I had this thought again, more viscerally, when I went to go and visit my grandpa at the nursing home this summer, which apparently was the last time I would ever see him.

I have never been as close to my dad’s side as I am to my mom’s, so I was never very close to my grandpa. But he was a large part in why I loved reading and writing and academia in general. He was a professor for almost five decades before he retired and picked up a paintbrush because he had always dreamed of painting beautiful landscapes and people. He taught me how to paint, which is something I did all throughout my childhood. I started my how to get smart again series because of him, because of the importance of retaining your cognitive skills, because of a selfish fear that I would lose my mind the same way he lost his in his later years. I wasn’t close to him, but the more I think about his life, the more I realize that he affected me in more ways than I thought he did.

And I still can’t cry. This morning, when my parents told me that my grandpa died last week, I didn’t even feel a muted ache in my chest the way I would when I thought of him dying. Maybe I was in shock; maybe I still am in shock. Maybe in a week something will remind me of him and I’ll cry. But my parents told me and I felt nothing inside. It felt like such a betrayal in a way. I had anticipated this, I had rehearsed this in my mind a thousand times to prepare myself for it, so I wouldn’t fall apart. I lived through dozens of dress rehearsals of this moment in my head during the week, wrought with melancholy refrain, and this was the moment that was supposed to be worth all of the overthinking in my head. But I’m not falling apart, I’m not even remotely there. The rock in my stomach was bigger, heavier, when I was anticipating the grief.

<from my journal in june>

I taste grief on my tongue when I’m the most happy. It’s not quite grief because it’s only half formed, which is strange in itself because I never do things halfway. It’s half formed because it’s anticipatory; I anticipate sadness like how you anticipate a tidal wave when the water recedes. To be honest, I thought that this was how everyone processed sadness, by overplaying a hypothetical scenario in their heads like a broken record, by pressing down all eighty eight keys of a piano until a note seemed in tune with the potential and inevitable melancholy that would follow.

I think about the other shoe dropping so much because I keep telling myself I need to be prepared, how are you going to deal with it if you’re not prepared. I think about the other shoe dropping so much that I sometimes can’t discern when it actually happens. I mourn moments that haven’t even happened yet. As if preparing myself and repeating the worst possible outcome into oblivion could lessen the blow when it actually happened. Maybe it’s some masochistic need in me to make everything a glass-half-empty scenario, so it won’t feel as terrifying when something sad actually happens. Either way, I let myself succumb to simulations of sadness that inevitably turns into just sadness.

My grandpa is sick and I’ve been feeling numb. We went to go see him, a man who dedicated his life to academia, who was a professor for fifty years, now someone who has a tabula rasa for a mind. I’ve been watching him slip away for a few years now, I’ve been losing him before I actually lose him. It’s the pretense of grief, the anticipation of the devastation that will happen because such is life; death exists because life exists and there always must be an equilibrium of sorts, right? At the nursing home, I locked myself in a bathroom stall and tried to manufacture the feeling before I felt it, anticipating it like some earthquake simulation. But iIve never really lost anyone close to me and I imagine that trying to know exactly how it feels is exactly how a blind person feels trying to imagine color.

I saw him and I felt a muted ache in my chest. But that was all. I worried that I repress my emotions so much on a day to day basis that I genuinely won’t be able to properly grieve when he passes away. I told my best friend this and he said that I can’t expect to immediately feel things, that big life events like this take time to feel and heal from and maybe that’s a beautiful thing. “That’s where you and I are different, I think that’s horrendous. We should be able to process and get over things immediately,” I replied.

I teared up when my baby sister cried. I held her hand tightly.

Everyone has been saying all the right things to me today, which makes sense because one of the best and most constant things in my life is that I have really good friends. They’ve told me that there’s some peace, at least, that they’re here for me, that they’re keeping my family in their thoughts. I’ve thanked them. I feel robotic. Emotions are so weird. I cried my eyes out over leaving a boy at the airport yesterday, and I can’t seem to cry over my grandpa. And I know that grief comes in waves, but it hasn’t come at all for me today, and I think I’m a bit worried. I worry that I imagined this happening so many times that I wore the grief out before it even hit me, like some preventative measure. I’ve dealt with anticipatory grief my entire life, over things that aren’t related to death. I spent every summer at my maternal grandparents’ house in Seoul, growing up. I still stay at my grandparents’ house when I visit during the summers and winters, and every time before I leave, I remember to take a picture of them and the house. I think I’m so scared of change, of irrevocable change, that I try and cling onto things and not let go of them.

I started to wonder why I do that. Why do I live life chasing sadness so it doesn’t chase me first, when it will ultimately end up haunting every hallway I walk through anyway? Trying to get closure for something that hasn’t happened? For someone who hasn’t experienced a lot of grief, I’ve grieved a lot in advance. I wish I could stop anticipating grief. I wish I could properly cry over losing someone, to stop feeling so empty and hollow instead. There’s no real ending to this essay or journal entry or whatever. I think I just wanted to write everything out. I thought it would be cathartic but I’m not sure yet. I’m still all empty inside.

prelude

“All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.”

—Anne’s House of Dreams, L.M. Montgomery

It is so humid here. A quick ten minute walk from point A to B feels eternal; the air is so heavy that every step I take is akin to trying to walk while submerged six feet deep in a swimming pool. It’s the sort of heat that clings to you like the adhesive side of sticky tape that was left out in the warm weather for too long, and trying to seek shelter in various air conditioned buildings has become second nature to me in the last few weeks. Monsoon season has also commenced, meaning that I have to go days without seeing direct sunlight and getting my socks disgustingly wet no matter how many puddles I cautiously avoid.

On days where it is simply difficult to even get through the day without feeling melancholic and sweaty due to the weather, I find myself becoming even more selective with the movies or books I consume, or the perfumes I wear. The last thing I need in this weather is a cloyingly sweet vanilla fragrance that will react with my skin and and heat and humidity in the worst way possible, concocting a scent that will drive me into nausea hell. And when rainy days seem endless, I simply do not want to watch a movie filled with sunshine and happiness while it pours and thunders outside. I’m unfortunately just not built for that type of optimism.

Here are some of my summer rainy day essentials, which also can be media I revisit whenever summer melancholy season hits. But it’s mostly just how I stay sane during stretches of summer where the torrential downpour seems perpetual.

side note: this was originally supposed to be a paid post, but I am aware (and feeling very guilty) about how my weekly postcards have not been…weekly, lately. I promise that I am not veering towards an entirely paid content model although it might have seemed that way recently, and will always focus on free subscribers as well (almost 100k of you!!). I was just going through a very rough and sick couple of months riddled with a lot of health scares, and I could not put out the amount of content that I wanted to. [on that note, I try to format most of my paid posts so that there’s always some content for free subscribers as well!]

LITERATURE

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
I wouldn’t describe this novel as cozy but rather claustrophobic. The narrative of this book clings to you like the rainy humid weather of July as you read about the tragic lives of five sisters in a suffocating small town through the Greek chorus-esque eyes of the teenage boys who are obsessed with them.

Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector
Agua Viva feels like running through a waterfall or a cascade of words. It is more melody than prose, more of a fragmented rumination on feelings than something conventionally comprehensive. The cadence and rhythm of Lispector’s writing in this felt oddly hypnotic, and I felt like I was watching her stretch and fold sentences, making literature malleable in her hands. It was kind of a spiritual experience in a way.

Cheri and the End of Cheri by Colette
A melancholic and complicated portrayal of a relationship that eventually morphs into an affair. Lea, an older, successful woman in her forties has an affair with her friend’s son Fred (Chéri), twenty five years her junior, set in the backdrop of the years leading up to and the years after World War I.

First Love by Ivan Turgenev
A short little book you can read in one sitting. Turgenev, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite Russian novelists, views love through an almost masochistically melancholic lens seeped in romanticism. Such a beautiful portrayal of first love and heartbreak, about a boy falling in love and coming to terms with who he is as a person as well.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf
I read this back in 2020 during the pandemic, when everything felt claustrophobic and trapped; in reading The Waves I found myself floating alongside the dreamy prose, like the ebb and flow of water—unanchored and boundless, which was such a kindness. What I found most profound and life-changing about the book is the somewhat reluctant cognizance that we are a part of a cycle, a chorus, a rhythm interconnected to those of nature around us. A brilliant portrait of growing up and getting older, of friendship and isolation, of sunrises and sunsets.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
This is probably Steinbeck at his most optimistic which is usually why I enjoy reading this book every spring, but it has just enough of a pensive touch that it is also very apt for a rainy late July evening. A slice of life novel that tells a story of loneliness amid happiness and happiness despite loneliness—whether or not you think that is naïveté or optimism is up to you.

Normal People by Sally Rooney
When I think about a melancholic summer read, one of the first books that comes to mind is Sally Rooney’s most popular novel. Nothing better to do than spend an entire afternoon reading about the insular and toxic push-pull relationship between Marianne and Connell.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald’s underrated book and one that I think I may like better than The Great Gatsby if I reread it. I read this over a course of three days full of torrential rain during one of my high school summers, and it was perfect. This semi autographical novel tells the story of Amory Blaine (he is insufferable, heads up), an extremely privileged and idealistic young man, from prep school to college. Possibly the book most representative of the aimlessness and disillusionment of the rich during the roaring 20s.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman
It constantly comes as a shock to both me and that this book is rated so low on Goodreads because it was an immediate five star read for us (and we both do not usually give five stars). Fishman’s debut does not feel like a debut. With sharp writing that feels alive, the book examines themes of sexuality, consent, and power through the eyes of Eve, a woman in her twenties, against the glittering backdrop of New York City.

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offhill
A quiet, moving meditation on love, marriage, motherhood, and the fleetingness of being human. I adore books with characters that feel real, like this could be the story of my neighbor or the woman I see at the bus stop every day on the way to work. Dept. of Speculation is tangible and personal, to the point where sometimes it feels almost untoward to be reading the story of someone in their most vulnerable moments because it is so easy to forget that the characters are fictional.

check out more here:

PLAYLISTS

A rainy day one because…it’s rainy.

My ABBA playlist which I listen to on days where I feel sad. This one has my favorite ABBA gems (Mamma Mia + non Mamma Mia songs). If you didn’t know, I’m an ABBA expert, and I have about sixty home videos of six year old me dancing tirelessly to all of their albums (concerts I threw for my parents against their will).

Specific type of dreamy indie-ish folksy-ish chill music perfectly suited for late summer.

FRAGRANCE

MAISON CRIVELLI rose saltifolia
A classic rose scent infused with the salty ocean breeze—a light aquatic floral scent that is perfect for a summer rainy day.

BYREDO velvet haze
The only perfume with a patchouli note that I enjoy. A transparent earthy scent that eventually becomes a soft, creamy coconut one.

CELINE dans paris
A green gourmand scent that doesn’t smell medicinal or heavy at all. A cold scoop of vanilla ice cream on the grassy lawn of a park in summertime.

GABAR lull
Probably my favorite scent to wear during the rainy summer season. The coziest perfume with notes of cherries, black tea, and a rustle of orange blossom over creamy sandalwood.

DIPTYQUE philosykos
A realistic fig scent that is not overly cloying. Smells like the entire fig tree, from the fruit to the leaves to the roots deep in the soil.

NISHANE wulong cha
Iced oolong tea sipped in a sleek glass cup on a temperate spring day under a citrus tree, wearing a loose linen shirt and a perfect pair of blue jeans.

REGIME DE FLEUR little flower
Dewy, delicate rose in the early morning sun. The black tea note bolsters the fragility with some stability. Light, sparkly, vibrant but reacts beautifully with humidity.

BYREDO summer rain
This is a candle!!! But I had to mention it because it is perfect. The site describes it as: “A sudden downpour, heavy drops sizzling on sun-warmed earth. A refreshing parenthesis on a summer day representing the restorative power of nature. Opening notes of basil and spearmint bring a fresh breeze, with vibrant green fig and ginger. As rain fades, sandalwood and tonka settle, grounding the composition.”

FILM

La Chimera
Haunted by his lost love and mystical visions, British archaeologist Arthur returns to Italy from prison to resume a career of tomb-raiding, trapped between real life and fantasy, between past and present—forever chasing the elusive red strings of fate. One of those movies that feel like poetry in film form.

Paris, Texas
An incredibly sad and brilliant slow burn of a movie that seeps into your bones and lingers after you finish it. Paris, Texas has no grandiose finale, or crazy plot device—the beauty of this film shines in its silent moments amid flawless cinematography, which is such an impossible thing to accomplish.

Aftersun
A quiet movie about a father daughter trip, it’s a quiet sort of devastation that seeps into your bones like a slow-progressing frostbite—and you don’t realize just how calamitous it is until you finish the movie.

Frances Ha
Frances Ha just gives me the reassurance I need that everything is going to be okay, despite what it seems like in that moment. It’s a movie for that period in your life where you’re not sure what you’re going to do, when you overthink every single decision and wonder if it’s aimless or going somewhere.

Blue Velvet
Not my favorite David Lynch movie (that honor goes to Mulholland Drive) but a fever dream nonetheless. A psychological thriller about a college student who discovers a severed ear on the street and becomes inextricably involved with the case. A dark fairytale and a fever dream, in a way, but in the bizarre Lynchian way, which is the best way.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma is the queen of sad melancholic queer movies, and this is her at her second best (her best is Petite Maman, sorry). Everything is emotion in this film. The visuals are absolutely breathtaking and brilliant in a quiet, subtle way. The plot and script are great, but I cannot get over how beautifully this film is shot; each frame can, like the title, be a portrait of its own. It is haunting and romantic and elegant—everything I love in a movie.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
A movie plastered in an almost overwhelming amount of vibrant technicolor and floral wallpaper. It feels like a bit of a precursor to La La Land, but then again, literally all of Demy’s films I’ve watched so far feel like that. This one in particular is my favorite of his—bittersweet, romantic, and jazzy.

Bones and All
Probably my favorite Luca Guadagnino feature just because of how beautiful the cinematography and scenery are. It is strangely equal parts bloodthirsty and tender; a love story drenched in blood. The film can be a metaphor for many things, and I need to rewatch it to fully figure out my thoughts on it, but it was so stunning that it’s stayed imprinted in my mind even after three years.

Pan’s Labyrinth
Speaking of dark fairy tales and magical realism, this movie is a classic that goes into my top 10 movies of all time. I watched this for the first time in my seventh grade Spanish class and I remember wondering just how someone has an imagination that creative (and twisted) to form such a plot sequence. The gothicism and striking visuals of the movie is not quite horror, but a genre of its own.

Roma
Another black and white movie that is so fantastic beyond words. Roma is more of an experience than a movie. I watched this for the first time on a rainy day, and it changed my life a bit. Alfonso Cuarón is one of the most celebrated directors for a reason; every scene of this movie is precise and meticulous and has a purpose. Such a privilege to have seen it.

The Virgin Suicides
Sofia Coppola portrays the banality of the white picket fence suburb with a dreamlike haziness. The movie starts with a young girl’s suicide attempt—one of the first lines in the movie is her reply to the doctor who tells her you’re not old enough to know how bad life gets: “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl”. A tragic bildungsroman and Coppola does Jeffrey Eugenides’ masterpiece justice.

La La Land
Self explanatory, I won’t say more.

interlude i: what i read this week

I am still on my ambitious NYRB summer journey, in which Griffin () and I attempt to read as many NYRB classics as possible over the summer so we can write a comprehensive guide and record some sort of hour-long podcast episode on it. This week, I have been reading two at once: Cheri and the End of Cheri by Colette and Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin. I am almost done with Cheri, which is such a beautifully written book (see above for my thoughts) and I think is so vastly underrated in the sea of semi-modern classics.

Notes of a Crocodile was such an incredible read and I was unable to put it down for all of Tuesday night. I had heard about how good this book was nonstop, from since maybe three years ago, and he is never wrong. The book follows Lazi as she struggles with her queer identity while drowning in isolation and loneliness. It somewhat reminded me of Giovanni’s Room in terms of its melancholy and complexity, although the writing style is vastly different.

I also finished reading She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark, which is a witty and gory short story collection centered around hunger. ‘Hunger’ in this case is a synonym for desire, and the people in these stories desire different things: thinness, “justice”, perfect skin, and go to extreme measures to attempt to achieve what they perceive as the perfect solution. This one was a quick read but some stories had my jaw on the floor.

Here are some articles to read this week:

1. The Grammar of a God-Ocean by Eli K P William
   To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness.

2. The Picturesque Picaresque of Barry Lyndon by David Sexton
   Fifty years after it flopped at the box office, Stanley Kubrick’s 18th-century epic is now recognised as an outright masterpiece.

3. A Thin Line Between Mother and Daughter by Jennifer Egan
   A former anorexic ponders the family origins of eating disorders.

4. Diary, 1988 by Annie Ernaux
   “I’ve always made love and written as if I was going to die afterwards”

5. Street Haunting: A London Adventure by Virginia Woolf
   Virginia Woolf on walking and wandering around the city.

6. Memories Without Brains by Matthew Sims
   Certain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?

7. The Family That Built an Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
   The Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars—and millions of addicts.

8. So who the hell was Hieronymus Bosch? by Tim Smith-Laing
   We misunderstand the artist if we fail to look past his grotesque beasts and monsters.

9. It was Satire: Caligula by Mary Beard
   The Emperor Caligula offers another case of the King Canute problem.

10. The Mirror Test by Melissa Febos
    “A slut was a careless girl, hands sunk haphazardly into the dough, broom stilled against her shoulder—eyes cast out the window, mouth humming a song, always thinking of something else.”

interlude ii: what i watched this week

Summer always reminds me of Celine Sciamma’s movies (Petite Maman, Portrait of a Lady etc), so I watched Water Lillies for the first time. I did not enjoy it as much as the other two of her movies that I watched, but any time I want to watch a melancholic French movie, I always know the director to turn to.

