HELLO
( Collapse )
To friends visiting: You can still leave comments even if you don't have an LJ. I'd love to hear from you.
( Collapse )
To friends visiting: You can still leave comments even if you don't have an LJ. I'd love to hear from you.
Films 2015 / Drama List
Last Updated: May 26, 2015
At least 10 previously unwatched movies a month in2010 2011 2012 2014 2015. Feel free to recommend movies, I'd really love it. (No film school stuff though, got those pretty much down pat because I studied film at uni. No "The Ring"esque horror films too. Just, no.) Anything that struck a chord, in any language, and preferably well-made, do tell.
( Collapse )
Also, Japanese dramas watched, in alphabetical order. I'd love recs too!
( Collapse )
At least 10 previously unwatched movies a month in
( Collapse )
Also, Japanese dramas watched, in alphabetical order. I'd love recs too!
( Collapse )
All Aboard The Last Voyage
It’s really over.
Let me get this off my chest.
For the last time.
For now.
We’ve already said so many things, have exhausted our feelings from both ends. There are no words to explain this to a person who isn’t an Arashi member, staff, or fan. We’re done verbalizing what is impossible to pin down.
There were so many sad things in the last Voyage episode.
As we all expected, but still: daggers.
Brilliant, glittering daggers.
The cityscape blurring past on the way to Tokyo Dome.
Their silence in the green room, each one steeling himself his own way.
Their muted walk to the final stage.
The special kind of heartbrokenness as they practiced their songs for the last time.
Emotions hitting in waves—at one moment, just another song they’ve sung for more than a decade; the next moment, a burial.
Laying something so charged and so precious to rest, bodies moving along to notes and lyrics that have been so entwined with their lives, a melodic inventory of what they have poured so much of themselves to.
Saying goodbye. Making peace. Tucking it away.
For now.
The palpability of Sho’s dread: at once both refreshing and sobering. Never have I ever felt like we, as a fandom moving as one organism, needed to mobilize and metaphysically give this very grown-up man a bear hug. His vulnerability touched me. The feelings of not wanting to enter Tokyo Dome. His dream before the last concert, of messing up his parts, of being depressed about it. Dreams aren’t always beautiful, after all, and even after waking up, sometimes there remains a taste in your mouth that the morning can’t wash away.
It’s that inexplicability that Sho was able to express at that moment. The others did not demand it so harshly of themselves—and they didn’t need to. They were self-aware enough to know that they were experiencing something for the first and last time in their lives. They owed us no explanation.
Aiba’s soft eyes were a confession in itself: so hushed, stripped bare of any pretense of being the appointed heliotropic member. The sun was simply something that streamed in to the smooth drone of the van as he sunk into the captain’s seat, silent and ponderous, marinating.
Nino’s frenetic monologue, for everyone to see and hear. I’ll feel different. Hmm, maybe I won’t feel different. It will change. It won’t change. It’s almost like you wanted to shake his shoulders. Bean, it’s okay.
Ohno accepting that there was no stopping the tides, this one, of time: how very fisherman-like. As they pulled up to the driveway of Tokyo Dome, he knew that he was simply moving, neither forward or backward. And that it was what he needed to do, for now, feelings aside.
But Sho, in particular, was harsh in his expression.
It bled into his dreams, before, and even after the concert. There was a cast of fragility that we've never seen on him before. While that doesn’t make him better or worse than the others, it was much more relatable, to me, personally. His volatility felt similar to what I felt. Knowing that this was the finish line all along, but still being confronted by disbelief and loss as the day arrived. Sho Sakurai, lips pursed, his dignified features distorted by emotions during their last bow on stage.
Because there it was, the release he probably wanted to keep inside but could not. His tears spoke for him.
“Out of my way.” Jun. Of course.
It’s always a treat to witness more of Jun’s precise creativity, his single-minded insistence on finetuning the way we experience Arashi. His sometimes terror-inducing scenes as a producer was juxtaposed by him, saying softly, that he cannot wait for the members to see the stage.
He pulled out all the stops to wrap it with a ribbon.
The hiatus is by no means the end of his potential. But there is something distinctly mournful about wondering what else we could have gotten out of Jun at this moment in time, at the height of Arashi and his production prowess, flanked by their long-time team and collaborators. This has always been his show, and to see him push and strain for a momentous, one-night-only, career-punctuating concert was to see a creative heart convulsing on the table.
No glass casings, no golden plinths. Just a stark, sterile light into what motivates Matsumoto Jun, alive and beating. His blood was all over the stage to make this swan song happen, just like how he had envisioned it, and while that sounds unnecessarily dramatic, every fan will know it to be true.
Arashi put on a show worthy of their legacy. Jun wouldn't have allowed anything else.
Yet for me, no matter how special it was, there was a note of emptiness: a show-piece, installation element to the This Is Arashi concert. As idols, they have always riffed off of fans’ energy, the same way fans gathered strength and pure joy at partaking of their idol’s performance and energy in person. When you’ve been at it for long enough, this is a distinction that idol fans simply know and feel by instinct. Other musicians primarily create music for the sake of the music, but idol craft resonates on this energetic exchange between idol and fan.
Music and spectacle matter, yes. But there is something there that matters more than words can portray. There has always been a pure, life-giving, wholesome something that is at the core of the idol-fan exchange, and of course, as a biased fan, I feel that no other groups have done it quite like Arashi. Arashi breathes this energy, this love.
You know this feeling, right? You wouldn't have read this far if you didn't. This has always been a special relationship.
Without that energy, they were simply performing. Did it make it less heartfelt? No. Music and memories are potent, and they took us along with them for a journey. Did they not push it to the highest of levels and execution they could? Absolutely, no questions asked. Was the scale and number of fans reached amazing? You bet.
