musicals and books and more stuff

I've been catching up on some musicals recently (some bootlegged, some legitimate highlight clips on Youtube), and it's been really entertaining! This realization had popped up not too long ago when I watched a dance choreography showcase at school hosted by the Theater and Performing Arts department, but once again, I was put in awe at the beauty, coordination, and creativity that the human form can achieve. Some musicals I watched included:

1. Hadestown (in its entirety, I especially loved Amber Gray and the number "Way Down Hadestown", and bits of her dancing reminded me of the Wednesday Addams dance in the recent Netflix adaptation (though of course, Hadestown came first))
2. clips from Mamma Mia (before we left for winter break, my normally very quiet apartment-mate was blasting the soundtrack from her room and it was fun to sing it with her)
3. A Very Potter Musical (*chefs kiss*, I've weirdly listened to entire podcast episodes featuring the StarKid Productions actors without actually watching AVPM, but it was lovely and definitely should replace Cursed Child in canon. Also I never made the connection between Darren Criss -> Glee -> AVPM and it was very enlightening). 
4. "Cell Block Tango" from Chicago (many, many renditions and all are fantastic with their quirks. I especially enjoyed the Miscast Killer Kids 2016 and Broadway Backwards 2015 renditions.)  

It was only a few years ago when I learned that Mamma Mia was a jukebox musical, and it got me wondering if someone could write a lofi jukebox musical of Keshi, Joji, khai dreams, etc. But the crisp articulation of musical theater might not blend well with dreamy and half-mumbled bedroom pop? Hm. 

~~~~

Below is a "Library Wrapped" of books that I read from the library, and other titles that I borrowed from friends. I might be missing a few titles, but that's alright :)

1. How Not to Fall in Love (Jacqueline Firkins): enjoyable, light read! I usually will pick up a YA or romance book to ease my brain into reading before trying to parse more dense texts. (This is coded language for: I like reading YA and romance).
2. Gallant (Victoria Schwab)
3. The Anthropocene Reviewed (John Green): saw this in a bookshop in Vermont, read an essay on Green's experience as a chaplain, and checked out the book later from the library
4. The Nightingale (Kristin Hannah): read this while camping
5. A Far Wilder Magic (Allison Saft)
6. Love in the Big City (Sang Young Park): cigarettes, blueberries, friendship
7. A Darker Shade of Magic (Victoria Schwab): reread
8. A Gathering of Shadows (Victoria Schwab): reread
9. People We Meet on Vacation (Emily Henry)
10. A Conjuring of Light (Victoria Schwab): reread
11. Nothing Personal (James Baldwin)
12. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
13. Circe (Madeline Miller)
14. The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
15. The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)
16. The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart (Chesil)
17. Once Upon A Broken Heart (Stephanie Garber)
18. The Upside of Unrequited (Becky Abertalli)
19. The Wedding Party (Liu Xinwu)
20. The Kidney Hypothetical, Or, How to Ruin your Life in Seven Days (Lisa Yee)
21. All My Rage (Sabaa Tahir): I think I cried, recommend! 
22. Almond (Sohn Won-pyung): reread
23. The Mirror Visitor Series (Christelle Dabos): my fantastical reread series that has replaced Potter since donating the box set rip
24. The Ballad of Never After (Stephanie Garber)
25. Babel - Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (R.F. Kuang): thoroughly enjoyed, has footnotes, maps, academia, and low fantasy
26. Magpie Murders (Anthony Horowitz)
27. Faker (Sarah Smith)
28. Mother-daughter Book Camp (Heather Vogel Frederick): nostalgic reread
29. How Not to Kill Yourself (Set Styes)
30. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin): game dev + love!!!
31. Everything I Know About Love (Dolly Alderton)
32. Faust (Goethe)
33. God Is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens)
34. S (J.J. Abrams)
35. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
36. Lost And Found (Orson Scott Card)
37. Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir): enjoyed!!! robots :D
38. On The Road (Jack Kerouac)
39. My Mechanical Romance (Alexene Farol Follmuth): research purposes if I want to write YA romance about a high school robotics team?
40. How Not to be Afraid of Everything (Jane Wong)
41. Gender Queer (Maia Kobabe) 