I also watched Bridges Madison County which was honestly my top 5 watches of this year so far. I talked to my parents about it and they said “you just watched that right now for the first time?” and I apologize for putting off such a good movie until the year of 2025. Just such a good movie, oh my god.

Speaking of watches, I’ll be on a 15 hour flight at the end of this month, and have no idea what to watch on the plane, so let me know if there is a show you think I’d enjoy. I’m scrambling to find one right now.

Some video essays I watched: The School of Athens explained, what happened to the Ancient Wonders of the World, everything to know about Art Deco, video about Before Sunrise.

postlude

things i love: incline walks, morning walks, iced americano (this is going to be on the list every single week), the sound of rain at night, sunday crosswords, getting lovely texts from my friends, blue cat-eye nails, a really good burger, lace dresses.

all of these are pretty sad. that being said, this is not a cry for help or anything, i’m fine! i just momentarily go through these moments sometimes and that’s when i reach for my journal. i think (?) that some parts are relatable and worth posting. i just realized i’m not really vulnerable or personal on my substack and i think i kind of wanted to be for once. i may paywall the last one later, but i hope some of these sentiments resonate with you.

1. landmine as anatomy (february 2025)

there is a ticking bomb in me. can you hear it? no? hold your breath for a second, count to three in your head. you hear it now, right? i must have swallowed it a little while ago. i didn’t realize that was what it was when i did, and i’ve been trying to dig it out of my chest cavity ever since. regret has bled into resignation, but i have a fear that it’ll multiply, metastasize, start thundering inside of me. i’m afraid that i won’t know when to squeeze my eyes shut and hold my breath when it inevitably explodes.

i didn’t notice it at first. i think it grew inside of me. a perfect environment for it to find a home in my organs, root itself inside of my veins, replace my arteries with its tangled red wires. but one night i was laying in bed and i began to hear it. the ticking. it thrived on cognizance, flourished on apprehension. the perpetual paradox of inadvertently feeding it by trying to rid of it, by being too aware of it, the monster under my bed. i learned how to perform surgery on myself, dissecting every inch of my body with a sterilized scalpel, collecting empirical data. i prayed that the size of the bomb would be proportional to its volume, the decibels of the ticking increasing each and every day.

days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years. i put myself in a test tube and saran wrapped the top. bereft of oxygen, in total numbness, i can visualize the bomb. it’s singed into my vision, branded into my closed eyelids. surgery turned into a steady flatline turned into rigor mortis turned into an autopsy. the room is thick with the stench of formaldehyde. and i still cannot find the bomb. the ticking stops post mortem, so i perform cpr on myself and barely bring myself back to life. the ticking resumes. i pray to a higher power i don’t believe in. i keep the door of the operating room open and you ask if i need help. i’m laying down on the table and i ask, can you see it? you shake your head. of course you can’t, how can you see it when you can’t even hear it. how can you hear it if you can’t even see it. it’s deafening in my ears. i lend you my ears and ask if you can hear it. you still can’t. you’re unsure if it exists. but you stitch me up and make me whole again. the ticking resumes.

one day, i finally manage to look at myself in the mirror and don’t recognize the reflection in front of me. there’s still a bomb in me, but i’ve carved myself open so many times i’ve tetrised my features back all wrong. it’s all wrong. nobody can hear the ticking and nobody can see the red wires protruding out from my skin where blue-gray veins are supposed to run and please, if you hold your breath long enough it’ll materialize in front of you. i’ve spent so long listening for it that i don’t recognize the cadence of my heart anymore. but i won’t ask for anything else now, i understand that it’s inextricable, a red string tied around my ankle. all i ask is that i know when it’ll explode. i always look at the needle when it pierces my skin. i need to know when the bomb inside of me will detonate. i thought it would have years ago, but it hasn’t yet. the countdown terrifies me more now to the point where i need to relearn how to walk because i don’t know how to take one step without trying to match my footsteps to the tick, a perfect and steady 4/4 time signature.

i swear, i’m not imagining it. please believe me. please don’t look at me like that. my body is a minefield and as soon as i locate all the explosives, i’ll be okay again.

2. good (anticipatory) grief (june 2025)

i taste grief on my tongue when i’m the most happy. it’s not quite grief because it’s only half formed, which is strange in itself because i never do things halfway. it’s half formed because it’s anticipatory; i anticipate sadness like how you anticipate a tidal wave when the water recedes. to be honest, i thought that this was how everyone processed sadness, by overplaying a hypothetical scenario in their heads like a broken record, by pressing down all eighty eight keys of a piano until a note seemed in tune with the potential and inevitable melancholy that would follow.

i think about the other shoe dropping so much because i keep telling myself i need to be prepared, how are you going to deal with it if you’re not prepared. i think about the other shoe dropping so much that i sometimes can’t discern when it actually happens. i mourn moments that haven’t even happened yet. as if preparing myself and repeating the worst possible outcome into oblivion could lessen the blow when it actually happened. maybe it’s some masochistic need in me to make everything a glass-half-empty scenario, so it won’t feel as terrifying when something sad actually happens. either way, i let myself succumb to simulations of sadness that inevitably turns into just sadness.

my grandpa is sick and i’ve been feeling numb. we went to go see him, a man who dedicated his life to academia, who was a professor for fifty years, now someone who has a tabula rasa for a mind. i’ve been watching him slip away for a few years now, i’ve been losing him before i actually lose him. it’s the pretense of grief, the anticipation of the devastation that will happen because such is life; death exists because life exists and there always must be an equilibrium of sorts, right? at the nursing home, i locked myself in a bathroom stall and tried to manufacture the feeling before i felt it, anticipating it like some earthquake simulation. but i’ve never really lost anyone close to me and i imagine that trying to know exactly how it feels is exactly how a blind person feels trying to imagine color.

i saw him and i felt a muted ache in my chest. but that was all. i worried that i repress my emotions so much on a day to day basis that i genuinely won’t be able to properly grieve when he passes away. i told my best friend this and he said that i can’t expect to immediately feel things, that big life events like this take time to feel and heal from and maybe that’s a beautiful thing. “that’s where you and i are different, i think that’s horrendous. we should be able to process and get over things immediately,” i replied.

i teared up when my baby sister cried. i held her hand tightly.

3. give me back my girlhood (september 2024)

(trigger warning: sexual assault)

half of the time when i think about that night, i feel like i'm making it all up in my head. like an alternate dimension has painted this fantasy in my head that’s stuck to my brain, like the dusty remnants of a year old sticky label, impossible to remove. it feels illogical to think that this is something that happened to me, not something i heard around like some urban legend. maybe i've dissociated so much and tried to distance myself from it that i feel like if i recounted what he did in court, it would feel like i was perjuring myself. my most irrational fear was that he would sue me for defamation and he would play a tape he had secretly recorded of me, and it would look like i was enjoying it because i didn't say no loudly or as many times as i could.

if our cells regenerate every seven years, it means that i'll be free of him in two years, there will be no physical remnant of him left on my body that i feel like everyone can see like a nineties blacklight party. and then maybe i can stop feeling like a fucking centrifuge just spinning and spinning until i'm just pieces of a whole. but will i ever be free of him? i’m no longer nineteen, i’m grown, i’ve become a whole person ever since. and yet i’m still scared of ghosts, the way a child asks their parent to check under their bed for monsters at bedtime. ghosts that look like the shape of him. he’s everywhere, in the room i sleep in, in the bus ride to work, in the books i read. he’s haunted me for longer than i knew him. he haunts me because i feel like i am a liar, that this never happened, that he was just a guy who lived next door and we never went on a date and i never went to go and hook up with him because i thought that the worst thing he could do to me was just be insufferable.

how many minutes does it take to ruin someone’s entire life? how many minutes does it take to irrevocably change someone’s personality, the way they view life, they way they trust? the way they thought the world spun on a certain axis but it got knocked off, and now everything looks a bit tilted and a bit jaded. i sometimes think about that night in detail, trying to illustrate it in color, like a masochist. did he…or did i imagine it? i don’t think my brain is that fucked up enough to conjure up such a horrible progression of events. did he? did he really do what i think he did to me? did he actually?

i think about if there were any times i could have escaped, could have broken free before he did what he did to me. i do this like it'll help me understand why he did what he did, when not even he could probably answer it.

i remember he told me his parents were absent and that's why he was so fucked up, before he read about nihilism to me in latin because he believed that god is dead and life is meaningless, and now i too believe that alive things are dead and wonder why the price to pay for his parents’ neglect is the loss of my girlhood.

prelude

“She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard.”

—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

Mini seasonal recs are back for postcards! I missed doing this for spring, and am so excited to do it for summer. This is a slightly updated version from last year’s (my tastes have changed but not that drastically), so if you were here for that post, welcome back! All of my playlists have been refreshed.

LISTENS // For me, summer sounds like the outro of Chiquitita. The beat of Supercut. The intro of Brazil. Any song that feels drenched in sunlight, like something you can listen to while sitting on a beach on the hottest day, eating strawberries and drinking a crisp glass of white wine.

Here are six other playlists of mine that I have on repeat in the summer!

READS // My themes and specific characteristics in books that I search for every summer are NYRB classics, essay collections about loneliness, minimalist writing, melancholic plots, relationship fiction with no happily ever afters, hazy mid-century books set in the Californian desert, the rose colored glasses of childhood nostalgia, books that feels like water cascading, quiet stream of consciousness.

Here is a list of all of my summer rereads: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Bonjour Tristesse by Fraçoise Sagan, Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger. I always find myself picking these books up like a tried and true habit.

(here is my reading syllabus for summer).

Some books I want to read before the season ends are: Heat Wave by Penelope Lively, Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, Little Reunions by Eileen Chang, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, Paradise by Toni Morrison, Parade by Rachel Cusk, Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, and The Feast by Margaret Kennedy.

WATCHES // My summer watches are a bit more complex than my spring watches because they’re divided into three categories. First: early 2000s romantic comedies (but special mention to Set It Up). Some of my favorites are: 13 Going on 30, 10 Things I Hate About You, 27 Dresses, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Proposal, and Palm Springs.

(this is my letterboxd! add me!)

Second are melancholy movies that feel like the late summer breeze. I watch these whenever I journal and still feel pensive, or whenever I want to watch something thoughtful (and sad).

And third are raunchy comedies. I usually am pretty impartial to them, but some are really funny and really good. Like that famous Animal Farm quote goes: “all raunchy comedies are equal but some raunchy comedies are more equal than others”.

….or something like that.

interlude: what i read this week

I’m on a mission to read as many NYRB classics as I can this summer. I finished On Being Blue by William H. Gass, A Month in the Country by J.L Carr, and Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. I rated all of them 4 stars (I don’t think I’ve rated a single NYRB book below four stars, their curation is just that good). This week, I am reading Good Behavior by Molly Keane and Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum, both of which I have only heard good things about. I’m halfway through Good Behavior, and anyone who loves a dysfunctional, messy family tale, this is your book. Such smart, brilliant writing as well.

Other than that, I am still trekking through Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (which I am determined to finish by the end of next week so I can stop writing that I’m still reading it). And since NYRB books are quite heavy, I’ve been carrying around Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys to read on the subway and bus. And for my big nonfiction book (in which I read slowly and take notes), I’ve still been reading Sophie’s World and it’s still as interesting and digestible as it was when I read it more than a decade ago.

I promise I will update my Goodreads sometime this month!

Here are ten articles you should read this week:

1. The Domestic Disappointments of Natalia Ginzburg by Dustin Illingworth

   In the novels of Natalia Ginzburg, family has a private grammar. “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people,” she wrote in Family Lexicon, her most celebrated novel, “just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.”

2. A Cure for Individualism by Tim Connolly
   It runs deeply through the Western outlook, hailed and condemned in equal measures. For a corrective, look to Confucius.

3. 1988—? by Eileen Chang
   “The three huge horizontal layers, a single silent travelogue in technicolor on a cracked silver screen, no audio added, played soundlessly in one corner of an exhibit that was running at a loss, and no one was watching.”

4. The Ecstatic Swoon by Robert D Zaresky
   As Stendhal knew, the reason for art is to make you feel. Do not try to grasp the artwork: allow it to grasp you instead.

5. A Third Thing Grows by Susan Moon

   How learning a third language became a place of reconciliation for my mother tongues.

6. Give Her a Snake by Mary Beard

   The myth of Cleopatra may offer women an image of power, but at the cost of implicating them in the misogynistic fantasies of patriarchy. For women, ‘Cleopatra’ is a trap.

7. The Climate Crisis is Worse than You Think by Elizabeth Weil

   A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

8. Street Haunting: A London Adventure by Virginia Woolf

   “The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful.”

9. Carmen Maria Machado's Many Haunted Stories of a Toxic Relationship by Katy Waldman

   Katy Waldman reviews Carmen Maria Machado's ”In the Dream House,“ a formally inventive memoir that recounts the author's experience with an abusive relationship.

10. The Dirt on Pig-Pen by Elif Batuman

    “I first encountered the Peanuts strips around age six, when my father started taking me with him to the used bookstore.”

postlude

things i love: my new wall shelves, various bottles from officine universelle buly, sunshine after a week of rain, byredo’s summer rain candle, walking in the morning, giving friends gifts.

Just a note: I have a 20% discount running until the end of November if you subscribe through this link! If you also love reading, watching movies, and podcasts / video essays, I post a weekly syllabus every Sunday and daily journal prompts every month. This is an entirely reader supported publication and am so thankful for your support.

You’ve been having an out-of-body experience for the last four months. Your mind is a dimly lit home at night, and you’re standing outside under a flickering streetlamp, watching someone who looks like you walking through the rooms. The curtains are always open and you’re eternally the sole spectator, the only one who made it to the ticket office. In other words, you’ve been waiting for your life to piece itself back together again for the whole winter season. Chalk it up to seasonal depression or a series of unfortunate events, maybe. It’s an exploration of liminal hallways that seem to have no end to the twists and turns, an exercise in patience—which you do not have an abundance of to start with. In this metaphor, the never ending corridors are made of wax, and they’ve all started fusing together, and melting down by a series of bad events completely out of your control, which is incredibly difficult to admit as someone who plans your entire life down to the minute. The point is, you’ve pretty much been split into tiny fragments of tempered glass, and have been trying your best to find all of them to piece back together again.

The search for every shard of my life that I can sit down and work out like a thousand-piece puzzle set has had one objective for the past two weeks: find that perfect day. My terrible perfectionist tendencies result in my need to execute everything perfectly or not even trying at all—and no day has been perfect—so I’ve been watching the ticking needle of my patience, trying to catch myself on the day I fix my life. I have an idea of what a perfect day would look like; everyone has one, but every day I wake up, there’s something wrong with it. The sun might be out, but I might be feeling too tired; I might be feeling fine, but the sun might not be out; the sun might not be out, and I might be feeling too tired, and so on. Moreover, my attempts to self medicate and ignore the big fault lines of my life with simply wasting away my free time, just waiting for the minutes to tick by.

With every day bleeding into the next, my mind working through day to day tasks on autopilot, I’ve realized that most of the days this year have no discernible characteristics from the next. It’s to the point where I’ll open up my journal, and see that each entry has almost sounded identical for the last three weeks. Fatigue about being fatigued has started to seep into my daily life, and I’m tired of being tired. Although it is the second day of summer, I’ve decided to do some spring cleaning in my life; as always, I’ve decided to take things into my own hands and write out a list of how I can get my life back together again. I’m impatient but I do believe that improvements to your life does not happen from big, radical changes, but small habits you implement that build up over time.

None of these are original thoughts or super groundbreaking, but I’ve already been feeling monumentally better after doing all of these steps (I always do). I also don’t have any ‘don’t be hard on yourself!’ steps because 1) I am genuinely my own worst critic and nothing can really stop me from being hard on myself, and 2) I wanted to include steps that are less conceptual and rather practical measures you can incorporate into your life. But also, don’t be so hard on yourself.

[side note: this post is a little tangent & introduction for my how to get my life back together series — my next post, ‘on keeping a notebook’, will be posted on thursday. i’m talking about my notebook ecosystem, from my journal to my reading journals, to my various planners. all the posts in this series will be for paid subscribers, so please consider upgrading your subscription if you enjoy this!]

you can check out my first post (it’s free!) here:

how to get your life back together…ish:

get off your phone and go on a walk

In the haze of productivity and trying to stay connected with the world, it is easy to forget the joy and magic of a simple walk.

I wrote a whole essay on this in December, but sometimes it’s embarrassingly easy just how fast a walk will cure you of your worries. I also feel like I’ve talked about taking walks so much that posting about it again feels incredibly redundant, but here I go again: a good walk will genuinely change your life. There is something about the act of walking that quiets down all the extraneous murmurs in your brain, and everything suddenly morphs into clear cut clarity. It’s not a miracle cure, but it sometimes is the only thing that works and allows you to see your life at a distance. You can’t see the full panoramic view of a meandering river if you are sitting closely on its banks.

Why does walking feel like the best prescription to any sort of distress? It grounds you in a physical way, I think, feeling your feet literally touching the pavement with every beat of your heart. In that moment, you become something bigger, a part of every sprawling nature landscape. Something in your life that felt so overwhelming suddenly feels small in comparison to the sheer magnitude of the world around you. And in the open solitude, the frequency of your thoughts begin to change, and something that didn’t make sense, the gray areas clouding your head, presents itself with an answer in startling technicolor.

closing shift for a clean space

This is kind of my number one, no negotiation rule to getting my life together. Whenever my life feels like it’s starting to spiral out of control, I realize that my surroundings have too more often than not—books get piled on my desk, articles of clothing end up on the floor, and tiny trinkets somehow find its way under my blanket. Not to mention my allergies get horrifically worse when my space is not clean because dust accumulates so easily.