But after 21 years, they deserved the heat of bodies in Tokyo Dome, the emotional ringing of their name called out in person, cheers so loud and sonorous, the invisible sound waves would’ve etched itself into the white scalloped ceiling. We deserved to give that to them, in person.
A-RA-SHI. They are historic. But most of all, they are part of our personal histories, and us, theirs.
They deserved that one last coming together of idol and fan.
A-RA-SHI, we called out, our sincere digital voice recordings that Jun timed to perfection, to the millisecond.
They successfully created warmth out of technology, but there will always be a stain of bitterness in my heart that everything unfolded this way. This kind of goodbye, in the middle of a global pandemic. Their eyes, scanning a cavernous and empty Tokyo Dome, imagining we were really there too.
A-RA-SHI.
We hoped it reached them, really reached them.
Oh, our super boys, who wanted to take the world by storm but ended up giving us their world.
A-RA-SHI.
I’m sad to be old enough to accept with grace that things truly end.
Eras, jobs, relationships, dreams, all of it.
But I’m also glad we’re finally here. For Arashi, it’s been three or so years of them transitioning to this. There is relief, too. They have nothing but my gratitude and admiration for closing this chapter so neatly, yet so openly. We could not have been held more tenderly and honestly by them.
On fingers, hanging by breastbones, or displayed properly in our rooms, we have twinkling Swarovski crystals from their stage—their gift to us.
Within our easy reach, all their music and concerts, both old and new. The stunning amount of entertainment to go back to, if we ever felt a need to return for awhile and laugh like the old days.
We have four entertainment stalwarts, still blazing paths and creating work that pushes them but also makes us smile. We have one free spirit to rest upon our hopes that fighting for our own distinct version of happiness works out in the end. We still have them, really.
In our hearts, all the lessons of these 21 years. All the dreams dreamt and realized. All the friends we've met.
The music never ends, but time has caught up with us. The camera mercifully afforded us a healing view: after they say goodbye one last time, the first thing they do backstage was to hug one another. We saw something too brittle and all too human: Jun reaching out to embrace a silently devastated Sho.
If hearts could be crushed and mended in one go, that was it.
It's over, it's done. They smiled and held each other assuringly. They let it be.
There was nothing more to be said.
At the end of the episode, a montage of time passing, from debut to now—a dizzying array of Arashi, through the years. They made it happen.
The storm.
There will never be another day like December 31, 2020.
There will never be another group like this.
There will never be this feeling again.
Because it’s us and Arashi, and we're the only ones who know how it feels.
No matter what, it's a feeling to treasure.
I guess this is goodbye.
For now.
from april 4
𝐓𝐮𝐧𝐚 𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐰𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐢𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜
Hello Nina from the future. This is how you felt on April 3, 2020, in the middle of a pandemic.
+
Whenever I wake up, it almost feels like just another day: the warm sunbeams slatting through my east-facing window, the reliable chug of my old AC, and the parched feeling in my throat. The messages on my phone say otherwise. It is not a normal day, and hasn’t been, for what, 18 days now? I’m nearing the point where I’m used to waking up to a global pandemic silently raging across the world.
But not yet. Not quite yet.
Pre-COVID-19, I was never the type to scroll through my notifications first thing in the morning. However, the updates now serve as anchoring of sorts. I’ve subscribed to a Telegram group named ‘PH Coronavirus Updates’, and the numbers rising up every morning sets off a chain reaction in my body: cold anxiety of the hypochondriac kind, a heavy unease, and finally, at around 8:30 am, an unsettling calm.
The day has begun. There are no noisy tricycles roaring outside my window, no people walking on the streets.
Manila is on lockdown, thoroughfares drained of its buses, jeepneys, and throngs of people. We are not going anywhere.
There is a virus waiting to jump to the next susceptible person.
It’s still time to get up.
I take a shower. 10 am, I wake up my laptop and get to work. Slack pings, left and right.
I’ve been on a remote work setup since November, so working from home didn’t present a psychical rearrangement to me as it did to a lot of people. But ultimately, it’s the loss of escape that changed how work felt like: no more jaunts to a coffee joint to hunker down on a brief, no more skiving off to the beach to clear up the week’s mental detritus, no dinner with friends to feel sane, no more yoga at a high-rise building and picking up fresh produce afterwards to get energized.
No need to disassemble the crassness of my privilege: I’m well-aware, thanks.
This won’t be the place where I list down how I’ve helped out other people during this time, or how I stand with the truly disenfranchised and condemn every anti-poor decision our government has made. We can all police—or better yet, inspire—each other to not be trash human beings at this moment in history; certainly, a new kind of social media morality has arisen from this pandemic, for a reason.
“This is so unprecedented.”
“Weird fucking times, love.”
“Grabe ‘to.”
In all the political filters, dogmas, and other belief systems we may view this global pandemic with, in the end, we are all subject to it. COVID-19 has birthed a kind of solidarity we couldn’t have imagined just a month ago. This is history playing itself out even as we scroll to the day’s developments.
We will remember this time—this *will* leave marks.
I am sitting here, with the guilt of material blessings, doing what I can to help, but also reckoning with what’s going on within me. When you’re hemmed in by the walls of your home, there is nowhere to look except in the crevasses of your brain, and no one else to move among apart from the people you live with.
At home, well, everyone’s home. As there are 19 people sharing one roof, this enhanced community quarantine has thrown us together in closer proximity and for longer stretches of time than we’re used to. Palitan talaga ng mukha.
It’s interesting how we find new ways of being with people we already live with. To make this time bearable, yes, but also as a natural consequence of being quarantined together. The green walls inside our home almost feel like they’re melting and shifting to accommodate the novel ways we’re moving around and living within it. Like it’s breathing with us through endless afternoons and silent nights.
