i am a sum

of all my past obsessions

Nov 26, 2022

this week’s Thought (singular)

i am!! finally!! managing two litres of water a day!! it is a miracle!! i am so hydrated!!!

recently, i received the startling and earth-shattering notification that my google account storage, which i had been using since fifth grade, was nearly over. the bar was a dangerous yellow. something needed to be done. so i undertook a daunting task, one that i had been avoiding for years for fear of encountering the people i used to be. i decided to clear out my google photos.

ever since i obtained my first smartphone (samsung galaxy star, white, served me well for a year) in seventh (eighth?) grade, all my photos on all my phones have been backed up to this repository. you can understand why this activity didn’t seem wholly appealing. i had no interest in having all my middle school cringe, high school depression, and pandemic hyper-obsessions laid out in front of me in such sequential starkness.

but what happened was…surprisingly revelatory.

as i methodically and not-at-all indiscriminately began to free up space, i got the opportunity to revisit all the things i used to love. as somebody who is obsessed with sending screenshots of the stuff i enjoy to my friends, there were a lot of things to revisit.

some of it was cringe.

okay, a lot of it was cringe.

most of it was cringe.

from middle school, i had an unhealthy amount of Grant Ward gifs, circa my Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D era, and way too much Harry Potter and Percy Jackson fanart by Viria. i had almost forgotten my eighth grade OneRepublic phase until i came across five full scrolls of content. i deleted my tenth grade snapchat pictures with all the vindictiveness of a gardener spraying weevils on a sprout farm. the time i used to spend on tumblr in high school largely consisted of me saving memes and reaction images that would mostly gather dust in my gallery, and i clearly spent a lot of time on tumblr in high school. my post-school pre-college k-pop period, while supremely fun and memorable, did at least a few gigabytes worth of damage.

all of this self-sabotage to say - what a life i’ve lived, truly.

there’s a tendency to feel like we haven’t done anything. like we need to have had some huge achievement, some big life-altering event, to lend weight to the span of years we’ve lived. by doing this project, i realised two things -

it is enough to have loved and to love. that is ample justification for living. that is a large enough event to make the past full. that is a hopeful enough reason to make the future promising.
cringe is not dead. you just stop caring about it. every phase i have had in my life, right from the earliest one i can remember (Harry Potter, early middle school) to the latest (Succession, 2022), has been so wonderfully fun and thrilling. fandoms can be places of incredible community, and sending 200 excited messages/screenshots/voice recordings about an obsession to a close friend is an activity i truly cherished.

to love a thing is to have something to live for. consequently, i am unspeakably grateful to all my past obsessions for giving me that motivation across the years. special shoutout to tumblr, for ably aiding and abetting my escapist efforts.

i’d like to leave you all with this line from Save Rock and Roll by Fall Out Boy (another eleventh grade anchor) -

ps: i am so very glad that we, as a society, have made it past our retrica era.

white cat on brown round table during daytime — Photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam ✪ on Unsplash

English Recitation Competition

Conjure, Rachel Blau DuPlessis

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Conjure “hold on.”
We can’t just conjure
the codes from nothing! We can’t work
any faster than [the 
resources, the lies, 
the lives] we have.

Renascence, Edna St. Vincent Millay

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The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.

The birthday of the world, Marge Piercy
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```
Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.
```

A Poll!

Middle School Book Review

your regularly scheduled book recommendation has been temporarily halted! watch this space over the coming weeks so you don’t miss the next one!

find all shared books here.

A Picture!

*man(nequin), yellow t-shirt and off-white flowery apron, respectable chef hat, legless*

The Good Side of the Internet

Bin day: why trash fashion is still inspiring designers
Carrier bags, supermarket shoppers, bin bags and litter have hit the runways for years. One man’s trash and all that, eh?
If you’ve been caught taking the bins out in crap shoes recently, feel no shame – even if the guy who saw you was a hottie. You’re bang on trend. Trash is in fashion, trash is cool and trash, it turns out, is now really bloody expensive.
Over the influence: how TV and film called time on the influencer
In Not Okay, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Triangle of Sadness and other works, the content creator gets a skewering. Are influencers coming to the end of their clout reign?
Shein hauls, videos of “good deeds” and teary apologies: influencing has an array of stereotypes that are regularly made fun of. But if an influencer’s job is to make you want to buy stuff, the cost-of-living crisis has caused an acceleration in snide feeling towards them, with film, TV and literature all finding the perennially-online social media worker ripe for parody. Is the star of the influencer finally burning out?
Scandal contorts future of John Friend, Anusara yoga (investigative)
The small yoga classes that Friend once taught at Willow Street and other studios morphed in recent years into flashy extravaganzas, some with music and dance performances. His shows were branded with catchy names, like the tours of mega-rock bands: Ignite the Center. Melt Your Heart, Blow Your Mind. Light the Sky.
How to nourish yourself in a difficult time
When things are hard, feeding yourself and those you care about can be the first thing to go. So what can we do? How do we pull back from the pain to a place of perspective, where we’re capable of taking care of our bodies and brains even when the rest of the world refuses to?
Day of a Stranger (personal essay by a modern-day hermit)
The hills are blue and hot. There is a brown, dusty field in the bottom of the valley. I hear a machine, a bird, a clock. The clouds are high and enormous. Through them the inevitable jet plane passes: this time probably full of passengers from Miami to Chicago. What passengers? This I have no need to decide. They are out of my world, up there, busy sitting in their small, isolated, arbitrary lounge that does not even seem to be moving—the lounge that somehow unaccountably picked them up off the earth in Florida to suspend them for a while with timeless cocktails and then let them down in Illinois. The suspension of modern life in contemplation that gets you somewhere!