I like to do something I call a ‘closing shift’ (I did not make this up), where I put on some music and spend half an hour before I sleep cleaning my space and putting objects back in its designated, organized place. I also declutter my digital documents and photos often, placing them into folders that I can easily find and access. Usually, though, the closing shift does not involve any sort of electronics, so it’s a good way to avoid blue light right before I sleep. Doing this every day or once every two days prevents me from having to do a massive, taxing clean on the weekends that takes up three hours and then a subsequent three hour nap. Keeping a clean space also mirrors my mental state and keeps my mind organized as well.

make a list of things in your control vs out of your control

This is one of the things that has massively helped my mental health. As aforementioned, I’ve been going through the wringer for the last few months, and a lot of it has been because of things completely out of my control. However, while I know this subconsciously, it is so hard to think that something is out of your control when it is happening to you. Suddenly, external circumstances, things happening to you, don’t feel like that—it feels like you somehow caused it to happen. When I told this to my close friend, she advised me to consistently make a list of things that are in my control, and things that are not. Her point was that seeing everything on paper not only makes everything feel tangible and thus less like a scary ghost slamming doors in your house, it also allows you to redirect your energy and focus onto things that you can fix, that you can control.

I feel like this has somehow lessened my anxiety, seeing all of my worries and problems neatly split into two binary columns because more often than not, my problems are out of my control. And for the ones within my control, writing it on paper makes it feel a lot less scary.

wishlists for everything

I don’t mean this solely in a retail therapy sense, but I like making wishlists of things I want to read and watch. Wishlists excite me, and calling book to-read lists or movie watchlists a wishlist makes me have something to look forward to. Sometimes, changing the way I see something that is so normal and banal in my life can significantly change my mood. Wishlists also saves time on mindlessly scrolling through streaming platforms or staring at my bookshelf to find my next read. I also like making wishlists based on specific books or movies—for example, when I finished watching Aftersun, one of my favorite movies, I researched and made a list of specific movies that capture a similar theme and summer melancholy to the movie.

In a retail sense, however, I find that making wishlists instead of buying on the spot allows me to visualize everything I want from a distance or sometimes the sheer volume of everything I want shocks me into not buying anything, thus, helping me save money. This summer, reading and watch wise, I am planning on making my way down my NYRB classics read-wishlist and my Criterion Collection movie wishlist. I talk about the reason for doing this in my how to get smart again post.

create habits, not routines

I’m someone who loves a solid morning and night routine because I like consistency. Thinking of a routine as a constellation of habits is much easier than a dreary timetable list of activities that must be executed every day, rinse and repeat. Habits are intentional actions that you want to incorporate into your daily life and a group of them create a routine, but visualizing your day as a series of habits makes it feel less formidable and offers a sort of flexibility. This way, it’s easy to adjust or switch out certain habits while having the same objective or goal the entire time. I like having a set of habits that I can autopilot myself on without thinking much in the morning (because I can’t function properly for the first hour after I wake up). By the time I’m awake, I’ll have accomplished a small litany of tasks that already sets me up for the potential of having a good day.

I talk a lot about habits in the post linked below, but to elaborate, I usually divide my habits into morning habits and night habits because those are the hours that are mine. Morning habits include: making my bed, stretching / yoga, drinking lots of water, journaling, reading, a 30 minute workout or a 5k run, and skincare in that order. Night habits include: planning the next day, closing shift, big light off by 10pm, reading for an hour, phone off by 11pm, skincare, sleep by midnight.

[I do want to digress a little bit and talk about the aestheticization of habits, and I’m particularly talking about the that girl routine (the one where you get up and drink lemon water, put on a baby pink workout set to follow a 10 minute ab workout Youtube video, fill out a page of the Five Minute Journal, eat a slice of avocado toast with a matcha latte, and then do a Drunk Elephant skincare routine). It’s not that different from what habits I like to do, but I think a lot of times, routines, especially in the way the social media does it, has places the spotlight on the products used. Routines become a hyper-aestheticized vessel, reduced to something that has to have a brand or tag to achieve its ‘ideal form’. Don’t fall into this trap! Routines are simply a collection of habits. You don’t need to buy anything new to enact this.]

exercises in optimism

I’m not good at this at all. I’m someone who finds comfort in expecting the worst in every situation because I feel like it cushions the blow; if I expect and prepare for the worst without even hoping for the best, then a good outcome will serve as a nice surprise. Should there be a bad outcome, I will have already built a fortress around me, made out of anticipatory grief and sadness. I honestly did not know this was not normal—I thought that this was how everyone processed sadness, by overplaying a hypothetical scenario in their heads like a broken record, by pressing down all eighty eight keys of a piano until a note seemed in tune with the potential and inevitable melancholy that would follow.

However! I have been worrying that constantly expecting the worst propagates some kind of self confirmation bias about my life in general (and I will be cursed forever and ever). I’ve been trying to expect good outcomes, to tell myself that there is more of a chance of a good outcome than a bad outcome. Historically, most things I have been hyper-anxious about has somehow worked out in my favor, and the other shoe I always expect to drop never does. My mom always tells me to force myself to laugh (literally, like a crazy person) whenever I’m feeling sad, because even simulated laughter can release endorphins. In the same vein, I’m assuming just forcing myself to be optimistic will somehow do the same. Either way, I’m trying to get rid of my stubborn habit of always expecting the worst to happen.

journal everything

I will live and die by my journals. My journals are a way of archiving my thoughts at that time, but also useful for processing them. I have a bad habit of intellectualizing and rationalizing every single thought or thing that happens to me, so much so that I’m always hyperaware of my every thought. I also repress emotions as the first line of defense (because I sometimes think my emotions get in the way of being productive—not in a toxic productivity way, but a ‘I need to get this done by a deadline for my job’ way).

Journaling for me, is a remedy for that. Every day after I wake up, I grab my journal and I write a long stream of consciousness of everything that is going on in my head. I feel like this helps me empty it for the day, so my brain feels less full. Even if I rationalize and examine every thought in my head, writing it down on paper makes it feel less abstract and more concrete. This allows me to just write it out and stop thinking about it—in essence, I am trying to trap all of my worries in my journals, like a metaphorical cage.

make a big to do list at the start of each month

Those who follow my journal prompts know this, but my prompt for every Sunday includes writing weekly intentions and making a big to do list. I usually make a big one at the start of each month and then dedicate a few tasks each week so it feels doable. I name it: my “get my shit together to-do list: ____ month edition”. Oftentimes, these are just one page long and a huge list of obligations and chores I need to figure out by the end of the month, from job related tasks to bills to things for friends and family to miscellaneous things I need to figure out, or even just updating my Goodreads. Anything, no matter how big or small, gets thrown on that list because I refuse to forget a single thing I have to do.

finish easy tasks on the spot

Easy tasks build up to become your personal Everest. I try not to let this happen by adopting a ten minute rule: if I can do something in ten minutes, I do it at that moment. I know that it’s usually called the ‘two minute rule’, but most things usually take more than two minutes, and I started doing the ten minute rule when I used to study using the Pomodoro method in school—instead of 25 minutes of work and a five minute break, I would do an hour of work and take a ten minute break. During those ten minutes, I did mindless chores, such as decluttering, folding laundry, answering simple emails, deleting duplicate photos or screenshots I no longer need, etcetera. It is so much easier to do one easy task in ten minutes of free time rather than setting an hour or two to do all of this, because it becomes exhausting when it builds up.

take yourself on solo dates. especially to the movie theater.

I always feel like my life is falling apart whenever I don’t have time to think for myself, or whenever I haven’t had the chance to recharge my social battery. I like having a weekend day to myself once a month at least, where I go out and roam around a park or a mall and eat at a new restaurant that I’ve had my eye on (on this note, I think that learning how to eat alone is one of the best things you can do in your twenties because it sheds a lot of self consciousness and I personally think it’s the final step to truly appreciating your own presence). The last stop on my solo date is always the movie theater. I love watching movies alone, but in the company of strangers, so I don’t feel lonely.

I am also a strong believer in the claim that movies, like books, are best enjoyed alone.

prelude

Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I'm bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is- just me and the trees and the sky and the seas- I know now that that's enough.

—Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton

Every month, I’ll be featuring someone’s favorite books so you get to hear from someone who isn’t me. This month’s feature is from my friend ! I’m so lucky to be able to call her one of my close friends; she is such a talented writer—on her newsletter , she metamorphoses simple feelings and concepts into these thoroughly articulate and unique pieces of writing. Her essays explore the intersections of emotion, personal history, pop culture, and literature, and she pulls it off every single time.

As always, as I do for my Substack friends, I’ve linked a few of my favorite essays of hers in the article links.

interlude i: what i read this week

I’ve kind of been reading a few books all at once! I’m on the last 50 pages of Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, which is actually kind of really great and witty and funny and beautiful (and as I mentioned before, I’m a Gravity Rainbow hater). I think Pynchon shines way more in his shorter novels than his longer ones. I’m also so excited for the movie.

I’m also rereading Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, which I read when I was maybe twelve? and I haven’t reread since. I want to start reading more philosophy and though that picking the book up again would be a good introduction and a way to ease me into reading denser material. Just going to read it slowly and jot down a few things that I want to remember over the course of a month.

I’m almost done with On Being Blue by William Gass, which is my first NYRB read of the summer! It’s such an odd little book that answers the question, what is blue? in a hundred different ways. I feel like this would be such a good late summer read, maybe mid-August ish. I think I just associate blue with August (maybe it’s because of Deborah Levy’s book, August Blue). On that note, if you missed it, I’ll be posting a summer reading guide series on NYRB classics, since that’s all I seem to be reading these days! Keep an eye out for it.

And then lastly, I’m rereading Beautiful World, Where Are You with (very apt to announce on this post). I love this book too much and have already talked way too much about this book to say more.

Follow me on Goodreads if you haven’t yet! (Although I still have like 4 months of reads to update—I’m behind)

Here are ten articles to read this week:

1. Out of the Fog by Gianluca Didino
   It’s a ‘failed painting’ that obscures the profound power of German Romanticism. Why do we love the ‘Wanderer’ so much?

2. I Want To Do Everything, So I Do Nothing by

   On midnight anxieties and career paths.

3. The Titanic of the Pacific by Tyler Hooper

   A tale of disaster, survival, and ghosts.

4. Our Narrative Prison by Eliane Glaser

   The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?

5. Ego Death by
   Unsolicited advice, session 01: on how to stop being a narcissist.

6. Siege Art by Hal Foster

   To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance develop unevenly over time, ‘anachronically’, in myriad acts of reception?

7. How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree by Matthew Ponsford
   A set of experimental techniques and technologies that might seem harmful to trees is actually helping ancient forests survive.

8. Recurring Screens by Nora Claire Miller

   “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience.”

9. What To Do When English Colonizes Your Brain? by
   On the struggles of the bilingual brain and favouring what's foreign.

10. How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It by Deborah Solomon

    “It is rare that a biographer of artists becomes the subject of a biography.”
    

interlude ii: what i watched this week

I’m not going to lie, I had a genuinely hellish week last week so all I did was binge Sex and the City. And I accidentally finished it. Like, I binged it so much that i thought I was on season 4 but nooooo I was actually on the final episode of the whole show. I had a few moments when the screen turned black after the last episode and I was just staring at myself in the reflection of my iPad thinking “I watched that way too embarrassingly quickly wow”. But it’s such a good show and I do think it is really good cultural commentary—a lot of the plots and the language used are very outdated, but a lot of the core concepts and issues that the four women face are still things I talk about with my friends. It’s kind of insane how I just watched it for the first time, but I’m also glad I watched it for the first time at 25.

postlude

things i love: chicken avocado croissant sandwiches, book stacks, vintage editions of pretty books, my gentle monster sunglasses, celine’s dans paris perfume, my new marshall acton ii speaker, petrichor.

[Postcards by Elle is a reader supported publication. every week, i send out a weekly postcard, which includes a list of everything i read (books and articles) and watched (movies and video essays) that week. to support my work, please consider upgrading your subscription! that way, i can have the time to produce content i love, which mostly just includes rabbit hole essays on niche topics i hyper-fixate on and research. or recommendations of all kinds.]

prelude

“People and events don't disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.”

—Chess Story, Stefan Zweig

[this was originally titled doomscrolling doomsday doom, which I like a lot so I’m adding it here. also the post is too long for email, and my postcards are always too long for email, so you should always read it on your desktop or the substack app!]

When I was five or six, my dad would leave for work at the crack of dawn, and being a light sleeper all throughout my early childhood, my eyes flew open at the sound of the door. I felt my pupils dilate to adjust to the dark, like a nocturnal animal of sorts, and crept out of my room into the living room on tiptoes. Our couch was pressed against the wall right below the window, and I would rest my chin against its back and watch the world come alive inch by inch.

The London sun was sluggish and somnolent, especially in the wintertime, but it would eventually get there; after an hour, the darkness would fade into bursts of crimson and vermillion and marigold. I reveled in the quiet, my mother’s sleep-logged breathing if I concentrated hard enough, and the occasional chatter from the parking lot below from early risers. It was only when I could read the numbers on the wall clock across from me, that I allowed myself to go back to my room and pick a book to read. My mom’s voice would echo in my head still, telling me not to read in the dark because I’d ruin my eyesight, but I thought I gauged the level of brightness well enough (obviously not well enough, because I’m legally blind now).

I’d look forward to this though, the tranquility, the soundlessness of everything around me. I’m not sure why I craved this so much as a five year old, because boredom is an acquired taste, but it was something I deeply enjoyed. To truly feel every second of the hour, actually seeing the world changing with my own two eyes, was transformative for me to say the least, almost like a reward of sorts. Not to mention that I hated sleeping—something that five year old Elle does not have in common with present day Elle, to clarify. But it was less about being awake and more about the wakefulness being tangible, which was further amplified by feeling like I was the only person who was conscious during that time. My mother would wake up around seven and the world would shift back to its regular axis and universe, but the two hours between was wholly mine.

Eventually, I grew out of doing this when I slept through the sound of the door clicking shut behind my father, but I sought that feeling of having the whole world to myself elsewhere while growing up; going to the park and staring at the ducks on a bench, finding the most isolated corner of the library with a book in hand, staring at the moon and making up stories about what was going on up there, wandering the isles of the supermarket when my mom took me (and then subsequently panicking when I felt like I had wandered too far away). But the bottom line is that I had a fascination and borderline obsession with boredom, the almost torturous first few minutes followed by a calm in my heart—something which evaporated when I got my first smartphone at thirteen.

There was a time when the internet was confined to a stationary desktop in the corner of the living room in our childhood homes. Every time I turned it on, the machine would groan and whir to life, the sound sometimes deafening as I waited for it to calm down so I could click on Internet Explorer and play Club Penguin, go on Mathletics for homework, or watch a few videos on a prehistoric version of Youtube. And then I would press shut down, go up to my room, and leave the online world behind. My room was my favorite space in the whole world—it still is—and as soon as I shut the door behind me, everything within the four walls became mine and wholly mine. From the bowing bookshelves against the walls in a state of near collapse due to the number of books they were holding, to my paintings scattered all around the room, to my piano, to the loose leaf papers holding scrawls of a story I was writing—everything belonged to me and was a product of my own imagination. Owning something in its entirety like that can only be born of a complete vacuum of outside noise, and when was the last time any of us truly felt that way?

I think my generation is the last to remember a time before everything migrated online (I was born in 2000, so that makes me early Gen-Z—a few weeks ago I saw a tweet that referred to people born between 1998-2003 as “old people” and I felt downright geriatric). Retrospectively, my childhood was a thin tightrope balancing act between a past analog and a future digital world; I remember the exact moments when each social media platform became a mainstream one. I downloaded Facebook when I was nine, Instagram when I was thirteen, Wattpad (sigh) also when I was thirteen, Snapchat when I was fourteen, and so on. Many social media apps have now become defunct in my life as I feel no need to open Snapchat as an adult, and I’ve moved on from one orange writing platform (Wattpad) to another orange writing app (Substack). But I think the general consensus for people born in the same year as me, give or take three years, is that there was a tangible shift when the world’s priority mode of communication became an online one.

I voiced this to my fifteen year old sister a few weeks ago, and in return, she replied, “Sometimes you say stuff like that and it makes me realize you’re like, dinosaur-old.” While there is always no better feeling than being calmly roasted and humbled by your baby sister, having a younger sibling born when everything was already basically digital has forced me to constantly reflect on how acutely the world has changed in the last decade or so. We were raised by the same parents in the same way, but her life has looked very different to mine because of this. In my sister’s mind, there was no world before this and she never had to have this adjustment period of witnessing everything become digital and mechanical. Instagram has always existed for her. And sometimes, it’s started to feel like that for me as well. The internet, especially social media platforms, has woven itself so inextricably into the coils of my life that I’m sure that attempting to untangle it will be a futile attempt.

This is not to say that social media is monolithically terrible and every remnant of it must be done away with, like many essays that have been published in the last few months. It seems like there is a collective shift away from constantly being online, and while I agree with this, I also think nothing good can come out of dismissing these platforms as a whole, because the world has irreversibly become a place where we cannot exist without them. I’ve written so much about my experience with having a public social media account (from my One Direction Instagram account that twelve year old me ran like the Navy, to a prolific Wattpad career in my teens). I have not been without the internet for a very long time, and many of my formative memories are deeply braided with my experiences on them. And if you were on social media platforms back in its rudimentary stages, you know that you’ve completed character building for life.