Previously ignored nooks and crannies finding renewed purpose: the little stair landing with old books is now our resident teenager’s TikTok spot (or whatever kids these days do on their phones.) A sad, ignored corner in the garden is now where 4 year-olds Saige and Steph gather rocks to throw a measly foot away. The garage is now emptied of anything with wheels, and dad and I have dragged our battered but precious, long-armed Ilocano silyon chairs to preside over the area. It’s now where everyone convenes at 4 pm: for coffee, for an errant breeze after a whole day of melting in summertime Manila, for a repetitive but still satisfying collective cooing over Enzo, barely two months old.
Mealtimes are like save points in a game now. We’ve always had dinner together as a family, even pre-pandemic. But something about having all our meals together has reconfigured how we make sense of a day. Asking someone to “please pass the patis” (mmm delicious assonance) is not just passing the patis now: it’s grounding, a sign that you’re in the same boat with these people, it’s breaking bread together in comfort, because while tomorrow feels pregnant with uncertainty, tignan mo, may sawsawan pa rin na nagpapasarap ng kain natin.
Speaking of breaking bread: I want to touch on Mum making me a tuna sandwich using Gardenia Classic bread, which on any given day I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Yes, that’s not the most politically correct thing to say about Gardenia right now, I’m well aware. Yet after a day filled with a ringing sense of anxiety and unending work, nothing has ever felt more delicious. I don’t remember the last time my mom has made me a sandwich (she’s certainly not behooved to do so, and I wouldn’t want to make a sandwich for someone gustatorily fussy as me either) but somehow, in the time of a global pandemic, it’s just a new normal. A magical new normal.
There are other moments.
My Kuya walking in circles around the garden with a backpacked Saige, looking for non-existent frogs. The strangeness of our dining table littered with laptops. Spending a day on my friend’s island for hours on Animal Crossing: a virtual otherworld bridging Chicago and Manila. Sitting on the silyon with dad, realizing we have the same shaped feet. Santino asking me about quarks and rhizomes and all things my adult brain has neglected. Watching my friends learn new skills, despite everything: cooking, handstands, knitting, triple crossover hops. My sister breastfeeding Enzo in one hand, and organizing her staff via email on the other. The ritualization of our afternoon coffees. Zoom video workouts with friends. The handwashing singalongs. Ate Melai thoughtfully adding soil to my jade plant after it fell off my window sill (I had a ridiculous mini-breakdown, sue me). Mom preciously asking where she could procure ripe mangoes in the Merville Facebook group, because Saige’s been craving for some mango shake.
The crawling of time. Pockets of time, moments, really, to remind us what to treasure in our life once we’re all let out of the house again: blessings and essentials.
But don’t get me wrong, this period of time doesn’t and won’t look the same for everyone, and nothing about what we’re facing now is inherently romantic.
Nina from the future, these happened too:
There are daily wagers taking it to the streets because they are sidelined and hungry. There are government officials mishandling billions meant for aid and still fumbling with most of the logistics, two weeks in. There are households supporting weary frontliners. There are frontliners, depleted in all aspects yet reporting back for duty the next day. There are families separated by various circumstances. There are people mourning a beloved one, when just a month ago, they were healthy, whole, and right beside them. There are cancelled weddings, sporting events, concerts, and other things that made life something to look forward to.
There are business owners poring over Excel sheets wondering about continuity and how to keep their people employed. There are people alone in silent condominium units. There are 8-people families wedged together in tight, airless makeshift houses no bigger than a fourth of a classroom.
There are people with mental health conditions struggling to make sense of this seemingly alternate universe turned canon. There are immunocompromised people wondering anxiously if their unopened groceries will be the one thing that delivers the final blow.
There are dead people.
And there are people fighting for their lives, not just socially distanced, but in pure isolation, struggling to do the most basic and elemental function to our existence: breathe.
That’s all we can do, to begin with, even as we live with the dark realities of this pandemic. Breathe, and allow love and kindness to suffuse our thoughts and actions.
In the time of pandemic, a kindness to one is a kindness to all.
However it looks like for you, I hope that your April 4 comes with a little bit of hope. We crawl ever closer to a day where this will become something we won’t forget, but still put behind us.
If you are infected, I hope that you recover. If you are suffering and hungry, I hope that help comes soon—we’re fighting to get supplies to you. If you are tired of taking care of other people, I hope you find some rest, in any way that you can.
If you are mourning the loss of a loved one, I hope you remember them in all their humanity, and take that with you as kindling maybe not to move on (because they will always be etched in your soul), but to do better as a human being. Not soon, but somewhere down the line.
I hope we take with us the lessons of this strange season, and pull humanity forward again, with scientific sobriety, and a heart that beats for everyone.
I look forward to tasting the salty tang of seawater on my tongue again. Sharing dessert with a friend, mask-less and cozily attached at the hip. Jumping in time to a beat during a concert, feeling the music around other people. Dressing up. Doing groceries without the tedium of social distancing and controlled lines. Walking outside to get coffee, and appreciating the smooth, bittersweet pull on my senses, finally in the company of other strangers.
It will come.
For today, we just support our frontliners, wash our hands, and stay in.
April 4, 2020: we breathe and live on.
Hello Nina from the future. This is how you felt on April 3, 2020, in the middle of a pandemic.
+
Whenever I wake up, it almost feels like just another day: the warm sunbeams slatting through my east-facing window, the reliable chug of my old AC, and the parched feeling in my throat. The messages on my phone say otherwise. It is not a normal day, and hasn’t been, for what, 18 days now? I’m nearing the point where I’m used to waking up to a global pandemic silently raging across the world.
