HINDsight
How Do You Look?
Getting dressed is a basic human pleasure, and even I can confess that style is the most charming when it is expressed. But the reliance on appearance as a fundamental, nay, lasting expression of who someone is, is disaffecting. My leggings simply don’t deliver. Did they change the way I was to be perceived? Maybe. It would be socially naive to suggest they wouldn’t. But what matters is if I can come to terms with that.
Amidst Plenty
Abundance is not a bad thing, until it is multiplied into a material state of overabundance. It becomes hard to distinguish the former when we adapt to seeing the latter as a constant norm, as when the lack of extra plated food becomes abnormal… it becomes not enough.
A Day on Paper
But I’m also a regular realist who, at the end of the day, knows that it’s just normal to be living a human life in tune with a two-steps-forward-one-step-back choreography. I’m not interested in the purely ultra-human, or in the achievement of optimal results. I’m interested in the complicated and interpersonal everyday that it takes trying to get there.
My Relationship to Things
I have an XXL plain black cotton t-shirt that I’ve been meaning to get rid of, but in the past month alone, I’ve worn, washed, and ironed it at least four times. Usually, that’s a sign for me to keep something because a) it works and b) I use it regularly. The shirt is five sizes too big, has two pin–prick sized holes, and has faded into a non-fashionable washed black. It’s a Fruit of the Loom generic cotton tee that I got from a Goodwill for a design project many years ago and bought for a single US dollar that I paid for in quarters.
How I Think I Indulge
I didn’t have a clear understanding of how the world worked, but I had an inkling, as a creative person, that I was in a larger web of making stuff for temporary consumption before it all succumbed to the test of time and ended up in a pile of cultural trends, contributing to the endless cycle of creating, consuming, and then eventually, forgetting.
Something Must Be Yielding
Reading the poems I wrote, I feel all sorts of things towards my undergrad self: sympathetic, understanding, even a right amount of cringe. But mainly, as someone who works in the creative industry now, I feel like I’ve lost something.
Slow Scramble
I made scrambled eggs for breakfast Saturday morning. Seemingly unremarkable, this classic breakfast is a favorite of mine. It doesn’t require a lot of fuss. Three ingredients, including salt. You need eggs, obviously. I had two. A generous knob of butter—I’ve learned from my mom that eggs taste better with butter. Four ingredients if you want black pepper, and I always want black pepper.
Here Comes the Sun
Checking the weather is a pastime of mine. At the onset of a mid-afternoon amble, I like to lay and scroll the weather app: will the night be significantly cooler? How many hours of fresh morning weather will there be tomorrow before the sun takes center stage? Is today warmer than the rest of the week? Right now, no—at this Wednesday’s hottest, it’s going to be 37 degrees celsius. This is an anecdote I enjoyed telling my mom at breakfast this morning: we are going to have a ‘heat wave.’
It’s funny because we already live in one.
On the things that make room for pause
There are things in culture that happen so fast, they become inaccurate measurements of time. If an unimaginatively corporate video of national celebration day is put out, as some are now, it somehow makes its way into one, two, ten, twenty corners of the social media realm. Setting aside the fact that social media is a public square, and setting aside the fact that it’s run by algorithmic giants, the speed of reach is undeniable. Tiny black box in hand becomes massive white box on the highway, which becomes culture by telecommunication. Essentially, this terribly uncreative work is naturalized, less than overnight, into the landscape of cultural celebration.
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