Regardless of always having an online presence, my phone time has never been a point of concern for me, as it has always fluctuated within a two to three hour daily range. I’ve always preferred to access my accounts on my laptop, much like how one logs into their work computer. I was perfectly fine with having multiple social media accounts because I was good at managing my attitude and behavior towards it. Maintaining a healthy distance from these platforms, like they’re someone I know two degrees of separation over, feels essential in order to preserve my mental health and sanity. After all, we were never supposed to be exposed to thousands of people’s thoughts at once.

Not only has reading a few hundred people’s tweets a day begun to fog up my own consciousness and ability to interpret my own thoughts with clarity, but Twitter lingo has slowly started infecting its way into my everyday language. Or I’ll casually mention something that’s been going viral on Twitter, and I’ll have to painfully explain the backstory to one of my friends who doesn’t have an account—and everything online ends up sounding very stupid when you try and explain it out loud. I’ve been accessing most of my social media through apps, and it’s been the first thing I check when I wake up and the first thing I see before I fall asleep.

Thus, lately, despite all my efforts, it has become harder to separate myself from my phone. My mother always worries that I’ll lose it and often discourages me from buying the newest model when it’s time to retire my old one. I explain to her that I’m hyper aware of my phone’s location at all times, because chances are that it is glued to my hand—in short, my phone is now an extension of me. My entire life is on there, from work emails to social media platforms to texts from friends. This has bred a nervousness that was previously not there before; the thought of not clutching my phone at all times has become anxiety fodder. I’ve even experienced physical symptoms of this in the last few months: my right wrist has started hurting, in a dull-ache, pseudo carpel tunnel sort of way, from scrolling on my phone for too long. Or maybe I actually do have carpal tunnel and I’m just in denial. All of these have led me to reach a terrible epiphany—I may not only be chronically online, I may also have an addiction to my phone. As soon as I began to feel my attention span withering away like a cut flower without water, I was forced to step back and ruminate on what has changed regarding my behavior.

For the first three months of the year, I was waking up at 4am for no reason, and the first thing I did was reach for my phone. I was barely conscious and totally not functioning at this point, and my one eye was squinted shut like a bad prolonged wink, but I still checked my messages. I’d sleepily text some people back and then open Substack and Twitter, the blue light from my phone laser-cutting into my retinas, probably causing irreversible damage that I’ll resent myself for in a decade when in desperate need of Lasik. But a deeper reflection reveals that perhaps I’m just afraid of being bored now, something I actively sought as a child. What if I can’t fall back asleep and I end up staring at the ceiling, bored?

Boredom almost unilaterally carries a negative connotation—if you are bored, you need to figure out a way to fill that boredom with something, which sometimes simply includes opening the same fridge over and over every five minutes just to see if new food has magically spawned on the shelf. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse because we have talked about this topic into oblivion, but perhaps this is indicative of the instant gratification society that we have turned into. Even using AI and generative AI as a solution to everything without thinking for a second is symptomatic of this. I always say that a walk outside in the sunlight can be a quick fix to so many problems, and that’s because living in the digital world, with constant stimulation from social media posts and playlists and podcasts in our ears, sometimes makes us lose the ability to quite literally touch grass.

A 2017 article explains this feeling of boredom as ‘ecological boredom’, saying “because we’re bombarded with increasing doses of glamour, glitz, buzz, celebrity, hype, and excitement, we initially find the natural world mundane”, which feels even more true eight years later. While I am not advocating for all of us to suddenly throw our phones out of the window and become prehistoric hunter-gatherers, I do think there is substance in that sentence, that we have always historically viewed nature as awe inspiring and we oftentimes no longer do, due to the constant information overload and ten second reels and scrolling through a hundred people’s thoughts at once in the span of ten minutes. In short, we have quite literally forfeited our ability to feel awe for overstimulation from content. And awe is arguably the most important emotion we can have.

Boredom is seen more as a void and a black hole in our lives instead of a blank canvas that can transform into something new and something creative. In a complete vacuum of distractions and outside noise, we are able to think in depth, create more freely, and form clear opinions of our own. Our attention spans are shrinking as we use the instant gratification of social media and short form content as a quick fix to the few initial discomforting moments of being bored. Boredom is as important for our personhood as much as any other emotion, but we’ve become afraid of silence and only hearing our own thoughts. In a way, our mind has become a disfiguring version of a Greek chorus, filled with a low hum of background noise from people we will never encounter in real life.

I am absolutely guilty of this. I recently wrote about this in my “how to get smart again” post, that my addiction to instant gratification has not only messed up my attention span, but also has bled into the way I live my life. I’ve gotten even more impatient, which was something I didn’t know was possible because I’m already such an impatient person to start with. Because boredom is almost a foreign feeling for me at this point, with my phone within my immediate reach at all times, it’s become even more unbearable.

Not allowing myself to think has also created unexpected byproducts, such as not walking places (and wanting to take a bus or car instead) and mild decision paralysis—the most shocking revelation to me, as someone who knows exactly what she likes and dislikes and doesn’t take more than five minutes to make any decision. Trying to learn how to be bored again quite literally feels like having to painfully detox the addiction of avoiding being bored at all costs, and rewire my brain into seeing boredom as a positive quality again.

Is doing this difficult? Yes. But do I absolutely dread what my life will be if I don’t learn how to be bored and learn how to think again? Absolutely. Boredom is agitating and even unnerving sometimes. What’s even more terrifying to me though, is the notion that I will one day self medicate myself with mind numbing media so much to the point where I am incapable of forming my own opinions. Don’t you agree that it is the fastest way to self sabotage and ruin your intellect and your ability to discern what is and is not important in life, or to feel awe?

I wrote this last paragraph in my essay back in October about the rise of generative AI, but I think it’s also pretty apt for this essay as well:

The art of letting things linger has become something archaic, lost in the steeps of corporate greed and between the axis of a cost benefit model. Everything is moving in super speed that feels different than a few years ago, like we are recklessly surpassing the speeding limit as a society and we are waiting for the inevitable crash.

Can nobody see it?

On a more optimistic note: here are some things you can do without being on your phone or a digital screen at all—

cook or bake a favorite recipe
meditate
journal a few pages
read a short book
go on a walk
paint
clean your room
learn how to knit or crochet
make something out of air dry clay
write someone a letter
do a puzzle
go on a run
paint your nails
learn origami (fold a paper crane!)
fill in a coloring book
go to a farmer’s market
scrapbook
take a bath

Or, you know, just let yourself be bored for a second.

Postcards by Elle is a reader supported publication. Every week, I send out a weekly postcard, which includes a list of everything I read (books and articles) and watched (movies and video essays) that week. To support my work, please consider upgrading your subscription!

Here is my new series for paid subscribers that will be posted throughout the summer:

interlude i: what i read this week

Here is my Goodreads if you want to add me!

I’ve been (very slowly) making my way through Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I’m really not a huge fan of him and reading parts of Gravity’s Rainbow for one of my college courses was painful at best, excruciating at worst. But I’m actually really enjoying it. It’s very different from any classics I read or even contemporary books and the amount of bizarre information casually given in a paragraph is oftentimes overwhelming. It’s a pretty short book (compared to Pynchon’s other books), but it is really manic and everything about it feels pretty technicolor, so it might take a long time for those of you who are not used to it (including me). I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys writing about the hazy 60s counterculture in California—the Joan Didion/Eve Babitz time period but the writing is not!!!! like them at all, be aware.

To balance out the overwhelm, I’m also reading A Way of Life by Any Other by Darcy O’Brien. I’m only a dozen pages into it but it’s pretty good so far. I am a little apprehensive of the 3.5 star review on Goodreads, but and I always say that 3.5 is the sweet spot rating for a good literary fiction book because it means that it’s complex and interesting enough that it polarizes the general public. I’ve also just learned to blindly trust any NYRB classic, to the point where I am thinking of exclusively reading them all summer so I can do a huge NYRB classic guide sometime in August.

Here are ten articles to read this week:

1. It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl by Brock Coylar
   A new generation has transformed the neighborhood — and reshaped the fantasy of New York City living.

2. Awe Can Do Wonders for Your Well-Being by Alisa Hrustic
   It’s the closest feeling we have to magic, and it can have profound effects on your mind and body.

3. Casual Viewing by Will Tavlin
   Why Netflix looks like that.

4. Our Narrative Prison by Eliane Glaser
   The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?

5. Incense Perfumes on the Eve of the Conclave by

6. My Brain Finally Broke by Jia Tolentino
   Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.

7. How to Be a Critic by
   put down the AI. pick up a dictionary.

8. The Grays of Our Lives by Kyle Chayka
   On clothes, color, and anxiety.

9. Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College by James D. Walsh
   ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

10. Who Decides What Words Mean? by Lane Greene
    Bound by rules, yet constantly changing, language might be the ultimate self-regulating system, with nobody in charge.

interlude ii: what i watched this week

Here is my Letterboxd if you want to add me!

I haven’t really been watching a lot of movies (but I am planning on getting on my Criterion channel grind in the summer, as I mentioned here). I did finally watch Babygirl, and to be honest, I didn’t really…enjoy it. It was a good movie, I just thought that the plot kind of deflated in on itself by the last third of the movie. I’m actually glad that I didn’t watch it as a Christmas double feature last year, because Nosferatu was near perfect and this one was a letdown. I also rewatched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it is still as good as I remember. The score is one of the most stunning soundtracks for a movie ever made.

Show wise, I’m watching Sex and the City from start to finish for the first time. I’ve watched a few episodes here and there and basically know what happens in the end because it’s impossible to avoid, but watching it in my mid-20s feels weirdly eye opening in a way. I’m at the start of season 4 and I’m starting to experience show fatigue because I’ve been binging it too fast. I’ll have an essay up about my thoughts in a bit.

I’ve also been slowly making my way through The Rehearsal, and it is just so good. I’m still on the first season (and I’ve heard from friends that the second season is much better), and I’m convinced Nathan Fielder is a genius. I’ll write more about the show when I’m on the second season because I haven’t watched that much yet. But!! I haven’t enjoyed watching a show this much in a while.

postlude

things i love: the sunlight, haribo starmix, bacha coffee candle, cold brew at lunchtime, sally when the wine runs out by role model, making sandwiches, eating sandwiches, hearing what people put in their sandwich, and this playlist i made—

[This is post is too long for email, so please view on your desktop or the app! I included a few quotes from books that I love revisiting on my birthday in the postlude, past the email cutoff, so keep reading!]

I turned twenty five on Sunday, and spent the first five minutes my birthday on a swing set at a neighborhood playground, giggling and drunk off of five gin and tonics from bar hopping with my friend. It felt comforting and strange all at once doing this at the precipice of turning what is arguably the first serious age of my life, like an intersection between growing up and getting older that I didn’t know really existed. I always keep things lowkey on my birthday because I already get easily overwhelmed and sad, but this year was close to my definition of a perfect birthday (Sunday crossword, a long walk, browsing around bookstores, eating dinner at a near empty restaurant, blowing out birthday candles at ten).

Twenty five seems like a real adult age, and reminds me that I have probably already lived through my quarter life crisis. I can tell you my top ten guesses for what that crisis might have been, or the last two years of my life may have been one long and continuous existential crisis. Either way, age is something that has growingly begun to weigh on me like a towel that needs to be wrung out at some point. Days bleed into months bleed into years and then it’s my birthday again, and I’m staring into a blank page of my journal, pen in my hand, wondering exactly what changed from last year.

On the morning of my birthday, I jokingly asked my friend, who turned twenty five just shy of a year before me, if he woke up on his twenty fifth birthday and just felt his frontal lobe click into place. I had been feeling blue all morning, moping on the couch, wallowing on the floor, and thought that surely, if my frontal lobe had developed, I would start to enjoy birthdays. In return, he pulled out a frazzled book from his shelf and gave me an essay by Jung to read that he had read on his 25th birthday (I cannot for the life of me remember the title or find the pdf online). The essay simply states that adulthood doesn’t really begin until we turn 25—which I guess is true and partly comforting. I haven’t experienced any seismic shifts in my cerebral hemisphere yet, but I think I have been seeing a lot of things differently lately. It feels like double vision almost, but not quite—for those with prescription glasses, it sort of feels like when you pull your glasses slightly off your nose and things get smaller for a second before (if you’re like me), you go legally blind. Some things feel smaller than I thought they were, but other things feel bigger. Everything balances out eventually, I think, even in this case.

There’s a lot of discourse around getting older (physically), I think, that’s contributed a lot to my innate fear of nearing my thirties, although I’m still five years out. Maybe it’s the copious amounts of anti aging skincare that you’re advised to use on the cusp of turning twenty five, or how it seems like the aimlessness of being in your twenties is only allowed until you turn twenty five or six. At one point, and I think it’s this point, age starts becoming less of a number and more of an invoice on what you’re supposed to have accomplished. Every year, I feel like I should know more about myself, about where I want to go with my life; my personhood should feel real and secure and binding. And every year, I realize that I’m going the opposite way. I’m unsure of things I thought I was sure about, I want things that I wasn’t sure that I wanted, or I come to the conclusion that I’ve subconsciously rejected something I thought was the most important thing in my life.

Still, I’m not sure if the frontal lobe development that life promises you at twenty five in exchange for a growing fear of aging, has happened yet for me. I’m not a woman in STEM, but I can tell you a hundred traits about me that I think would have been magically fixed, like bleach on stains on a white shirt, if said frontal lobe had expanded and clicked and locked into place. I think I’m too stubborn and not levelheaded and I get too fixated on something to prove a point; my perfectionist tendencies become an obstacle in my day to day life because I’m convinced that in order to be happy everything has to be perfect and when is anything truly perfect, really? I hate being wrong and regret too many things that have come out of my mouth and live a lot of my life seeing the past with rose colored glasses. I rationalize my decisions too much and am too hyper independent to the point where I feel like Icarus, flying dangerously close to a world where I’ve accidentally pushed everyone I love away.

These are the things that I like to think will be magically fixed—one day I’ll wake up and everything will be different. Maybe I’ve put too much of an emphasis on the number twenty five. Numbers that end in 5 or 0 always feel like closure to me in a way—when I was writing books on Wattpad as a teenager, I’d always end the book in a chapter number that ended in 5 or 0. The last time I was one of these ages I was 20 in 2020, and I was celebrating my birthday at home during the height of COVID. That in itself feels like closure for a chapter in my life since I graduated the next year and never went back to my college campus. I keep wondering what 25 signifies for me. I rinse and repeat this thought in my head. What chapter of my life am I closing as the number closes in on me? What’s the reflection, what’s my groundbreaking realization?

I always get hit with intense birthday blues a week before my birthday. I don’t really like treating my birthday like some huge celebration, and I historically have canceled multiple birthday parties through the years either because it always overlapped with exam week or a very hectic work week, which never really bothered me. I’ve never been someone who has a 'birthday week’ or god forbid, a ‘birthday month’. But I do think I make my birthday a big deal in my head because I irrationally catastrophize it in a way, like it’s a big milestone that’s forced on me every year and every year I realize that I’m not where I wanted to be. None of that transformative character development or work development or brain development. I’m just the same person I was last year, albeit a bit circumstantially different, and it feels massively disappointing sometimes. I worry that I’m not a serious person, that I’ll never be a serious person (a la Logan Roy’s I love you, but you’re not serious people). Even as I say this, I have no idea how one can be a serious person or if it’s even a mandatory requisite of adulthood.

However (and I’d like to believe this is frontal lobe development), I’ve been thinking less about success and more about happiness in the last few months. I used to think these two things were synonymous, and deep down maybe I still do, but there’s unequivocally a part of happiness that is not quantitative. Adulthood and the process of growing up in your twenties just seems like accepting and appreciating that life is mostly made up of mundane moments; life roots itself and grows in the gaps and spaces between important life events. In the pretty tumultuous twenty fourth year I’ve had, the things that have grounded me and continue to ground me are these small pockets of happiness that always don’t seem like much until I’m looking in retrospect a month later.

I’m an overthinker and I stress about everything ad nauseam, so as I’ve begun to really ruminate on things that make me happy, I’ve started wondering if I ever realize that I’m happy in that moment. It always seems to be a retrospective rose colored glasses thing, a strain of nostalgia that seeps into your veins like venom. I think that’s what I’d like to change for my twenty fifth year. Finding and recognizing true happiness in that moment. Maybe it means living life more presently, no longer backseat driving the events of my life. Maybe it means having a list of everything that makes me happy coiled into my cells. Maybe it means being a little in love with everything I do. I’m not sure. I’d like to find out.

interlude

If you’ve been subscribed to me for a while (on Substack and my bookstagram), you know that I always ask my friends to write a little something for my birthday post, like a brief anthology of sorts. This year, in the same vein as my multitude of reflections over the past month, I asked my friends to write a list of things that make them happy. Here were their answers—reading these genuinely made my day, so I hope it makes yours too!