But not yet. Not quite yet.
Pre-COVID-19, I was never the type to scroll through my notifications first thing in the morning. However, the updates now serve as anchoring of sorts. I’ve subscribed to a Telegram group named ‘PH Coronavirus Updates’, and the numbers rising up every morning sets off a chain reaction in my body: cold anxiety of the hypochondriac kind, a heavy unease, and finally, at around 8:30 am, an unsettling calm.
The day has begun. There are no noisy tricycles roaring outside my window, no people walking on the streets.
Manila is on lockdown, thoroughfares drained of its buses, jeepneys, and throngs of people. We are not going anywhere.
There is a virus waiting to jump to the next susceptible person.
It’s still time to get up.
I take a shower. 10 am, I wake up my laptop and get to work. Slack pings, left and right.
I’ve been on a remote work setup since November, so working from home didn’t present a psychical rearrangement to me as it did to a lot of people. But ultimately, it’s the loss of escape that changed how work felt like: no more jaunts to a coffee joint to hunker down on a brief, no more skiving off to the beach to clear up the week’s mental detritus, no dinner with friends to feel sane, no more yoga at a high-rise building and picking up fresh produce afterwards to get energized.
No need to disassemble the crassness of my privilege: I’m well-aware, thanks.
This won’t be the place where I list down how I’ve helped out other people during this time, or how I stand with the truly disenfranchised and condemn every anti-poor decision our government has made. We can all police—or better yet, inspire—each other to not be trash human beings at this moment in history; certainly, a new kind of social media morality has arisen from this pandemic, for a reason.
“This is so unprecedented.”
“Weird fucking times, love.”
“Grabe ‘to.”
In all the political filters, dogmas, and other belief systems we may view this global pandemic with, in the end, we are all subject to it. COVID-19 has birthed a kind of solidarity we couldn’t have imagined just a month ago. This is history playing itself out even as we scroll to the day’s developments.
We will remember this time—this *will* leave marks.
I am sitting here, with the guilt of material blessings, doing what I can to help, but also reckoning with what’s going on within me. When you’re hemmed in by the walls of your home, there is nowhere to look except in the crevasses of your brain, and no one else to move among apart from the people you live with.
At home, well, everyone’s home. As there are 19 people sharing one roof, this enhanced community quarantine has thrown us together in closer proximity and for longer stretches of time than we’re used to. Palitan talaga ng mukha.
It’s interesting how we find new ways of being with people we already live with. To make this time bearable, yes, but also as a natural consequence of being quarantined together. The green walls inside our home almost feel like they’re melting and shifting to accommodate the novel ways we’re moving around and living within it. Like it’s breathing with us through endless afternoons and silent nights.
Previously ignored nooks and crannies finding renewed purpose: the little stair landing with old books is now our resident teenager’s TikTok spot (or whatever kids these days do on their phones.) A sad, ignored corner in the garden is now where 4 year-olds Saige and Steph gather rocks to throw a measly foot away. The garage is now emptied of anything with wheels, and dad and I have dragged our battered but precious, long-armed Ilocano silyon chairs to preside over the area. It’s now where everyone convenes at 4 pm: for coffee, for an errant breeze after a whole day of melting in summertime Manila, for a repetitive but still satisfying collective cooing over Enzo, barely two months old.
Mealtimes are like save points in a game now. We’ve always had dinner together as a family, even pre-pandemic. But something about having all our meals together has reconfigured how we make sense of a day. Asking someone to “please pass the patis” (mmm delicious assonance) is not just passing the patis now: it’s grounding, a sign that you’re in the same boat with these people, it’s breaking bread together in comfort, because while tomorrow feels pregnant with uncertainty, tignan mo, may sawsawan pa rin na nagpapasarap ng kain natin.
Speaking of breaking bread: I want to touch on Mum making me a tuna sandwich using Gardenia Classic bread, which on any given day I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Yes, that’s not the most politically correct thing to say about Gardenia right now, I’m well aware. Yet after a day filled with a ringing sense of anxiety and unending work, nothing has ever felt more delicious. I don’t remember the last time my mom has made me a sandwich (she’s certainly not behooved to do so, and I wouldn’t want to make a sandwich for someone gustatorily fussy as me either) but somehow, in the time of a global pandemic, it’s just a new normal. A magical new normal.
There are other moments.
My Kuya walking in circles around the garden with a backpacked Saige, looking for non-existent frogs. The strangeness of our dining table littered with laptops. Spending a day on my friend’s island for hours on Animal Crossing: a virtual otherworld bridging Chicago and Manila. Sitting on the silyon with dad, realizing we have the same shaped feet. Santino asking me about quarks and rhizomes and all things my adult brain has neglected. Watching my friends learn new skills, despite everything: cooking, handstands, knitting, triple crossover hops. My sister breastfeeding Enzo in one hand, and organizing her staff via email on the other. The ritualization of our afternoon coffees. Zoom video workouts with friends. The handwashing singalongs. Ate Melai thoughtfully adding soil to my jade plant after it fell off my window sill (I had a ridiculous mini-breakdown, sue me). Mom preciously asking where she could procure ripe mangoes in the Merville Facebook group, because Saige’s been craving for some mango shake.
The crawling of time. Pockets of time, moments, really, to remind us what to treasure in our life once we’re all let out of the house again: blessings and essentials.
But don’t get me wrong, this period of time doesn’t and won’t look the same for everyone, and nothing about what we’re facing now is inherently romantic.