~~~~

Cheers to 2023! Vague goals for the upcoming year? >:D

• employment lol
• practice I Will Follow You Into the Dark to the point where it is recognizable
• develop the film rolls
• functional uncertainty

~~~~~

Fun pictures from 2022! (December to January)

Apparently "Tahoe" is Washo for "lake", so we've been saying Lake Lake this entire time.

First and Last >:D

Zareen's

upside down (:

lol

Pinnacles

half moon bay

oslo :o

strictly lab business

mickey mouse!

pancakes

2022 :3

parties

In addition to my power electronics and MEMS classes (which would be interesting to write about in a future post), I also happened to enroll in a Cancel Culture seminar run by the Theater, Dance, and Performing Arts Department to fulfill a breadth requirement for my Masters degree. 

If you wish to read about SOIMumps processes, how to wind an inductor, or wrangling with TPUs, please let me know. As no one has reached out to me about those topics yet, I'll ramble a bit about college parties and why I mildly dislike them despite attending a few with people whose company I enjoy. 

(Update: someone has asked me to talk about TPUs!)

I cannot think of a witty caption for this inductor.

I mention the Cancel Culture seminar above as we often talk about cancellation as a from of performance. A selection of ideas brought up in class on the nature of cancel culture includes collective movement, fulfillment and subsequent breaking of roles, performance of complicity vs rage, and elements of opportunism.

In terms of how this relates to college parties: yes,  I am Holden Caulfield. But also, I am explaining to a void why I don't enjoy parties so who's the real phony? 

Anyways, the following will enumerate a few of my social incompetencies for archival purposes.

Collective movement: 

• A culture necessitates a collective of people, preferably heading towards a common location, such as a house that is hosting a party. Time of arrival varies by commute distance, transportation method, and general mood, but can range between 1-3 hours.

Fulfillment/Breaking of roles: 

• I prefer to skulk in the corner, annoying the roommate's cats and eavesdropping on conversations. Imagining everyone else at the party fulfilling the same role elicits some shame, so I push myself in baby steps, first reading the labels on all the liquor bottles before settling on 100% juice concentrate, then asking the host if I can help prepare anything or wash their dishes. Eventually, I remind myself I am an adult with thoughts and opinions. Et voila, pleasant conversation. Before long, I flirt with the idea of attempting to sing karaoke, but thankfully my senses are recovered and I retreat back into the corner. 

Complicity vs rage:

• Complicity towards the assumption that I am not a frolicking type of person has permeated my subconscious to the point where I've convinced myself that I am genuinely out of words on some occasion. Rage (or middling motivation) to contradict that would be misplaced, as it seems like I have plenty of words (as evidenced by this blog) but not much faith in people being interested, and thus preemptively choosing silence. Oops. 

Opportunism:

• In seminar, we always ask if the timely cancellation of a public figure benefits some power structure in the shadows behind them. Whether feigned or genuine, levity (particularly of the inebriated variety) does provide the opportunity for enlightening tidbits of information to be dropped. 

Complaining aside, I appreciate the people who try to pull me out of the shell and take my atypical conversation responses in stride. 

I am filled with determination.

Happy Thanksgiving! 😀

~~~ Encore ~~~

If you're happily anticipating the oncoming season of festivities and group activities -yay! Otherwise, I recently spent a Saturday reading this book, finishing at 1AM, realizing no one was awake for me to talk about the book with, then texting five separate people the same message about my feelings about aforementioned book.   

While criticisms and ways to find fault with the book is always possible, I really enjoyed it! It had a lot of elements that I cherish in books (world-building maps, dark academia vibes, footnotes!!!, some historical elements, long-winded technical explanations, fictional death). >:D

Who needs Goodreads?

when you're older :)

Apologies in advance for being self-referential. 

A lot of the posts on this blog communicate a youthful anxiety about the present and an optimism about eventual clarity in the future. Somewhat subconsciously (or as the master procrastinator I am), I left it to my older and wiser self of the future to sort out my motivations and justify why I am as I am and why others are as they are. 

Growing older has given me more tasks for daily passage of time. I want to compost to reduce my carbon footprint, forsake single-use plastic, and listen to NPR to avoid living under a rock. I try to grapple with schism between the scope of my daily struggles/pursuit of happiness in context with the larger suffering of the world. I think I am virtue-signaling to myself that I am alright, I suppose. 

Taking cues from current discourse on how to navigate a relationship between oneself and the world is one approach. Religion or philosophical theory may offer answers to others. In order to shed self-responsibility for my outcomes I've been tending to go where the wind blows, which while freeing, is also constricting to a certain local landscape. 

Sometimes it does feel a little bit hmm-inducing to continue down your track, too afraid to step off the track. So you look around at others on nearby tracks, but they are also looking around and convincing themselves that the track is fine. And so it goes (oh no!) 

To sum it up, I want to live more intentionally but having intentions sometimes seems excessive. [Come back to this in a few years.] 

Maybe that is the nature of fragility? The context of this piece is different, but I like how it encapsulates a fatalistic trend towards disorder, so you try to hold still to avoid hastening an outcome. "To leave a support system can mean to become more fragile, less protected from the bumps of ordinary life. And though fragility might be a consequence it can be recruited as cause: as if you willfully caused your own damage by leaving the safety of a brightly lit path."

updates IV

The neighbor in the apartment next door has been practicing Clair de Lune most evenings for the past week or so.