I’ve linked Substacks for all of my friends that have them (this post made me realize that quite literally everyone in my life has a Substack! which is very exciting).

elle

almond croissants, sun warming up a cool spring day, paperback books, beach sunsets, handwritten letters, gin and tonics, clean spaces, morning routines, someone remembering something about me and saying “because i know you” because to be loved is to be known, warm bread with butter and flaky salt, new york review book classics, making playlists for people, caramelized onions, art galleries, moleskine notebooks, sharable small plates at restaurants, listening to an album a day, alphabetized lists, my mom’s cooking, good gossip, a very long nonfiction history book i can take notes on, cherries in the summer, bialetti coffee maker, beautiful cinematography, searching up the menu before leaving home, greek yogurt with sautéed dates, dainty gold jewelry, late summer melancholy, the outro of chiquitita, independent bookstores crammed with books, black forest cake, late night calls, having a meal in comfortable silence with someone you love, cotton tea bags, marshmallow notes in perfumes, a very long walk, flower trees, sapphire blue, opening the windows as soon as i wake up, peonies, freshly washed bedding, homemade pesto, rose jam, bon iver in winter, black forest cake, essay collections, birthday candles, scenic train rides, cool condiments, fiction that feels like brain food, hot tea before sleeping, running at sunrise, night showers, special editions of favorite classics, a clear starry night sky.

eve

mangoes, being told I smell good, live jazz, smokey palomas, meeting new people, the herons in my local park, fresh herbs in everything, baths, hard work paying off, miso soup, reading back my old writing and liking it, new friend group combos, Foushée, walking everywhere, Northern English accents, short stories, pistachios in savoury dishes, drinking white wine and playing scrabble with my bf, listening to albums start to finish, realising how far I’ve come, planning trips meticulously, ice cream, when substack friends become irl friends, Goldfrapp, autobiographies of women from the 60s, artistic integrity, cannoli.

griffin

watermelon and white wine in the summer on a picnic blanket in the grass, house parties, swimming in the lake, laying down in the grass, looking at the sky, play-doh, nice pens, old books, thick fonts with serifs, acoustic albums, live jazz, big band jazz, expressionist paintings, cold brews, trees of all shapes and sizes and the way leaves look on them, the sound leaves make when the wind comes calling through, finding shapes in the clouds, dreaming, fresh baked bread with soup, conversations with the moon, physical media, crt tvs, coffee and cigarettes in the morning, open skies in the country when the sun is setting, meditation, reading on the floor, banjo, zine collections, tangents, etceteras, cicadas, bad paint jobs, hardwood floors, this small rotund dog my friend encountered three years ago while hiking the camino in spain:

rayne

literary magazines, gossiping about literary magazines, talking to Americans about their small regional cultural differences, frozen fruit, having a good reason to feel sad, making my friends laugh, saying something out loud that makes me realize I sound like my mom, being cynical, a truly great essay, wearing blue jeans and just a bra on top, righteous indignation, the fancy pharmacy near the Met, frizzy undefined long curly hair, kissing, no makeup, receiving signs, steak.

nana

fresh laundry, cats purring, salty air at the beach, the musk from new leather, a spritz of angel’s share. sunlight pouring through blinds on a slow morning, the weight of a good hardcover book, silk pillowcases, the soft crackle of a fireplace, buttery croissants from a quiet corner café. the feeling of slipping into a cashmere sweater, perfectly warm bathwater, worn-in hotel slippers, a record playing in the background. long car rides at night, the glow of old film photos, handwriting from someone you miss, the rustle of wrapping paper, a familiar song from childhood, the hum of a favorite old movie. flipping through thick fashion magazines at the airport lounge, discovering a new restaurant tucked into a side street, trying a dish i can’t pronounce but love anyway. business-class upgrades, bottomless brunches, a stiff espresso martinis, walking through new cities with no plans, spring collection releases in soft pastels, the crispness of new pages in a travel journal. that one perfect mug, rain tapping gently against the window, and the scent of something baking just because.

niña

pistachio ice cream, a full moon, the sound of walking on crunchy leaves. quiet friday evenings, slow saturday mornings. a good book that leaves me feeling full rather than empty. writing long, drawn out emails. the smell of fresh laundry on the walk to my favorite cafe in the morning. the barista knowing my name. remembering important dates – big meetings and family reunions and their doctor's appointments. belonging in someone's calendar. their perfume on my skin. the intimacy of a life shared. hearing the same story over and over again just to see the storyteller's face light up every time. christmases with my family around me. catching 11:11 on the clock. sharing a meal. having the space to be uninhibited with my affection. consoling a friend. taking care of someone i love. being taken care of by someone i love. having my heart feel always close to bursting because the love i carry is bigger than even my 5-foot frame.

april

scent of perfume on your collar. how gooey clouds look at sunset. clouds. sunsets. good morning texts, morning walks, good banter, beautiful brain dumps on substack. when spotify gives a really good recommendation. impressive cinematography. the mountains! skiing. beautiful cafes with beautiful friends. mountains. hiking? crisp, crisp, crisp air. jotting things down in my notes app in the office bathroom that later become full-fledged essays. water when you’re thirsty. mountains. log cabins. bergamot. amy winehouse. making a bonfire with people you love. pine against fog against the creamy sky. how the bright the milky way looks you’re from the nearest town. the purest kind of love.

emma

elle’s substack, this post, leaving windows open all day so every room smells like fresh air, warm cinnamon rolls, trinkets, long wandering walks with the world as a soundtrack, little birds, opening mail, flowering trees, the smell of a bookstore, unpacking, lists, real maple syrup, diners, new cities, philly sports, snoopy, a good sandwich, sundress weather, popcorn at the movies, bloopers, laughing so hard you can’t get air in your lungs, picnics, a very ripe peach, museums, organizing, apologies, baking cookies, little shops, a good long article, restaurants and cafes and bakeries, boston, train rides, scented candles, disposable cameras, milky coffee, bakeries, alice’s adventures in wonderland the first warm day of the year, always books.

jen

seeing the moon while it’s still light out, handmade ceramics, the sound of bugs at night, warm buttered toast, a packed calendar, rainy days at home, rainy nights, waking up early without an alarm, moleskine notebooks, going out for breakfast with my family, tea and anything tea-flavoured, getting into bed on a cold night, autumn hikes, handwritten postcards and letters, giving gifts, going to the bookstore alone, when the plane descends at a holiday destination, manicured nails, a good sweat after a workout, movies at the cinema, collecting postcards, gelato, slowly walking around a new city, tasteful independent stores, film scores, home-cooked food, lightbulb moments, baseball caps, the smell of freshly baked pastries, grocery shopping, hand creams, getting told, 'saw this and thought of you', cold fresh air, stunning cinematography, forests, lakes with a mountainous backdrop.

elle

citrus trees, rehashing old stories, postcards (by elle), prose that sings. long train rides. long car rides. stacks of hoop earrings on my ears, stacks of books on my floor, waiting for a shelf. ambient playlists on in the background, a fat slice of cheesecake, the unexpected photo of my cat back home from my dad. the manic, delighted panic of football season’s start. walking around a museum with someone you love pointing at this one and this one and that one. when everyone on the tube smiles at the same baby at the same time. the sun of summer, the snow of winter. pens that run smooth, flowers that last longer than a week, a cup of tea with the right ratio of milk and sugar. my brothers and my sister across the ocean. a big breakfast. swans. planning a trip with friends, then another one. watching the light fade over the sea after a long day.

seo

daily walks, the way the sun looks when it filters through tree branches, notifications from my friends, the scent of freshly squeezed limes, miffy, my impulse-purchase couch, painting my nails with laufey playing in the background, prequel vitamin c serum, tretinoin, the sound my cat makes when she wakes up from her nap, inside jokes, houseplants, scented candles, my fridge post-meal prep.

luisa

how the sunlight reflects on sea waves, art i don’t understand, sunny breezy days that aren’t humid, my morning black coffee, songwriting that feels like it was written about me and for me, going to the movies, when my cats are affectionate and i don’t expect it, long distance friends traveling to see me, discounts, planning future trips on google sheets, when someone cooks for me and didn’t ask for it, spending time with my mom, miso soup with lots of scallions, starry nights, baked goods, video calls with my sister, how excited my dad’s dog gets when i visit their house, thrifted clothes that feel like they were made especially for me, dinner dates with my girl friends, mentoring youth, the last five minutes of my therapy sessions when my therapist shares details about her personal life, elaborate breakfasts, the silence of dawn.

olivia

freshly squeezed orange juice, waking up with the birds at 5am to catch an early morning flight, my grandparents, walking around the city listening to dance music with noise cancelling headphones, magnolia season, fresh mangoes, spending all afternoon reading a book in the met in that one room filled with rembrandts with the blue velvet couch, watching people finish marathons, watching people accomplish their dreams, giving compliments to strangers, a stiff cotton baby tee, skiing fresh tracks with my friends, chrysanthemum tea with honey, receiving developed film photos, a hoodie with a big neck hole, funnel cake.

ema

a clear night sky where i can see stars at their full potential - and when i find Orion’s belt, when i try something new out (cooking, makeup) and it comes out so well, when my friend’s dogs choose me over her and decide to climb/sit/rest on me, a damn good matcha latte, guinness cake, buying things with deal so good i basically earned money, buying things that i’ve spent so long thinking about/looking for, pretty sunsets, when i try to tan and it comes out really well, mum/grandma’s home cooked meals after a long time away, dumb jokes between friends that make absolutely no sense but will put us into fits of laughter, when i can’t tell if im having a solo concert alone in my room or cleaning said room (abba!), that sense of extreme cleanliness when you have a clean set of bedsheets, towels and pyjamas and you go to bed after the shower, sunny spring/autumn days when the weather is just perfect, reenacting an incredibly emotional scene and atmosphere in the shower whilst singing (are these my tears or the shower??), exploring random parts of hk with my mum and finding the spot (local restaurants, dessert cafes, shops) in essentially the middle of nowhere, writing and drawing cards for my friends.

joe

reading at night, travelling, watching people walk their non dog pets, watching people walk their dog pets, good food, anything hk, finishing the first book of a massive series (and liking it), cooking, board games, video games, games, puzzles, fixing things that have been broken a while, learning stuff, being able to help people out.

shaye

obscure books, early mornings, Brutalist architecture, impossible geometries, sunlight tangled in the leaves, long days spent writing, oversized sweaters, campus in the autumn, the sea, metaphysics, literary puzzles, drunken nights, questions that can’t be answered, black tea, vintage books, the blue hour after twilight, language, love, learning new things, deserts and other kinds of wide open spaces, the golden ratio, afternoon storms, mid-century furniture, dinner parties, late night philosophical conversations, silence, stargazing, knitted socks, metafiction, autumn leaves, fresh bed sheets, time to think, strange dreams.

jean

stepping on fresh snow, the smell of winter, christmas music, the scent of new books, yellow mangoes, hugging my parents, reading a book so good you can’t stop reading, takeout with crappy reality tv, sandalwood candles and perfumes, fresh cut flowers, the scent of a laundry room, going inside a warm bed after being in the cold, vanilla cupcakes, sentimental letters, realizing you love someone a lot more than you thought you did, korean food, roller coasters that give your butterflies, warm sand on the beach, autumn rain, when the clothes fit better than you expected in the dressing room, tight hugs, brisket pho, seeing bleu (my dog) happy, seeing the perfect shade of pastel pink, seeing loved ones you haven’t seen in a long time at the airport, cuddling after a long day, light reflecting on water, laughing so hard you grow abs (you don’t), petrichor, birds chirping in the morning, spring picnics, hot showers that melt away the pain, farmers markets, long walks that clear your head, soft summer breezes, the waves tickling your toes and running back to the ocean, cashmere cardigans, fruit loops, a good workout, writing about things i love and realizing you have a lot more to love in life than hate.

leah

living by the beach, vanilla scented anything, fresh strawberries in summer, petrichor, driving with my favourite music on, leopard print, blonde hair, simple gold jewellery, a floppy paperback, my tote bag collection, iced caramel lattes, winter beach walks, rewatching my comfort shows, candlelight, finding new favourite songs, baggy jumpers, the square of sunlight on the carpet in the mornings.

stacey

peanut butter and banana on toast, colorful knits, cold sunny days, unselfconscious prose, mood rings, yellow ladybugs, jam biscuits, windows, dark blue summer evenings, black ballerina flats, the fishbowl scene in romeo and juliet, the neapolitan novels, squirrels, layer cake, the perfect thrift find, arriving in paris, “don’t delete the kisses” by wolf alice, first glass of wine on an empty stomach (shoutout tom wambgams), my stuffed animals, summer, small ice cubes, trees with flowers, catching the last train home

arden

birthday cakes, long walks, vanilla bean speckled whipped cream, laughing so hard my stomach hurts, olives, negronis, watching movies on the plane, crisp sheets, live texting, crushes, the first warm day after a brutal New England winter, matcha, dancing, scream-singing, and optimism.

sue

nice weather (is spring finally here?), rooftop bars, sitting on an outdoor patio sipping wine, sunsets, east coast/new england summers, summer nights, the smell in the air after rain, making new memories with old friends - and laughing your ass off while doing so, unexpectedly being on your friend’s gratitude journal, planning cute dates and get togethers with friends, a good pistachio rose croissant, a good matcha latte, or a good gelato. Cherry blossoms!! Walking in the park & cute neighborhoods - if the sun’s out and the temperature is above 25 degrees Celsius, I’m happy.

cherrien

terrace cafes, green awnings, laundry on clotheslines, flowy linen curtains, flowers by mapplethorpe, stacks of books on wooden floors, vintage paperback books, giant canvases, georgia o’keeffe, tiny picture frames, dark wood, crown moldings, chrome details, vanilla candles, woody scents, perfume stacks, looking through friends’ perfume stacks, tekla bedsheets, soft bathrobes, bathroom tiles, striped towels, pool patios, flowers above water, sunrise by the sea, sunsets by a bay window, morning coffee, cucumber gin tonics, walking around town, outdoor reading, unexpected kindness from strangers, indie rock, girl bands, sad pop, my cats, the smell of my cats’ foreheads, daydreaming, terracotta vases, vintage ceramics, real matcha, pistachio green, olives, summer martinis, orange wine, cherry coke, the cure (the band), fleetwood mac, fall leaves, winter sun.

meredith

laying in fresh sheets after shaving your legs, perfume, the smell of laundry right out of the dryer, back scratches, head scratches, vampire weekend, iced almond milk matcha lattes, thoughtful gifts, a perfect spring day, fraiser fur candles, chinese takeout, eating at a new restaurant on a whim, dogs, audible, binging a tv show, the smell of new books, curly fries with ketchup, vanilla iced cream cones dipped with chocolate (only from mr.softee trucks), drives on the pacific coast highway, montecito, cooking something new (when it tastes good), going to the movies, blue raspberry icees, old friends, new friends, good gossip, a comfortable pair of shoes, traveling, my childhood bedroom, kacey musgraves.

gabee

reading poetry in quiet corners, walking around a new city, every single dog in this universe, vietnamese food, franz kafka’s melancholy, just-hot-enough tea, yogurt with fruit, teaching wide-eyed kids, a statement bag, contentment over the chase, amsterdam by gregory alan isakov, scrolling through photos in the hotel room after a long travel day, coffee dates where time doesn’t matter, blushing cheeks, the feeling after a gym session, prague's cobblestone nostalgia, well-curated playlists, genuine friendships, notebooks filled with half-finished writing, ballet flats, secondhand bookstores, early mornings full of maybe, peonies, a deep-cleaned room, spring, soft-spoken confidence, slice of life vlogs, making lists (and the thrill of checking off every single thing), grocery day, a paul mccartney bass line, eating a meal alone, laughter that bubbles up, my mom.

olivier

to be honest my brain is fried, many things make me happy and i guess the first coming to mind is those stupid funny reels (why my brain is fried), especially those sent from your close friends or family group chats, yes my mum has sent me some out of pocket ones, similarly cute dog reels (cause I don’t get to always see my baby girl dog), and of course seeing my dog in person is even better, playing football, casual hang outs with my close friends, being by the beach, being with my family, playing a game of FIFA with my mates, getting randomly complimented (yes it’s rare for guys), to be honest there is so much but I can’t be bothered to think with my fried brain, travelling, I just want to feel lost, or found, somewhere new and just feel alive exploring new things new people new places etc, spontaneous trips for me are so incredible , literally just went on one of the most spontaneous trip last month (booked it less than 3 hours before my supposed flight time) and went to Melbourne to watch F1. This paragraph makes no sense, well so do I, and so do things that make me happy sometimes.

postlude

favorite quotes i revisit for every birthday:

she belonged to the sky, and the sky belonged to her.
—kira kira, cynthia kadahota

i realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.
—conversations with friends, sally rooney

i may never be happy, but tonight i am content.
—the unabridged journals, sylvia plath

and i love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason i root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.
—beautiful world where are you, sally rooney

it isn’t possible to love and part. you will wish that it was. you can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it of you. i know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
—a room with a view, e.m forster

there will be a spring and a summer. it's almost excruciating. but then comes autumn, short as a wink, before winter is finally upon us again. life does not go on, it starts again, everything is possible again. anything can happen, all the best and all the most beautiful and all the greatest adventures on earth.
—the winners, fredrik backman

i see the sun, and if i don't see the sun, i know it's there. and there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.
—the brothers karamazov, fyodor dostoyevsky

prelude

My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, from teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen in my mind, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer's eye there, looking through to me.

—How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee

Every month, I’ll be featuring someone’s favorite books so you get to hear from someone who isn’t me. This month’s feature is from , who is such a great friend and also an amazing writer. She writes both fiction and nonfiction on her newsletter, Sublime Miscellany, both which are always so heartfelt and brilliantly written. I am always amazed at the way she is able to articulate her feelings and happenings in her life. She also incorporates a lot of literature and culture into her essays, and has the best tangents. Please make sure to check out her fiction as well as her nonfiction, as I love both!

As always, as I do for my Substack friends, I’ve linked a few of my favorite essays of hers in the article links.

(cover picture & quotes were all chosen by the featured guest!)

interlude i: what i read this week

Sorry for the monthlong drought in postcards! I’ve been going through a pretty rough month, although I’m hopefully near the end of it. I’ve still been reading consistently and following along my reading syllabus for spring.

I’ve also just been very obsessed with New York Review Book’s classics collection, and also New Directions’ catalog in general. In the last year, I’ve been making an active effort to read more books from independent publishers because I feel like smaller houses are more willing to take risks on unconventional and diverse reads. I want to do a whole post on independent publishers and my favorite books from them, so stay tuned!