Nina from the future, these happened too:
There are daily wagers taking it to the streets because they are sidelined and hungry. There are government officials mishandling billions meant for aid and still fumbling with most of the logistics, two weeks in. There are households supporting weary frontliners. There are frontliners, depleted in all aspects yet reporting back for duty the next day. There are families separated by various circumstances. There are people mourning a beloved one, when just a month ago, they were healthy, whole, and right beside them. There are cancelled weddings, sporting events, concerts, and other things that made life something to look forward to.
There are business owners poring over Excel sheets wondering about continuity and how to keep their people employed. There are people alone in silent condominium units. There are 8-people families wedged together in tight, airless makeshift houses no bigger than a fourth of a classroom.
There are people with mental health conditions struggling to make sense of this seemingly alternate universe turned canon. There are immunocompromised people wondering anxiously if their unopened groceries will be the one thing that delivers the final blow.
There are dead people.
And there are people fighting for their lives, not just socially distanced, but in pure isolation, struggling to do the most basic and elemental function to our existence: breathe.
That’s all we can do, to begin with, even as we live with the dark realities of this pandemic. Breathe, and allow love and kindness to suffuse our thoughts and actions.
In the time of pandemic, a kindness to one is a kindness to all.
However it looks like for you, I hope that your April 4 comes with a little bit of hope. We crawl ever closer to a day where this will become something we won’t forget, but still put behind us.
If you are infected, I hope that you recover. If you are suffering and hungry, I hope that help comes soon—we’re fighting to get supplies to you. If you are tired of taking care of other people, I hope you find some rest, in any way that you can.
If you are mourning the loss of a loved one, I hope you remember them in all their humanity, and take that with you as kindling maybe not to move on (because they will always be etched in your soul), but to do better as a human being. Not soon, but somewhere down the line.
I hope we take with us the lessons of this strange season, and pull humanity forward again, with scientific sobriety, and a heart that beats for everyone.
I look forward to tasting the salty tang of seawater on my tongue again. Sharing dessert with a friend, mask-less and cozily attached at the hip. Jumping in time to a beat during a concert, feeling the music around other people. Dressing up. Doing groceries without the tedium of social distancing and controlled lines. Walking outside to get coffee, and appreciating the smooth, bittersweet pull on my senses, finally in the company of other strangers.
It will come.
For today, we just support our frontliners, wash our hands, and stay in.
April 4, 2020: we breathe and live on.
behold, the you of today
27th of January.
1/27.
It means something now. Last year, it was the first day of my unemployment after quitting a job that I loved (despite all my complaints about it) and leaving a team that I was more than fond of and really nurtured and cared for. It also happened to be the day when Arashi announced their plans to go on a hiatus, a decision that took me months to process and accept. Somehow it felt like my own mortality eating at my heels—a feeling, I'm sure, that only Arashi fans will understand in its entirety. Their hiatus announcement had the instantaneous effect of making us all wonder where all the years went, and how a presence that's seemingly so stable and omnipresent in our lives can disappear just like that, like a scaffolding crumbling right under our feet.
When you grow up loving someone or something who has also been growing up and older alongside you, the deadline to their existence as you know and treasure it also marks the unforgiving creep of age and time on your end. That's a long sentence for a tiny sliver of truth. Nostalgia is a potent side effect, but it's not just limited to that. There's also the inescapability of the tides changing, of chapters predictably but hurtfully closing.
So yes, me quitting my job and Arashi's hiatus announcement was a whole tail-end January pas de deux coalescing into an outsized amount existential worry.
Anyway, 2019 was really a "fuck everything and just go" kind of year. I mean, I quit my job with no plans. It was one of those decisions that I knew I just had to make, because if I stayed any longer, it would only have been because of comfort and complacency, two things I cannot accept as reasons in this season of my life. But it still stands that I feel like I only inched forward, in terms of personal progress. Maybe it's egotistical to have expected a whole evolutionary leap from myself in just a year, but with the way I upended my life, I felt like things should have changed more drastically. Again, I know it's all on me. I need to be kinder in my confusion, yes. I need to give myself credit for still trying out the opportunities that come my way, no matter how glacial the pace forward is.
I just want to give myself an even wider berth this 2020, but also apply just the right pressure. I don't have to evolve like a fucking Pokemon but I still need to constantly ask myself questions, to probe where it's distinctly uncomfortable, to reassure myself whenever I feel like it's a pointless exercise. And also, I need 2020 to be
A year of learning how to focus.
A year of tapping into deeper beauty, of articulating the locus of near perfect moments.
A year of mending all the tiny threads that have come undone, mentally speaking.
A year of just living on, just like all the other years, but hopefully with more awareness.
Nina, you're not fucking up. You're just a WIP. Please remember that.
1/27.
It means something now. Last year, it was the first day of my unemployment after quitting a job that I loved (despite all my complaints about it) and leaving a team that I was more than fond of and really nurtured and cared for. It also happened to be the day when Arashi announced their plans to go on a hiatus, a decision that took me months to process and accept. Somehow it felt like my own mortality eating at my heels—a feeling, I'm sure, that only Arashi fans will understand in its entirety. Their hiatus announcement had the instantaneous effect of making us all wonder where all the years went, and how a presence that's seemingly so stable and omnipresent in our lives can disappear just like that, like a scaffolding crumbling right under our feet.
When you grow up loving someone or something who has also been growing up and older alongside you, the deadline to their existence as you know and treasure it also marks the unforgiving creep of age and time on your end. That's a long sentence for a tiny sliver of truth. Nostalgia is a potent side effect, but it's not just limited to that. There's also the inescapability of the tides changing, of chapters predictably but hurtfully closing.
So yes, me quitting my job and Arashi's hiatus announcement was a whole tail-end January pas de deux coalescing into an outsized amount existential worry.