Some highlights from the last two months have been: Journey to the Past by Stefan Zweig, Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, and Solar by Ian McEwan.

Follow me on Goodreads if you haven’t yet! (Although I still have like 2 months of reads to update—I’m behind)

Here are ten articles to read this week:

1. Legacy of the Angels by Rebekah Wallace

   When medieval scholars sought to understand the nature of angels, they unwittingly laid the foundations of modern physics.

2. Twilight Years by

   Or, I’m scared the internet is dying.

3. Happy Hundredth Birthday, Flannery O’Connor! by Jamie Quatro

   “A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress.”

4. Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents by Anna Russell

   A growing movement wants to destigmatize severing ties. Is it a much-needed corrective, or a worrisome change in family relations?

5. Words Mean Things by

   On absent absolutes, man-made mysteries, and Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu.

6. The Severance Finale Ends With a Big Twist. It’s Where the Show Was Always Going by Sam Adams

   There’s more than one reason the season had to end like that.

7. Everyone’s a Sellout Now by Rebecca Jennings

   So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?

8. The Most Un-liminal Thing by

   Short fiction.

9. From Antarctica, With Love by Allegra Rosenberg

   Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed journey to the South Pole captivated the world. But hidden within the legend was a story that has never been told—a love affair between two of the crew who survived.

10. The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons by Yiyun Li
    The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died.

interlude ii: what i watched this week

I bought a Criterion Collection subscription this week, which is possibly the best thing I’ve ever bought so far this year. If you like watching movies, I highly recommend it! There are so many gems that you can’t find anywhere else (and commentary too). I watched a few movies in the last month and a half since I posted a weekly postcard, which I will update on my Letterboxd soon, but my favorite this year so far has to be La Chimera. It’s just such a deeply beautiful movie that feels like poetry in film form—if you like slower, thoughtful movies with beautiful cinematography, this is the movie for you.

I’ve been watching a few television shows, including Severance. If you have not watched Severance yet, please do. It’s the best show I’ve watched since Succession, and I don’t say that lightly. The finale genuinely rocked my world, and all I could say was holy shit for a solid five minutes after the credits rolled. And like every single Korean (and apparently non-Korean), I watched When Life Gives You Tangerines. I’m still not done with it; I’m only halfway through, but it’s the first Korean show I’ve watched in a while and it’s so good. The script is amazing, although the translation on Netflix is awful.

I did update my top four favorites—

postlude

things i love: maison crivelli’s rose saltifolia perfume, the maria’s submarine album, morning bus rides, tower 28’s sos spray, criterion collection

I still think that Valentine’s Day is at least a tiny tiny bit of a corporate scam (and I don’t care how much of a hopeless romantic you are! Call me a cynic, I guess), but I do love the fact that there’s a day for celebrating love. And not just romantic love, but the love that surrounds us all the time. And I love thinking about things and people I love—it’s what holds me through difficult times and days and what I think makes life worth everything, despite everything.

This Valentine’s Day, Nana () and I got on Facetime, armed with alcohol (a bottle of wine for her, multiple refills of French martinis—raspberry liqueur, vodka, pineapple juice—for me) and snacks (prosciutto and mozzarella for her, salt and pepper chips and caramelized onion dip for me), and set out to watch the greatest Valentine’s Day movie of all time: Gone Girl. We ended up just talking and drunk, giggling for three hours, probably unintentionally keeping our families up until one in the morning (our moms have been sick of us for years I’m sure). I watched the movie alone after we hung up, which has been my annual tradition for a while.

I suddenly had the idea to put together a post on love letters, whether that be romantic or not. I asked followers on my Instagram and subscribers on my Substack (you!) to send in letters or notes to people that they want to express their love (or want to, but can’t for some reason). They ranged from letters to sisters to crushes to mothers to exes, and I love that they collectively represent the idea that love isn’t just romantic. Here they are:

unsent postcards

there’s a space in my heart that holds the sun in your eyes from five years ago. my hand on the nape of your neck, gazing longingly, wondering, “what if i love you.” “what if i never do?”

for years i thought love was this tumultuous, crazy, anxiety-ridden, panicked feeling, and i was supposed to just ride every turn out. when you chased my chaos with calm, i thought it couldn’t be real. nothing good ever comes this easy. i let the spiral settle, we let our practicality take over, and we lost touch, eventually. for the best, we said. before resentment festered and we lost the ability to see each other in light—

nostalgia is a bitter trick; a magician that brings about voices that appear out of thin air. my best friends are getting engaged and married. i go on date after date. you’re still the measure. i dance with a fever trapped in my wings. i think about how you were the closest that ever came to that. how, if i’d just gotten out of my head in time, maybe we would’ve never run out.

i saw you again for the first time in years. there’s a theory about last meetings; how people who’ve finished their run in your lives are bound to never appear again. we’ve been in close proximity for years and yet the comets have never once aligned, no matter how much i’ve implored them to. and i walk in, one chilly december night, with the world breathing heavy on my shoulders. there you were, like nothing changed. two souls, an invisible string, bated breath—after all this time. surprise written in your eyes, a hug—as quick and fleeting as we once were. search party abound, just like old times. does the theory hold? i pray you never disprove it.

i ate twelve grapes under the table this new year’s. you were every wish.

to my little sister –

i hope the universe will always unveil its wonders to you. i hope you’ll hold that childlike, carefree spirit inside you forever, and leave trails of laughter behind wherever you go. i hope you know that out of every facet that makes up my identity, ‘姐’ is the one i am the proudest of. i’d choose to be your sister in every lifetime–thank you for being mine.

for a brief moment i understood. it was there and it was shining and brief but i understood what the poets write about and why soldiers kept lockets, why they say the love may not solve everything but it matters that it was there. because it was there. for a moment i felt it. for a moment i understood. but there was not enough that i could give for crumbs do not make a man full but i love you and for a moment i felt it. for a moment i understood.

Don’t think I should even tell you this because you’re with someone else now, but I’m still in love with you.

Dad,

I hope you’re doing well up there in heaven. I’m taking good care of Mum. You don’t have to worry. We miss you every day. I love you.

I think about you every time I hear a love song now.

i’m in love with you, but i’ve been so scared to say it. every time i try to tell you, the words keep getting stuck in my throat and i don’t know why. i think i’ve unconsciously been telling you i love you in a hundred different ways without actually saying the words for a long time. and i’m pretty sure you’ve been doing the same.

All your life, you feel like you know love— you have met a lot of people, liked a few of them, loved even fewer.
Then someone comes along, redefining all your concepts and ideas, making you question whether you’ve really loved anyone before? Nothing existed before them and nothing would exist after them.
It’s true they say, we’re all just passing by, but to you, they become an absolute point.

You were that absolute point for me, my valentines’ two years ago. We had no plans to celebrate but we ended up getting each other chocolates, and spent the day talking. That’s how it was with you, with everything— Easy.
Years have gone by and still, I don’t really know what to do with all this love. I heard, they say, love doesn’t just disappear— it evaporates. Slowly, with a sloth’s pace. There are factors which decrease it’s boiling point, bring it closer and closer to establishing that equilibrium. It’s not instantaneous, that’s why we never realise it happening and wake up one day, purged off of it. Or so I believed until I met you.

It would’ve been easier if I could just hate you. Hate with such passion that the very thought of you would become repulsive, that I’d find myself free of this heavy load, this love. There are times wherein I find myself, on the verge, the anger mixing with the love— forming a solution of love and hate. I stir it, hoping, this time the love would evaporate, the hate is that factor, it will happen but at the end, when the solution of my being settles down, there’s only love that’s left. Turns out, my hate is rather volatile when it comes to you, but the love, it’s the essence, the very atom of my being.

I’m glad you’re my best friend. I wouldn’t trade you for anything. Let’s stay friends forever and ever and ever because I don’t know how to live this life without you with me.

For my younger sister. I’ve written many love letters to you; whether in form of birthday cards, or excerpts from my journal. Although we squabble over the pettiest things, you are the one person I share the most conversations and time with on a daily basis. You’ve nearly reached my height, which is so crazy because I once knew you as a crying, red, bald baby. You are so beautiful, and I love you. I’m so glad I got to grow up with you, and to witness you grow. I remember our conversation of how we will always choose each other as our maids of honour, because friends come and go, but sisters have to stick around. You’re my favourite sister, even though you’re the only one I have. Thank you for being the best little sister ever. I see you and me in every sister duo I read about or see in movies.

i never believed in right person, wrong time until you came into my life. i wish i had been braver. i wish i told you not to leave when you asked me if i’d be ok with you moving. i wish things were different. but now i just watch your instagram stories and write you letters i can never send you. why didn’t i ask you to stay? we could be together right now. everything else feels silly now.

Thanks for showing me that love is gradual — and infinite. I loved you yesterday, but I love you more now. And I know I’ll love you even more tomorrow. It’s growing with you, side by side, within your smiles, your soft kisses to my cheek, the way you say “babe”, and the way you run toward me.

My heart is full with you, baby boy.

You are the reason why now I tear up without fail when I hear Can’t Help Falling In Love now. I still love you so much, but that love feels useless now. You seem to be doing better and I’m happy that you’re happy but what if I’m not? Every March 9 I light a candle for us.

The Space Between Us

Nights stretch too long without you.
The bed is too wide, too cold,
and silence presses in like a weight.
Even the air feels restless,
turning over in its sleep, searching for you.

The city moves, uncaring—
headlights streaking across wet pavement,
voices rising, fading,
but none of it touches me.
Even the wind, once soft, now stings.

Your book still waits on the nightstand,
a folded page frozen in time.
Your coffee cup lingers in the sink,
as if you might return,
as if love alone could summon you home.

Some say distance makes love fade,
but I know better.
Time bends for us, waits for us—
I will wait for you, steady as the tide,
until we are real again.

you came into my life and turned my world upside down. i can’t remember a time before i knew you, and to be honest, i don’t want to. you tell me that i changed your life for the better, but i see colors that i never saw before you. how could i have not known it was possible to feel this way about someone? every day i think of telling you how i feel. everything feels so easy with you until i’m about to tell you that i’m in love with you. and then everything feels so terrifying. but i’ll say it here because you’ll never see it, wish it on a star, three times for good luck. i love you. i love you. i love you.

wherever you are, i hope you know i’m patiently waiting for you.

despair creeps into my heart, doubt in my mind. but i know everything worthwhile takes time. so, i’ll wait.

thank you for loving me the way you do. thank you for being kind, and thoughtful. thank you for the late night talks, and the full days spent at the museums, and that poem collection you gave me for my birthday. i remember every word you annotated for me. thank you for giving me your time. thank you for choosing me. thank you for letting me choose you.

i love that you are the only person who cooks for me without me having to ask. and the way your eyes wrinkle when you smile. and how pretentious we both are about art. i love your brain, but mostly your heart.

wherever you are, know that i am waiting. patiently waiting. sure that you will come.

I remember the first time I met you on a hookup app of all places, 1 August 2022, and since then my love has bloomed in ways that surprised me. Sometimes I asked God, “why did you put him in my life?”, and I understand the reason now, it was so I can learn how to love so earnestly and fully in a way I didn’t think I could ever do or even thought I deserved to do, but I learnt that I’m a lover girl at heart, and while it hurts that I can’t say this to you personally, this love letter is a testament to the fact that I love you so deeply and in the end, you let me get to love you the way I wanted to. Even though we didn’t make it, I know we will always be intertwined in this timeline and the next, but for now my love, meri jaan, forever and always

Sometimes i feel like it's okay that we're are apart and oceans are separating us, because my love is enough for it, knowing that you're okay and you're smiling are enough for it.

Sometimes I can't look at you without a pang in my chest, knowing what you had and have to go through from the beginning, and it hurts so much that i want to just look away to just end my suffering.

But i look at you anyway, because looking away feels selfish and my love is not selfish, that's what i tell myself, refusing to tear my gaze away from you.

Sometimes i look at you and just wish to be near you. Not romantically or something like that, but just to feel you near me, see your chest expanding with every breath, see your eyes as you wake up in the morning, greeting the sunrise, see the way your hands are playing on the piano, caressing the keys gently. I just want to walk you through your life as some kind of ghost, i want you to feel my hand on your shoulder when it gets hard, i want you to step behind me so i can protect you.

Sometimes it gets so unbearable that my love becomes selfish and greedy and destructive and all the things i wish it weren't. I just want you all to myself, i want to catch your every breath, every genius word that slips from your lips, hear you quiet laugh and hug you so hard that you'd understand that I'm here.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but it makes me weaker when my desire to see you is burning in my chest, physically drags me closer to you, but you've gone too far for me to touch you.

Sometimes i wish i didn't love you.

I may be weak but my love isn't. So I do, I always do.

ode to a lost twin.

it’s strange to say goodbye to someone before you’ve said hello. to miss someone you’ve never met. to have the rug pulled out from under you before you’ve had a chance to make a home. to share a womb and then nothing at all, ever again. i catch myself wishing i could tell you about my days, imagining your shadow moving parallel with mine. i have memories of us that don’t exist, giggling late under the covers at night, two sets of blonde pigtails in matching pink ribbons. but then i blink and the film reel in my mind judders to a halt. when i look up at the moon i think of you. every year on our birthday i write a message on a balloon and watch it fly up to you, but here’s one more. i miss you and i love you.

Hey,

I know our relationship has been so difficult and I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that I’ve decided to believe in what other people say about you, that I believe all the horrible things they say or jump to conclusions that you’re a terrible, unlovable failure of a man.

I’m sorry that I haven’t done better in trying to take care of you, that my mind is so scattershot that I can’t care for you the way you need. I wish that you could find the happiness and love that you deserve. I wish that things in your life can get better, even though you don’t believe it will. I wish that you could really believe that you’re smart and capable and earnest and good, like all your friends say you are and that you can grow into.

I wish I could take better care of you, especially that you and I are stuck together, that you and I are the same.

I wish I could love you better. I wish I could love myself better.

Dear Mom,

When I think of love, I immediately think of the love that you’ve poured into me, sweeter and warmer and messier and stronger than all of the world’s Valentine perfumes and chocolates and roses mixed together as a concoction.

Happy Valentines

love letter

fort greene park
evelina
cape cod beach
homemade curry and twisters (2024)
cafe paulette salad
can’t take my eyes off you
amc a-lister
joker: folie à deux
chess, lucali, and a bottle of wine
casper ruud jaaa
miffy and boris
calling HR
bourgeoisie
cows and udder
madagascar mort
katesye dances
puerto rico and inauguration day
costco cookies

these are just a few of the many things only the two of us can giggle about. how lucky am i that we have written a love letter only the two of us can decode.

Usually whenever Valentine’s is around, I absolutely dread it. I don’t mind people celebrating love. I just don’t like the reminder that I’m so single, especially one particular rather scornful week in February. For some reason, I didn’t sweat it too much this time - maybe I spent more time indoors and forget about the impending D-day or maybe I am immuned to it at this point. I saw some content creator make a day out of nice solo dates buying flowers, jewellery shopping and treating herself to a nice dinner. I thought I could do something similar and signed up for an art gallery viewing just by myself. Okay maybe I was hoping I would stumble upon the good looking former French prime minister’s son who curated the gallery or perhaps some well-dressed dude who knows art stuff and lacks the highly contagious blandness of personality that prevails in guys these days. The day was off to a rocky start, I didn’t pass my exam, which I only moderately studied for. The tiny morsel of unhappiness flew away by the awareness that I was looking really nice today dressed up in a nice black satin dress paired with sheer black leggings, red lipstick and heels. E and I made a drinking opportunity out of it and got 3 glasses of wine each. This of course hinders my much anticipated plans for some art gallery soulmate-searching. We talked about music, the absurdity of Firework lyrics starting with a “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?” which we mutually contended to sharing from time to time and then loudly singing lyrics to “I’ve got a pocket full of sunshine” and finally progressing to, of course, relationships and boys.

For a moment I am back in another bar, more dimly lit with E who proposes the idea of flirting with one of her friends. I wasn’t particularly interested but thought I looked good, felt confident and surely could use some extra validation so why the hell not. He seems nice and polite and I am already mildly drunk. E berated him for his clothing choice that day to which I replied “I think he is okay” and I realised I wasn’t even lying. Being the wingwoman that she is, E hypes me up telling how I finish reading books in 2 weeks and makes me sound smarter than I really am. And then of course, the classic she needed to use the washroom trick, which to my surprise I was thankful for. No we didn’t flirt but we did talk and in some weird sort of way it felt better. Like no butterflies, just feeling level-headed and not losing my sanity sort of. In a word, safe, very safe. All this while I have come up about different theories about love, my most recent being that love is a number’s game. And when you think you know everything about something, a stranger walks in and all these ideas, theories you have collected and ruminated on are thrown out of the window. Who makes you feel okay, like a person who is more focused on asking questions and staying curious, rather than running this unspoken radar of how hot I look today or how many times did I mess up today a million times in your head. I realised how that non-fleeting sense of security has been missing in my past romantic expeditions. And that is something I really would look for from now on…

I walk back to office in my drunken state and shockingly no one caught on the act. In 2 hours, the tipsiness finally wore off, thank heavens, and I feel like my mortal self again. I head to the nearby library after work and get some books on ancient Rome which I have been meaning to read for the longest time. By the time I step out its already dark. I conclude my night with a box of greasy pizza with herby garlic dip, contended and feeling less alone. My eternal flame is yet another day’s discovery but I go to sleep knowing I am surrounded by my books and my lovely friends always.

I think you are one of the few people I know where I can pinpoint the moment I realized I wanted you to be in my life. Maybe I’m wrong and it actually happened earlier, but this is what I remember.

We were all in the staff room unpacking boxes. You took a look inside one of them, realized it contained several large knives, yelled “DANGER” and started to cut up some extra cardboard to make knife covers. Although we had all recently finished a group training session on risk mitigation you did this completely unprompted and within seconds of clocking the cover-less knives, which I thought was hilarious. Later on, I opened the drawer where the knives had been placed. Each of the cardboard covers had puns written on them in black Sharpie: “You can HANDLE it!”, “Cut out negativity!”, “You’re on the cutting edge!”, “Looking sharp!”.

I laughed and decided I wanted to be your friend — although if I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure which of these things happened first.

Maybe the past is an odd thing to write about on a postcard but I thought about you today and this is what came out.

It really was knife to meet you.

Thank you for marrying me and loving me. I’d love you in every lifetime.

prelude

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.”

—The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

Every month, I’ll be featuring someone’s favorite books so you get to hear from someone who isn’t me. This month’s feature is my lovely friend Shaye, who I’ve known and talked about books with for years. I adore her (and her actually insanely good taste in books), and admire her so much as a writer. She runs the newsletter Born Under Saturn, which is one of my favorites on the platform. I’m so excited that I finally get to have her on my on-the-shelf segment because she influences my book taste so much.

As always, as I do for my Substack friends, I’ve linked a few of my favorite essays of hers in the article links!

1. Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu

“I was enveloped in a fear that I had never felt before, even in my most terrifying dreams; not of death, not of suffering, not of terrible diseases, not of the sun going dark, but fear at the thought that I will never understand, that my life was not long enough and my mind not good enough to understand. That I had been given many signs and I didn’t know how to read them. That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hand, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it will flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.”

A lonely teacher in Bucharest recounts the anomalies that have shaped his life, the series of bizarre events he believes can lead him (if combined in precisely the right way) to the answer for existence—both the meaning of life, and a way to escape the human condition. It is for him not about accepting our limitations but exceeding them: stepping outside of our three-dimensional logico-mathematical universe and into a higher dimension where the human drama plays out like two-dimensional images on a screen. Meanwhile, his surreal visions lead us through enormous underground caverns, infinite houses, and fantastical micro-landscapes, where mites leads their blind lives with an ignorance not unlike that of humanity.

Covering concepts in topology and physics, oneirology and biology, Solenoid depicts a metaphysical romp through the tragic labyrinth of reality, which holds escape as its ultimate goal. It is a work of staggering insight and genius, written in language so poetic that you’ll be underlining every page.

2. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (or otherwise his Collected Stories)

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”

I often say the Solenoid is my favourite novel, but Borges is my favourite writer. Borges never wrote a novel, believing the form to be a madness, a waste of time. The economy of the short story appealed to him; he felt that a few pages were more than enough to say what you wanted to say, and in fact the shortness of the form meant your ideas had to be more refined, more rigorous, lacking in any and all excess, whittled and smoothed to perfection.

What he crafts in his short stories are pure ideas, pure wonder. He takes concepts such as time, space, dreams and infinity and unfolds them as far as they can go. Some of his best and most well-known stories include “The Library of Babel”, in which the universe is a nigh-infinite library that holds every book which could ever be written, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which an invented world emerges from the pages of a fictitious encyclopedia and overruns our reality. Labyrinths is an excellent introduction to his short stories and essays, but if you enjoy them I would highly, highly recommend reaching for his Collected Stories.

3. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

“Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comfort of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name. And then the nightmares will begin.”

Mark Z. Danielewski was highly influenced by Borges and this is nowhere more apparent than in House of Leaves—a book about a manuscript about a film about a house in which is contained pure and annihilating absence: true nothingness. People often call this book a horror novel (sometimes even “the scariest book ever written”), and it is, but I find this label severely misrepresents the exquisite, intelligent and thrilling labyrinth that is House of Leaves. This is maybe the only book I’ve ever read that at multiple moments made me legitimately question what was real and what was not. It is pure metafiction; postmodernism at its limits. Not only is there a labyrinth in the narrative, but there is a very real labyrinth born of the text itself, of its strange contortions and manoeuvres across the page. As one critic has written, this is a book preoccupied with its own writing, consumed with the need to unwrite itself, to flee in terror from its own telling. There is truly no reading experience like that of House of Leaves. Forget all your fears, forgo all expectations, and abandon yourself to the words. You won’t regret it.

4. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”
“To live,” said Camilla.
“To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

The Secret History unfolds the motives, plotting and consequences of the murder of Bunny Corcoran, a student at Hampden College. It is a quiet and quietly tragic tale, a story of academia and hedonism, and of evil and recompense.

In recent years I have felt myself somewhat souring on this widely beloved modern classic—something I have quickly recognised as a mistake. I think if I read it for the first time today I would have a very different reaction to it, but as it is, I read it for the first time as a teenager and instantly fell in love. Here, I thought, was a book that could describe for me the fascinations of my soul. This is the book that both expanded my reading horizons into literary fiction and re-ignited my inspiration. I have since read it twice more and each time loved it just as much. While it is certainly not the peak of literature, it holds within its pages an atmosphere so consuming and compelling that emerging from the book feels like waking from a dream. To this day, it is one of the only novels that I can truly lose myself in, and I think that demands respect, regardless of what anyone says. Crafting a novel is damn hard work (I’ve done it four times) and Donna Tartt clearly knows what she’s doing.

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The American classic that everyone and their dog has read and loved. I watched the 2013 Baz Luhrmann adaptation a few years before I read The Great Gatsby, and usually watching the film first will spoil my reading experience when I later pick up the book. That wasn’t the case here. Maybe due to the faithfulness of the adaptation or maybe because Fitzgerald writes with a vibrant and modern lyricism, reading The Great Gatsby has only heightened my love for its story—as well as for its titular character, Jay Gatsby. There is something so hopelessly and tragically romantic about this book, and it speaks to so much both socially and philosophically. I admit, I cry every time I watch or read this classic tale. You could say it was the classic that made me fall in love with classics.

6. Play It As It Lays

“She walked back to the car and sat for a long time while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines Motel and cross the street to the supermarket. The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in a trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.”

A narrative about nothing (quite literally), Play It as It Lays follows a woman in the 60s as she awakens to the vacuity which underlies existence. In this novel, horror and destruction is juxtaposed with blasé attitudes and shallow distraction, which in turn is backdropped by the sweaty and sprawling wasteland of Los Angeles and the dusty, sunburnt swathes of the desert. Meanwhile, Didion’s prose is beautiful but understated; she expends few words and says quite a lot. The effect is powerful: you are at once captivated and horrified, sickened and numbed, by the tragic arcing of Maria’s life and the lives of those around her. Play It as It Lays is, at its heart, an existential novel, and it centres on a recontextualisation of Hamlet’s famous question: To be, or not to be?

7. Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis

“And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Just driving.’
‘But this road doesn’t go anywhere,’ I told him.
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘What does?’ I asked, after a while.
‘Just that we’re on it, dude,’ he said.”

It was Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less than Zero, which in fact led me to Didion’s Play It as It Lays. Here, we find the same existential numbness, the same juxtaposition between horror and banality. In typical Ellis style, however, the narrative is a lot more disturbing and graphic. Less than Zero is about physical and existential stasis, about ennui and the dangers of bored and unpatrolled youth. Its protagonist, Clay, is vacuous, a shell of a person—he’s disturbed by what he sees but is trapped in a state of torpor, unable to do anything, even if that thing is to rescue himself from his own empty circles of existing.

Something about this book sticks in the mind, the same way certain sentences get stuck in Clay’s thoughts (“People are afraid to merge. Disappear Here. Wonder if he’s for sale”). The simplicity and repetition of Less than Zero is its strength. The book passes in a blur of clubs and drugs and driving, and then, in between, there are bright, hot shocks: a coyote mangled under the wheels of a car; a boy OD’d in a back alley; a young girl raped. And all this against the hot, dystopic, disaster-prone landscape of Los Angeles. Everything is delivered raw. Every character is trapped in space and time, locked in a cycle, shooting darkly down a dead-end road. A horrifying book, but trust me, you won’t be able to look away.

8. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

“What a shame that time passes, don’t you think? What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”

The Savage Detectives is about the lives of a group of poets who had their start in Mexico in the 1970s: the visceral realists—a wild and promiscuous crowd led by the mythic figures of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. Through a long series of vignettes from outside perspectives, from those who knew them or met them, we catch fragments of their lives over the decades, as they travel and cause havoc and fall in love and grow apart, and as they move through a steadily darkening world, one of fragmentation and estrangement, of silence and decay and death.

This book reads as a slow and steady tragedy, a subtle weaving and unweaving of lives and words. It paints the future as a wasteland and then thrusts its characters into the sands. It’s about the poet but it’s also about Latin American poetry and Mexico and the corrosive effects of time on the individual and the eternal battle between words and the void. If you’re willing to give it the time, to let yourself get swept up in the momentum of Bolaño’s writing, it’s meaning will unfurl at the back of your mind like a dark flower, beautiful and tragic and hidden and utterly mesmerising.

9. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

“Time! The past! Something—a voice, a song, a chance fragrance—lifts the curtains on my soul’s memories… That which I was and will never again be! That which I had and will never again have! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors.”

Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is described as a factless autobiography, a fragmentary collection of thinking and musing that enquires into being and existence, and atomises and examines experience. The value of Pessoa’s writing lies in its intensely poetic expression of universal suffering, which is the disquiet of being, the pain of existing and, particularly in Pessoa’s case, the pain of being alone. He puts words to so many of our fears and agonies and dreams and minute experiences.

It’s not a novel in the traditional sense: although apparently fictional (the bulk of the work authored by a fictional character, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms) it has no real story to speak of, and little ties the hundreds of short vignettes together beyond the undercurrent of existential examination. As a result—and given the rich observations of each episode—the work can and is probably best read piecemeal, over a long period of time. It is a book that helps you to understand yourself, to find and form connections with others, and indeed for some it would probably change your life.

10. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

“You spend a restless night, your sleep is an intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same. You fight with the dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don’t yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.”

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is an experience you cannot predict or prepare yourself for, a metafictional journey through narrative and narrative form, through truth and fiction, through infinity and reality; you embark from an ordinary train station and soon find yourself in strange worlds. Every world is a labyrinth and each labyrinth is built by and concerned with story—with the reading of stories, the writing of stories, and the words which form them. This novel is really a collection of stories, of the beginning of stories, each linked by thematic concerns and a reader’s quest (your quest) to find the thread of the original narrative, the unfinished story they (you) wish desperately to go on reading, and instead you are led to story after story, world after world, each fragmented and incomplete, and the stories proliferate, and there are those who deal in the fake stories, stories which are forgeries of other stories, whose goal is to turn all literature into counterfeits, feeling that in mystification one finds truth, and there are those who seek the truest representation of reality, who want to craft or find the story of all stories, the story unfiltered through any human perception, the absolute story, which would contain absolute truth. I have really only uncovered the tip of the iceberg here—so much looms under the surface. This really is a story you have to experience for yourself.

interlude i: what i read this week

I read Checkout 19 by Claire Louise Bennett, which I didn’t quite love the way I thought I would. It was dense but felt a bit…meaninglessly dense? Not sure how to describe it—I’ll come back and edit this when I have a proper review.

Still reading War and Peace because I have to finish it by February, it’s a must.

Here are ten articles to read this week:

1. The Listening Gift by Faith Lawrence

   It is the dark matter of conversation, the white space around a poem. For Rilke, listening is receiving the divine.

2. Everything Dances with the Abyss by

   On the fundamental fuzziness of things.

3. In Praise of Subspecies by Richard Smyth

   To lump or to split? Deciding whether an animal is a species or subspecies profoundly influences our conservation priorities.

4. The Image of the Doll: Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn Out Language by Olga Ravn

   “I am 52 years old, 172 centimeters tall, slender and blonde.”

5. The Desire for Meaning by

   On absent absolutes, man-made mysteries, and Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu.

6. Room, Moon, Moon, Balloon: Reading and Breathing by Jaimeson Webster

   “Reading aloud is a magical exposure to words that speak to the enduring mystery of life, breath, language, sleep, and time.”

7. The Leaning Tower of New York by Eric Lach

   How a luxury condo building in Manhattan went sideways.

8. I Demon Want Your Heart by

   On Suffering for One's Art.

9. America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem by Lex Pryor

   You may have heard America’s honeybees are dying. But what does that mean for the people on the front lines—and what could it mean for what ends up on your plate?

10. A Cheat(ing) Sheet to the ‘Montoya, Por Favor’ Memes by Jennifer Zhan

interlude ii: what i watched this week

I didn’t watch any movies, but I did watch the “MONTOYA, POR FAVOR!” clip about ten times. If you don’t know what this is, check out the last article! I am about to explain this to my very offline friend…wish me luck!

postlude

things i love: friends coming to visit me! also cooking new recipes, fuzzy pajamas, amika hair oil, brandy melville scrunchies

A few months ago, I was texting this guy I liked. I already hate texting because I feel like I can never quite get across words exactly the way I mean it, but trying to talk to someone you are romantically interested in? A whole otherworldly migraine-nightmare.

There is so much that goes into the science of texting a crush, like a potion concocted in a lab—you need just the right amount of interest, flirting, self-consciousness (but not too much), and the magic word: nonchalance. There is nothing worse than being too interested, too eager to talk to someone you’re into. I found myself pre-sending drafts of texts to my friends like I was in middle school, asking, is this okay to send? I don’t want it to seem like, too much, you know? At one point, I gave myself a horrified look in the mirror, almost dropping my phone like I was holding a hot iron skillet with bare hands, wondering to myself what on earth I was doing as an adult.

The feeling of hesitation and second guessing my replies really sucked, because I really liked this guy. We had a ridiculous amount of shared interests and experiences, and the conversation never cut off. Minutes would bleed into hours. I’d text him until three in the morning but then finding myself sending walls of texts, I’d stop myself short, wondering if I sent one text too many, thinking about all the Reels and Tiktoks of ‘guy advice’ that popped up unannounced on my feed like some new incredibly contagious COVID strain. I called my friend and asked, “why should it be embarrassing that I care about something, or someone?” Asking my friends if something I wanted to say to someone was okay to say felt odd, embarrassing even—I had never done this before because I hadn’t ever given texting a second thought. My friends replied with copious amounts of “this is very out of character for you, are you..ill?”

In college, after I went on a date, I was writing out a text to send to the guy (a generic “hey, had a great time!” although I hadn’t really, but it’s just pleasantries) when one of my friends plucked my phone out of my hand and held it above his head. “You can’t send that before him,” he told me, panicked shock ringing in his voice. “You need to wait for him to send it to you first. You’re going to seem like you like him too much, and it’s going to look desperate. Do you want to look desperate, Elle?” I shook my head, of course not. I know that there are all these measures and scaffoldings that construct the modern dating world—don’t text for a second date until a week later, don’t have sex on the first date, don’t text about the date first—but why had simple communication morphed into a disfigured, and disfiguring, sort of bureaucratic process? Why was letting someone know I enjoyed spending time with them, while a white lie in that specific case, a cause for concern which I would have to delicately time and snip like the red wires on a ticking bomb?

Growing up I was never nonchalant or indifferent about things. Sure, I tried because I thought that was the cool way to be, but I was never wired that way. I wrote in one of my postcards about this last year:

I don’t know how to do things halfway. Twenty four years in, I’ve realized that maybe that’s my greatest strength and maybe it’s what makes me think that I am a difficult person to love. It’s a perfectionist thing, maybe, like I have to do everything the exact way it goes in my head. I’m selective—maybe way too picky—with the people I choose to trust and love. It takes me a long time to do so, but once it happens, I do it wholeheartedly. I’m all in or all out. I keep a small crowd of best friends around me. I trust them wholly, I love them wholly.

I think I’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself less for people, a watered down version of me, trying to extinguish how intensely I feel everything. I’ve tried being the cool girl and the chill girl and the girl who lets everything slide because I do genuinely admire when people have that ability. I wish I could be relaxed about anything. I stretch myself as thin as I can across jobs. I write pages and pages of thoughts about a book. I pulled countless all nighters for good grades. I love people fiercely or I don’t at all.

There was, and still is, no remark that makes me break out into angry hives more than “just chill out, Elle” and its exciting variants, encores of, “it’s not that deep”, “god, just relax”. I once got sent home with a note from my teacher in the third grade because the boy sitting next to me told me this, and I scribbled ASSHOLE!! in his spelling journal. My parents sat me down and talked to me that night, not with the intention of scolding me, but to ask why that specific line made me so angry. I was not an angry kid growing up, so this must have felt very uncharacteristic of me to my parents. Even over a decade later, the conclusion I reached that day still stands: there is nothing more patronizing and infuriating than someone telling you to chill, to care less, to water yourself down, and to make yourself exist in a smaller way in a room.

There is this word in Korean that cannot be directly translated into English: 무안 (pronounced: mu-ahn). While the closest way I can describe it is embarrassment or shame seeped in deep discomfort, English words fail to capture its nuance. It’s the feeling you get when you excitedly talk about something and then someone replies, nobody asked you. Or you tell a joke and the room falls silent with nobody laughing. Or someone publicly recalls something embarrassing that you did in the past. It’s a sort of embarrassment that exclusively exists in a social setting when your heart sinks and you feel the back of your neck start to sweat. That is the untranslatable feeling I get whenever someone tells me to “just chill”, like I did something wrong for some reason because that specific feeling mostly surfaces whenever enthusiasm is met with indifference.