Anyway, 2019 was really a "fuck everything and just go" kind of year. I mean, I quit my job with no plans. It was one of those decisions that I knew I just had to make, because if I stayed any longer, it would only have been because of comfort and complacency, two things I cannot accept as reasons in this season of my life. But it still stands that I feel like I only inched forward, in terms of personal progress. Maybe it's egotistical to have expected a whole evolutionary leap from myself in just a year, but with the way I upended my life, I felt like things should have changed more drastically. Again, I know it's all on me. I need to be kinder in my confusion, yes. I need to give myself credit for still trying out the opportunities that come my way, no matter how glacial the pace forward is.
I just want to give myself an even wider berth this 2020, but also apply just the right pressure. I don't have to evolve like a fucking Pokemon but I still need to constantly ask myself questions, to probe where it's distinctly uncomfortable, to reassure myself whenever I feel like it's a pointless exercise. And also, I need 2020 to be
A year of learning how to focus.
A year of tapping into deeper beauty, of articulating the locus of near perfect moments.
A year of mending all the tiny threads that have come undone, mentally speaking.
A year of just living on, just like all the other years, but hopefully with more awareness.
Nina, you're not fucking up. You're just a WIP. Please remember that.
Displaced
I don’t know why I’m putting so much pressure on myself to figure out what’s next. The breadth of options is ironically making me feel like there isn’t a place for me. I just feel so shell-shocked.
I applied to a job that’s maybe a couple of steps above my experience just to see how I would measure up. Found myself vaguely confident when I met the owners. It was like because I didn’t care at all, in the ways that matter, I became more confident. But in a hollow way lol. They confirmed my worst suspicions by actually offering me the job: that I can mime a life pretty well. In a twisted way, it’s almost like I’m just doing this to comfort myself? That even if I want out of this industry I can still fall back on it. Which is terrible, I know. And no, I’m not taking the offer. It’s just that I’m so wildly unsure about how valid my next step is. Valid in the context of how I’ll value it, personally and intrinsically. I’m just so paralyzed by fear that this adventurous, non-traditional route I’ve gotten myself into with so much aplomb won’t make me happy in the end.
I also feel like I can’t tell anyone about any part of it. It’s not shame exactly. But it’s just so hard to concretize in words. I don’t want to talk about sorrows I have no words for. I want to reach out but I have nothing to show for it, nothing to say.
Always this high-functioning despair. So constant, a bed fellow doused in the familiar scent of a fabric conditioner, my own punishing sixth sense.
I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m doing enough. If I myself am. If this pursuit is enough. If I can. If I’m willing. If.
I’m exhausted.
I applied to a job that’s maybe a couple of steps above my experience just to see how I would measure up. Found myself vaguely confident when I met the owners. It was like because I didn’t care at all, in the ways that matter, I became more confident. But in a hollow way lol. They confirmed my worst suspicions by actually offering me the job: that I can mime a life pretty well. In a twisted way, it’s almost like I’m just doing this to comfort myself? That even if I want out of this industry I can still fall back on it. Which is terrible, I know. And no, I’m not taking the offer. It’s just that I’m so wildly unsure about how valid my next step is. Valid in the context of how I’ll value it, personally and intrinsically. I’m just so paralyzed by fear that this adventurous, non-traditional route I’ve gotten myself into with so much aplomb won’t make me happy in the end.
I also feel like I can’t tell anyone about any part of it. It’s not shame exactly. But it’s just so hard to concretize in words. I don’t want to talk about sorrows I have no words for. I want to reach out but I have nothing to show for it, nothing to say.
Always this high-functioning despair. So constant, a bed fellow doused in the familiar scent of a fabric conditioner, my own punishing sixth sense.
I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m doing enough. If I myself am. If this pursuit is enough. If I can. If I’m willing. If.
I’m exhausted.
Standing on the Minamihama shore with you, in white
It's not a storm if it doesn't dampen every square inch of your soul. If it doesn't drag you down with its weight, with the certainty that you will feel soaked with what keeps you alive, with what nourishes you.
It's not a storm if a fierce, blazing sunshine does not appear the day after. Because it always does.
It's not only a storm. It is the storm. Inside you. With you. Always.
5x20.
front seat
When I stepped out of the house, it smelled like impending rain. You know the one. That mix of heavy earth, and temporality. The deliciousness of being weighed down. I relaced my Chucks and took a deep breath in. It took courage to be on my way to you, frankly. But when I saw you again, it just felt...
...natural. Not like pulling teeth (like I feared, because dredging up feelings from the past almost always feels like that), or like walking into a lair of self-conscious dread. The moment you leaned over to open the car door from inside felt weirdly like a homecoming. I've seen you do it so many times before. I've smelled it too. Whenever I settle in the passenger seat, the whiff from when you leaned over always lingers around. You still use Wood Sage & Sea Salt. How many bottles has it been since the last one I gifted you? Five? Four, if you don't do that wasteful walk-into-a-perfumed-mist move anymore.
It wasn't so bad, sitting in your car. It felt like the contours of your leather seat has muscle memory, like somehow it still supported my thighs just right, and embraced the shape of my back. Comfort. Your smile looked like you were comfortable too.
You made it feel good. Not that I expected anything else, not that I expected to be held again, or hold you, conversely. It didn't feel like solace. It just felt like meeting you, yet again. The fond tug on my bangs. The scritch of my palm against your undercut. The smell of your nose (do people smell noses like I do?) The expanse of you, when I fold myself into your nooks and crannies and your chest and the part where your shoulder meets your neck. The little stories that would've been incomprehensible over text. The music. The feeling that the city moved around us versus us moving within it. We walked, but it seemed like the streets and lights arranged themselves to look like the night was ours. Yes, this is the vanity of being wrapped up in a moment, together, but it really did feel like that. Meeting you, right down the middle, and finding that the embers never really cooled off.