This comes in tandem with the fact that there seems to be a nonchalance epidemic in today’s society. The person who holds all the cards in their hands is the one who cares less because this somehow means that they have the emotional upper hand. Sincerity and earnestness seem dead, gone, and buried, a final eulogy for enthusiasm; when the dust has settled, we are left with a distressing trade off—a collective sacrifice of genuine human connection and care for the illusory security of forever avoiding rejection.

By engaging in this phenomenon, we’re not just slowly eroding away the tethers of human connection, but also dismantling the very essence and reason for our existence. The fundamental basis of our beings lies in our pursuit of doing something that we think will make us happy, and we imbue these actions with care and heartfelt efforts. When you force yourself to stop caring, heeding the fallacy of a victory through nonchalance, you’ll feel the life bleed out of something unintentional as well.

There is no such thing as well intentioned apathy.

One of my favorite books. Beautiful World, Where Are You, has this quote that I come back to time and again:

Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.

There is something so extraordinary about this paragraph, which encapsulates the very reason this book changed my life three years ago. Like the quote, much of the reason why life is beautiful and why it is okay to perceive life as such is because of the people we love and the connections we make throughout our time in this world. A rare boundless optimism exists within those lines and it’s this specific joy that is found within melancholy that I deeply appreciate. This sort of love and optimism, by extension, cannot be established within the gray frames of indifference. In this vein, caring is, quite literally, the backbone of society. I fear for what will happen if we begin ignoring its significance. As indifference, in all its grayscale, chronically infects the technicolor of life, the world will become unrecognizable.

Every aspect of human civilization is rooted in our capacity for care. Literature exists because we cared so much about a story or subject that we had to sit down and pen our thoughts. Philosophy exists because we cared so much about our existences that it led to ruminations and theories about our places in the universe. Art exists because we cared so much about the landscapes of our surroundings and imaginations that they manifested as brushstrokes on canvas. Even STEM subjects and groundbreaking innovations exist because we cared enough about the world around us to inquisitively attempt to make sense of it through quantitative and empirical data. All of history, all of these subjects, are scrawls and evidence that there are no shortcuts or exceptions to caring. The fact is simple: it is because we give a shit, that the society that we live in is possible.

A week or so ago, I came across a viral tweet (that I unfortunately cannot find despite scrolling) of a Tiktok screenshot in which a girl is advising people to use ChatGPT to send messages to crushes. You can adjust the tone too, she captions, and I immediately cringed upon seeing it. Even in my “is this okay to send?” phase, the thought of doing this quite literally never crossed my mind, because wasn’t this actually putting in more effort than just thinking for yourself? The fact that we have begun depending on nonhuman avenues for deeply and exclusively human activities such as conversation, sets a deeply dangerous precedent for our future. Are we witnessing a seismic societal shift in which people are so lazy and apathetic that they cannot put in the effort to formulate a single response? In this vein and in my opinion, generative AI has been the biggest cause of the nonchalance epidemic, causing what was before a generalized ailment of the heart to metastasize in ways it otherwise would have not.

The thought of sending an AI generated text makes me recoil in disgust because I would rather not send anything than rely on a machine to figure out my thoughts. Perhaps the reason for this societal malaise, the reason people have become so indifferent is because the absence of thought in our daily activities has become disconcertingly normalized, even encouraged. The overwhelming accessibility and cornucopia of information has pulverized our capacity for critical thinking, instant gratification wearing away a previous patience to attempt to seek out answers for ourselves. If we truly believe that the internet can provide us with a streamlined instruction manual for life’s answers, if we blindly trust a machine to form basic thoughts and feelings on our behalf, then of course caring about something is going to seem like a useless and superfluous endeavor.

How do you read a book that changes your life?; see a piece of art that viscerally moves you?; watch a movie that becomes so ingrained in your mind you can replay it scene by scene when you close your eyes?; love someone so fiercely that you don’t think there is anything you wouldn’t do for them?—and then decide that caring is too much of an emotional investment? Where else would you find the beauty and meaning in life? By typing something in the question box of an AI website? By seeing this enthusiasm and passion light up someone’s eyes and telling them to “just chill”? Really, what are the implications of a society that prioritizes ephemeral convenience over something that underpins the tapestry of a world in which we believe the antidote to the inconvenience of caring is wielding nonchalance like a weapon? If, when given the chance, we opt for a mirage of comfort instead of genuine connection, will we, in Sally Rooney’s words, stop “being stupid about each other”? This cannot be true. It is too cynical to believe, even for me.

prelude

Welcome to postcards by elle! Every week, I send out a weekly postcard, which includes an essay, along with a list of everything I read and watched that week. This is free at the time of publication, so free and paid subscribers will all receive this. To support my work and receive more posts throughout the week, please consider upgrading your subscription!

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Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

—November, Gustave Flaubert

[This post gets cut off on the email, so read it in the app or on your desktop <3]

A bit of a late winter book recommendation post, but better late than never! I usually have such good reading months in January and February, mainly because I just don’t leave my room. I always try to read seasonally, and in winter, I try to find books that are quiet, introspective, and have poetic prose. Or something that is odd and unsettling so it can transport me to a different world other than my own. The best purpose of reading is escapism, is it not?

In general, I have a love hate relationship with winter. I think I love the idea of it—the coldness outside only amplifying the coziness inside; how the world outside can become blanketed in sheets of white pillowy snow overnight; the amount of hot beverages I consume and the warmth I get from it; the calm peacefulness of a winter night before it begins to carry a crushing weight; clear blue wintry skies in the morning and its icy crispness that resets your entire day before it even starts; slow art-centered hobbies such as painting or knitting or reading suddenly becoming very apt for the season.

Winter does seem very fitting for my introvert, homebody self—I can hide and hermit away in the comfort of my own room and solitude, and I can pretend that it’s a nice seasonal flair. I sometimes do that in summer when the outside heat gets unbearably hot and humid and I find myself slapping my palms together to catch a mosquito every other second, but it feels counterproductive in the summer, staying inside. Winter, on the other hand, is designed for you to stay indoors and cozy.

You can see the little reading syllabus I made for myself this winter.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

One of the biggest realizations I had last October when I began my (third) reread of The Secret History was that it is a winter read. I had always thought of this book as a quintessential autumn novel, mainly because its themes are steeped in dark academia—but I found myself yearning to read this during a season when the world was blanked by snow.

The Secret History is a piece of literature that transcends literature. It is flawless in every possible way, and one read can tell you why Donna Tartt took ten years to write it. There is not much to say about this book other than that it is a true testament to the beauty and genius of English literature. Tartt has the brilliant capability to immerse and entrap you into her narrative to the point where when you finish reading, you enter a sort of fugue state for a bit because readjusting to reality is hard. It explores themes of beauty, hedonism, moral corruption, and the very slow descent into madness. Atmospheric prose, strong characters, and a masterclass in plot pacing. What more could you possibly want?

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.

I’ve heard that this makes me sound insufferable, but I’ll admit it anyway: every winter, I read Anna Karenina, a book that is as daunting as it is spellbinding. Spanning 800 pages, Tolstoy tells a cinematic tale that has remained beloved for centuries. At the core of the novel is the theme of love and its variants embodied in the opening line: all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Despite its many political and existential themes and a hundred people with the same last names, the heart of the book revolves around two very different characters: Anna and Levin. Anna begins a torrid love affair with Vronsky, a charismatic and handsome officer, bound to crash and burn. Levin timidly chases after Kitty, his friend’s sister-in-law, whom he is in love with. Both arcs explore the dichotomy between love and lust, idealism in relationships, and the superficiality of infatuation and lust.

So who has the right to fall in love? And how do we classify what love is? In other words, should we be able to stare at the sun? What is there that we are trying to see?

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

For the longest time, I struggled to write an adequate review for this book just because of how much my heart hurt after finishing it. This book is brilliant and heart wrenching and heartwarming all the same, and I think everyone needs to read it. In Beartown, their main economy comes from hockey. High school hockey, to be exact. It’s a tiny, inconsequential town in the middle of nowhere, Sweden, to those who don’t live there. But they are incredibly good at hockey, and they are given a chance to bring in a lot of buzz and attention when the junior hockey team qualifies for the semi-finals. In this town, the teen boys who play hockey are not boys. They’re celebrities, gods, immune to any and every repercussion, and everyone worships at their altar. Backman uses hockey as a base to carefully weave and craft his tapestry. One that explores toxic masculinity, sports, and rape culture (the two of which are closely intertwined), peer pressure, small-town politics, and the consequences of blind idolization.

I read this back in 2021 and found myself inconsolably sobbing by the end of the book. The two sequels are also perfectly written, and it’s the best series to read in winter.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

White Nights is a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky that was published in 1848. Set in St. Petersburg, it is the story of a young man fighting his inner restlessness. A light and tender narrative, it delves into the torment and guilt of unrequited love. Both protagonists suffer from a deep sense of alienation that initially brings them together. A blend of romanticism and realism, the story appeals gently to the senses and feelings.

While Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are lauded as must-read Russian classics, his short story White Nights is my favorite by him—mainly because so much of it is uncharacteristic of his often bleak and somber interpretations of the human condition. It is still very classic Dostoyevsky, in which the prose is meditative, philosophical, and very introspective; however, despite ironically being set at night, this is Dostoyevsky at his most hopeful, idealistic, romantic, and starry. White Nights tells the story of a man who spends his life in solitude, yet dreams in technicolor. Despite reading most of Dostoyevsky’s bibliography, this is the one I return to the most. Melancholy yet beautiful and optimistic, this book is my favorite by him.

Severance by Ling Ma

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

An uncomfortable pandemic novel written before COVID. The post-apocalyptic world that Candace lives in feels like an eerily well-paralleled hyperbole when compared to our current situation. Candace is disillusioned and stuck in the cogs of corporate America; she is ambivalent in everything she does yet does not yearn for something more or different. In this vein, Severance is a biting satire about late-stage capitalism as it is a chilling story about a pandemic a bit worse than ours.

Ma does a brilliant job at creating a claustrophobic atmosphere with both timelines. While the present is suffocating because Candace and all survivors rely on day to day survival, the past is as equally so because daily life is so heavily entrenched in meaningless routines and mindnumbing tasks that often seem as never ending as the bleakness of the world being plunged into dystopia. The way she manages to encapsulate social and cultural commentary about identity, immigration, family, and modern corporate society through dry wit and humor is masterful.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

The Bluest Eye has some of the most devastating, beautiful prose I have ever read. I read this for one of my classes back in college and I remember feeling absolutely broken after finishing the last page. Toni Morrison navigates incredibly heavy topics through the vulnerable eyes of children—Pecola, in particular, with her childlike innocence juxtaposed with the ugliness of internalized racism and self-loathing she violently experiences, has been seared into my mind for years.

There comes a point in the book where Pecola, being neglected and abused by every adult in her life who is supposed to protect her, is bereft of a place to feel safe in other than her imagination. Her yearning to have blue eyes amid her resignation from her life is something she inherits from centuries and centuries of fortified institutionalized racism and the hegemony of white beauty standards by extension. I haven’t had the courage to reread this since I first read it six years ago, but I do think this should be required reading for everyone.

Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector

Lispector at her most philosophically radical. A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

I often characterize winter days as one day that bleeds into another, until they all coalesce into one colorless, amorphous blob on the calendar. One antidote for my January blues this year was reading this book. Agua Viva is reminiscent of how I feel during winter because each word and phrase and sentence blend into one another—just in a poetic way, not a seasonal-depression-way.

Reading Clarice Lispector’s works often feels transcendental, and this was no different. But this one especially felt like running through a waterfall or a cascade of words rather than physically reading pages. The cadence and rhythm of Lispector’s writing in this felt oddly hypnotic, and I felt like I was watching her stretch and fold sentences, making literature malleable in her hands. Kind of a spiritual experience in a way.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle.

Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention…

Boy Parts follows Irina, a photographer who takes fetishistic and explicit photos of men she scouts as her models. She is narcissistic and manipulative and is hyperaware of the power she holds over men and people in general. She knows how to control a situation so she has the upper hand in every situation. Throughout the book, we see glimpses of her past in fleeting hallucinatory and hazy flashbacks where there is no definitive line between imagination and reality.

The book is told in first person, which does fantastically in distorting the story even further, as she is as unreliable as a narrator can go. She is equally cruel and violent to herself as she is cruel and violent to others, destructive as much as she is self destructive. While she has no regard for any sort of moral consequence, she has elusive moments of reflection where you almost feel sympathetic toward her. almost. A subversive, unhinged take on a gender swapped American Psycho.

And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

In Italo Calvino’s cosmicomics, primordial beings cavort on the nearby surface of the moon, play marbles with atoms, and bear ecstatic witness to Earth’s first dawn. Exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe, these beloved tales relate complex scientific concepts to our common sensory, emotional, human world.

Calvino is one of my favorite authors, but The Complete Cosmicomics has become my favorite of his in the past year on a reread. Calvino’s mind is a labyrinth of alternate realities and whimsical lines of poetry, and he manages to spin fables and folklore out of astronomy in this book. It’s absurd and funny and moving in the sense that I felt like I was made of stardust and my existence stretched across the cosmic expanse of the universe while I was reading this book.

I don’t think I can classify this as magical realism or science fiction—The Complete Cosmicomics, much like most of Calvino’s wonderfully bizarre books, has become a genre in itself. Every single line is so deliciously and beautifully written, and it gives you the feeling of floating outside of your grounded body, among all of these primordial beings and particles that Calvino has imbued with emotion and humanity—perhaps more than we have as actual humans.

I always return to this collection whenever I feel tired of realistic fiction because this is probably the oddest book I have ever read in my life. In a good way, of course.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.

This is a carry over from my late fall reads, but I always end up reading it in tiny bits until the end of February—a companion for seasonal depression, if you will. I’ve recently started loving writer/author diaries (Kafka and Woolf also have fantastic ones). They have an ability to see the ordinary in a different way than us. Sylvia Plath was able to see the ephemerality of life yet portray each moment in a day beautifully. On my reread, I stopped seeing Sylvia Plath as famous author Sylvia Plath, but rather young adult Sylvia Plath—a girl in college and in her twenties with the same uncertainties we have as women in our twenties decades later.

Plath worried; she worried about the future, she worried about who she was, her identity, boys, school, loneliness. Her overthinking, while eloquent, doesn’t shy away from existential and superficial questions alike. Who am I? How do I see beauty in everything? Am I in love? As much as it is fragmentary and written in vignettes, you cannot help but immerse yourself in her words and her thoughts. Her introspections and ruminations are never tiring, and you can really empathize with her the entire time you are reading.

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city's most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here - is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world.

This one is a recent favorite, simply because of its breathtaking prose. Cold Enough for Snow is a haunting elegy about loneliness, memories, and family. I love any book about mothers and daughters, and this was no different. Short but dense, and packed with meditations and philosophies on the way we live. It is immersive and atmospheric, and for two hours you will find yourself being transported to Japan where mother and daughter attempt to reconnect with each other and themselves. The writing itself is so gorgeous that it was an immediate five star read for me, something that hasn’t happened since I read Intermezzo in June.

interlude i: what i read this week

Here is my Goodreads if you want to add me!

I’m trying to get back on the War and Peace grind—I sort of fell off my daily routine of reading four chapters a day, and now it’s a mad scramble to finish it by the end of this month because I am not about to read it going into March! War and Peace is absolutely a winter book.

But other than that, I finished Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. Not my favorite by her (The Waves and To the Lighthouse are ultimate masterpieces), but it was still so good. And it has this quote I’ve loved for ages, so it was so nice to finally read it in context.

I also read Her Bodies and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and I was blown away the same way I was when I read In the Dream House by her. I cannot believe it took me this long to read this book. I originally began reading this book at a Barnes and Noble last month, and it was one of the books I immediately put on my January reading list because of how much I kept thinking about it after reading the first thirty or so pages. This was equal parts beautifully written and absolutely horrifying. The Husband Stitch in particular may be top 3 short stories of all time.

Longer book reviews of all of my January reads will be in a post for paid subscribers!

Here are ten articles you should read:

1. The Listening Gift by Faith Lawrence

   It is the dark matter of conversation, the white space around a poem. For Rilke, listening is receiving the divine.

2. Lessons for the End of the World by Hanif Abdurraqib

   On Octavia Butler, the L.A fires, and misuses of things that cannot be recovered.

3. The ‘Murder Gang’ of Computer Whizzkids by Andrea Cavallier

   Investigators are exploring whether two apparently unrelated murders could be linked, by way of an alleged cult made up of highly educated computer scientists with an interest in animal rights.

4. The Death of Hobbies by

   Artisans do not have short attention spans.

5. The Insulin Empire by Edward Ongweso Jr. and Athena Sofides

   How profiteers pushed a lifesaving drug out of reach.

6. Why Childhood Reading Matters by Sam Leith

   “Made a Difference to My Whole Existence”: Books are the platform on which everything else is built.

7. A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite by Adam Higginbotham

   The race to stop one of history’s most bizarre extortion plots.

8. I Feel Bad for Objects by

   What happened to all the rolodexes?

9. Signs Of Life In A Desert Of Death by Nick Hunt

   In the dry and fiery deserts of Central Asia, among the mythical sites of both the first human and the end of all days, I found evidence that life restores itself even on the bleakest edge of ecological apocalypse.

10. The Penumbral Plunge by Eric Schwitzgebel

    Diving into the ring of darkness beyond things easily answerable, asking ‘Why?’ questions is what make humans awesome.

interlude ii: what i watched this week

I watched A Man Called Ove (not the Tom Hanks remake), and it was so good. Deeply heartwarming and perfect for when you want a good cry. I really enjoyed the book, so I’m glad the movie did not disappoint.

No video essays this week as I’ve been too busy to watch them, but I did link a five hour documentary on last week’s postcard!

postlude

things i love: the fact that it’s almost spring