(...or if they did, that we had the ability to light them up at will.)
I mean. I like the me when I'm with you, always have. It doesn't have to mean anything more, apart from what it meant that day. You just kept nodding yes when I ran off with all those words. And when you hugged me before I got off the car, I could tell that we both felt light. It wasn't an ominous moment.
To marks and all. To sparks that never die, but don't have to be pursued. To our own paths, newly emboldened.
When I got home, it finally rained. Like the heavens held their breath or something. There was no need, though.
...natural. Not like pulling teeth (like I feared, because dredging up feelings from the past almost always feels like that), or like walking into a lair of self-conscious dread. The moment you leaned over to open the car door from inside felt weirdly like a homecoming. I've seen you do it so many times before. I've smelled it too. Whenever I settle in the passenger seat, the whiff from when you leaned over always lingers around. You still use Wood Sage & Sea Salt. How many bottles has it been since the last one I gifted you? Five? Four, if you don't do that wasteful walk-into-a-perfumed-mist move anymore.
It wasn't so bad, sitting in your car. It felt like the contours of your leather seat has muscle memory, like somehow it still supported my thighs just right, and embraced the shape of my back. Comfort. Your smile looked like you were comfortable too.
You made it feel good. Not that I expected anything else, not that I expected to be held again, or hold you, conversely. It didn't feel like solace. It just felt like meeting you, yet again. The fond tug on my bangs. The scritch of my palm against your undercut. The smell of your nose (do people smell noses like I do?) The expanse of you, when I fold myself into your nooks and crannies and your chest and the part where your shoulder meets your neck. The little stories that would've been incomprehensible over text. The music. The feeling that the city moved around us versus us moving within it. We walked, but it seemed like the streets and lights arranged themselves to look like the night was ours. Yes, this is the vanity of being wrapped up in a moment, together, but it really did feel like that. Meeting you, right down the middle, and finding that the embers never really cooled off.
(...or if they did, that we had the ability to light them up at will.)
I mean. I like the me when I'm with you, always have. It doesn't have to mean anything more, apart from what it meant that day. You just kept nodding yes when I ran off with all those words. And when you hugged me before I got off the car, I could tell that we both felt light. It wasn't an ominous moment.
To marks and all. To sparks that never die, but don't have to be pursued. To our own paths, newly emboldened.
When I got home, it finally rained. Like the heavens held their breath or something. There was no need, though.
Real talk
I haven't smoked a cigarette in years.
The past few weeks, I've picked up the dirty habit again. Nothing quite close to how it was back then, but a couple of sticks a day can be a slippery slope. To be honest, it's just the stress of making a wrong decision. I'm not going to bore myself with the details of a dismal reality I've been living in for just a mere month, but for the sake of a Future Version of Nina perusing this, I'm just reminding you that you took the wrong job.
It's not a total disaster. You're paid too well, like, six-figures well, you're still being creative, you're shuttling back and forth to Singapore, you're an integral building block of ramping up the business (or so your boss tells you). But the late hours are draining you--the 2am calls servicing clients like, say, from Los Angeles who are selling ethical bamboo sheets and pillowcases. Not fun. What is there to do when stress is bearing down your neck and there's no one else awake while you have to take those calls? Smoke.
I honestly hate relying on it as a crutch again. But it just got me thinking that I'm at least at that level of adult where I know it's a habit that doesn't serve me, and is only a reactionary mechanism to get through the day. To be completely fair to myself, I've buckled up and handed in my resignation last Thursday. And I know I can easily quit cold turkey again. I've been without it for 4,5 years and I didn't really miss it. It's just suddenly got to me how I could literally change myself, change my environment, if I so will it. At one point you just get so sucked up in your own life that you forget that you could actually turn things upside down at any point, you just have to do it. The key is to decide on doing the right things. And I guess that's not always clear.
I feel so much more confident in who I am now, temporary career slip-up or not. But I guess there is still fear in finding out about the extent of my agency (and of course the privilege sandwiched in between there, I'm not going to skate around it.) One of the things I frequently toy with is just moving to another country, see if a new place could just tell me what the fuck I should do with my life. But then my experience kicks in again, and I know that if I can't make it happen where I am, it won't happen anywhere else. I am who I am in any place.
I struggle with feelings of dissonance, when I consider my skill set together with what I imagine to be intangible threads of purpose. I cannot seem to find an overlap. What I crave is community, service, but above all, expression. After all these years of being in a creative profession, it seems absolutely pathetic that I've come out feeling more like a person with nothing to say. I feel like there is a core truth to me that I've been neglecting, a sort of emotional emancipation that I subconsciously don't allow myself to experience.
Is it fear? Apathy? Comfort? A three-headed monster, most likely.
I'm absolutely fine not following anybody's concept of an acceptable timeline, in terms of doing all the "right stuff". I feel no obligation to be like my peers, to get married, to have kids. At least not right now. But I also haven't made enough effort to explore what the options could be. I'm in full coast mode, simply because I can literally afford to. I know that's truly terrible, but that's what's real. And I think I just have to place myself into a position where the safety nets are, if not totally gone, then at least unreliable enough so that I could choose to take risks that will probably hurt me in some way.
I'll probably read this later on and wonder why I just didn't do something about it. But right now, I just don't know what to do. I have options, yes. But what the fuck do I do? Do you get what I mean? I just don't know.
The past few weeks, I've picked up the dirty habit again. Nothing quite close to how it was back then, but a couple of sticks a day can be a slippery slope. To be honest, it's just the stress of making a wrong decision. I'm not going to bore myself with the details of a dismal reality I've been living in for just a mere month, but for the sake of a Future Version of Nina perusing this, I'm just reminding you that you took the wrong job.
It's not a total disaster. You're paid too well, like, six-figures well, you're still being creative, you're shuttling back and forth to Singapore, you're an integral building block of ramping up the business (or so your boss tells you). But the late hours are draining you--the 2am calls servicing clients like, say, from Los Angeles who are selling ethical bamboo sheets and pillowcases. Not fun. What is there to do when stress is bearing down your neck and there's no one else awake while you have to take those calls? Smoke.
I honestly hate relying on it as a crutch again. But it just got me thinking that I'm at least at that level of adult where I know it's a habit that doesn't serve me, and is only a reactionary mechanism to get through the day. To be completely fair to myself, I've buckled up and handed in my resignation last Thursday. And I know I can easily quit cold turkey again. I've been without it for 4,5 years and I didn't really miss it. It's just suddenly got to me how I could literally change myself, change my environment, if I so will it. At one point you just get so sucked up in your own life that you forget that you could actually turn things upside down at any point, you just have to do it. The key is to decide on doing the right things. And I guess that's not always clear.
I feel so much more confident in who I am now, temporary career slip-up or not. But I guess there is still fear in finding out about the extent of my agency (and of course the privilege sandwiched in between there, I'm not going to skate around it.) One of the things I frequently toy with is just moving to another country, see if a new place could just tell me what the fuck I should do with my life. But then my experience kicks in again, and I know that if I can't make it happen where I am, it won't happen anywhere else. I am who I am in any place.
I struggle with feelings of dissonance, when I consider my skill set together with what I imagine to be intangible threads of purpose. I cannot seem to find an overlap. What I crave is community, service, but above all, expression. After all these years of being in a creative profession, it seems absolutely pathetic that I've come out feeling more like a person with nothing to say. I feel like there is a core truth to me that I've been neglecting, a sort of emotional emancipation that I subconsciously don't allow myself to experience.
Is it fear? Apathy? Comfort? A three-headed monster, most likely.
I'm absolutely fine not following anybody's concept of an acceptable timeline, in terms of doing all the "right stuff". I feel no obligation to be like my peers, to get married, to have kids. At least not right now. But I also haven't made enough effort to explore what the options could be. I'm in full coast mode, simply because I can literally afford to. I know that's truly terrible, but that's what's real. And I think I just have to place myself into a position where the safety nets are, if not totally gone, then at least unreliable enough so that I could choose to take risks that will probably hurt me in some way.
I'll probably read this later on and wonder why I just didn't do something about it. But right now, I just don't know what to do. I have options, yes. But what the fuck do I do? Do you get what I mean? I just don't know.
Terroir
Wake up mid-morning, no longer to a grind, but as a gladiator in the middle of an existential coliseum; don't spare any thoughts about why, instead, move your body. Fasted, with only body temperature water swilling gently in your guts. Don't buckle; don't let your fingers do the talking; don't wake up to a jampacked feed; don't dilute what could be original thoughts to other people's cry-for-helps filtered with their aesthetic. Don't wake up to like what you don't like. Don't wake up to a life you don't like. Don't wake up to a life you don't like. This is how you find yourself quitting a job you loved because uncertainty felt like liberation; this is how you quit a job; this is how you find yourself drowning in art made by dead females you admire—I know you admire them because somewhere along the long commutes in Manila, you wondered how you could ever express yourself again. This is how you express yourself again; this is how you throw yourself back to yourself, I know you can do this. This is how you find the words, in the middle of sipping lukewarm coffee handcrafted by a stranger. This is how you navigate entering a new decade, all power, all apathy, all disdain for every person you swiped right for but will never meet irl. Listen, I hear you, but you have to wake up every day not listening to anyone else, because this was how you lost yourself before. This was how you became a grown-ass girl on auto-pilot, this was how you became distant from the putrid soil. This was how you ended up looking for solace in the colorway of a pair of limited editions; this was how you self-medicated with every glass of healthy green dross—sipping what you imagined could change your genetic expression, distracting yourself with the abstractions of health. This was how you could stomach small talk in meetings that looked important, looking in from a frosted window with a sliver of clear glass—you had good posture, your finger primed to press for the next slide, you had a point, you made it. This is how we get you out of this—you breathe like human beings have done so for millennia. This is how you breathe. This is how you never lose yourself again to fifteen seconds of uninterestingness, to overpriced farmer's markets, to representations that don't represent you and your shame and your truth and your capacity to grow through the cracks. This is how you listen to yourself, how you get rid of nihilism that depended on your next big paycheck; this is how you get rid of performing for a blue ribbon pinned on your brain for every fuckboy; this is how you grapple with the nature of your possible asexuality; this is how you own your brand of pleasure and fears; this is how you return to that 12 year-old who longed for connection in MySpace and early Facebook; this is how you live the sincerity of your status messages as an adolescent—away, brb, smile like you mean it. This is how you sift for the terroir of your soul; the time to talk to your mother and ask her, what were you most afraid of when you turned 30; did you feel like dying but also in control of your destiny; did you love my dad differently then; did love feel enough; did your c-sections make you sad and dislike yourself; did you also still feel like a child? This is how you continue. This is how you will conquer the digital boundaries of your life; this is how you will provide solace to yourself, this is how the next revolution will be fought—off the screens, ankles sunk in mud, your eyes to the sky; this is how you will make your own sustenance; this is how you will continue to move, every sinew stretched and loose; this is how you will remain honest, you will need to remain honest, you will need to say, I am afraid of becoming just like her, you will need to look into your front-facing camera and be able to see the outline of a person you feel fondness for, you will need to look away, you will need to say your truth out loud. This is how you grow.
---
Inspired by Jamaica Kincaid's Girl. Art by Brian Calvin.