They've been gradually improving and it's pleasant to listen to through the intermittent cricket chirps.

If they take song requests, I think Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor would create an appropriate ambiance for stormily working the nights away.

Monolith, Frogner Park, Oslo, Norway

In any case, they must be Debussy fans since they're playing Golliwogg's Cakewalk now. Or maybe our piano teachers were friends, who knows. 

September has been a pretty quiet month, save for external events. As this is yet another procrasti-blog, I was wondering again whether a marker of adulthood is doing things that are not instantly enjoyable, but somehow peaceful because you've trained yourself to enjoy it. A sort of self-inflicted Stockholm situation of habituation. 

An escalator in Stockholm. 

sporadic attempts to discuss matters of the heart (SAD MOTH ch 1)

~~~

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

TLDR: This is definitely not about me lol

 ~~~

Act one begins fall semester, October 2021. Manifestation began in quarantine, spawned from idle thoughts in an empty living room. Sitting in my make-shift living-room-turned-bedroom as my roommate isolated, I considered some items left on my college to-do list. I had already done some classes, attempted some research, went on adventures with friends. Pulling an all-nighter was left unchecked, but seemed massively unappealing. SO really, the next thing to attempt was a college relationship, right? Realistically considering the sample space of people I actually interacted with on a semi-regular basis, I honest-to-god flipped a coin and thus manifested a crush. Let's call them the hedgehog since hedgehogs are cute.

I told you they were adorable.

With any decent rom-com, the meet cute is imperative. Some may say it was inevitable, really. If your brain is working hard enough to manifest a crush, it will definitely be able to do the mental gymnastics to construct the cutest of meets from the most innocent situation.

"You drink water? I drink water! What a coincidence."
Credit: https://xkcd.com/1592/

There is no Austenian ending to these stories, so there is not much to look forward to aside from a vicarious speed run of emotions and retrospectively funny events. I thought I would be fed up with the foolish human construct of love, but James Baldwin convinced me otherwise that love is a decently difficult, if not respectable, endeavor. I guess this is a self evaluation for future reference.

As for the initial condition, I was in that peculiar hazy state of awareness, in which you know of a person's existence, but you aren't entirely sure if they know of yours. Normally, that would induce some sense of sneaky superiority within me, but for the purposes of gaining someone's attention, I had to somehow change that. 

some more angsty musings (but long form!)

I've been putting off cleaning my room for two four weeks now, and these two four weeks were on top of the three weeks I spent graduating, "decompressing", and cavorting around the East Coast and Scandinavia. So currently, per usual, I am procrasti-blogging and about as decompressed as a bag of Lays on a flight en route to Copenhagen. 

The view from the Church of Our Savior (Copenhagen)

Aside from running, reading, working, and avoiding thoughts of the future, I've been feeling a little stagnant in the personality department as of late. Stagnant as in externally functional and acceptably amicable (if a bit on a quiet side), but internally lost, tired, and screaming about what the hell is going on. My hunch is that these are symptoms of living in the Bay Area, existing as a 21-year-old, or both.

After acknowledging my set of uncomfy emotions, my immediate reaction is to reflect on all the fortunate people and things that I have experienced in my relatively care-free life, and guiltily convince myself that while acknowledging sad and cynical thoughts is justified, I should move on and try my best to be a good human bean.

At least, that is the discount therapy approach I've taken for the past few years.  

We interrupt this programming with a view of some farmland witnessed during a train ride from Copenhagen to Stockholm, in which a kind lady sitting diagonal to me (and thus with a forward-facing seat) gave me a heads up when pretty scenery was about to pass by.

Anyways, a common theme of this blog is to conclude: "Well, I'm not really sure what I am doing, but if I try my best to be a good person, I suppose that's all I can really do."

Which is a bit of a cop-out coping mechanism in my own humble opinion about my own humble opinion. So, I will try to address the following questions in an attempt to move on with my life and regain some self-confidence and spunky can-do attitude that college seemed to have stomped out of me. Intermittently, I will add some vacation pics to remind myself that yes, I had fun.

i am a little afraid to google the symptoms of depression but this goggle-wearing shark convinced me to do so just now, and the NIMH tells me that while a few symptoms are there, i think i have good people around me and routines that help keep me energized and appreciative of life :) i also acknowledge that post-grad depression is a widely-experience phenomena, but in the off-chance someone on the internet is reading this, please get help and talk to someone if you are experiencing symptoms (or if you just want to talk to someone, which is a basic human necessity). it was not my intention to self-diagnose in an image caption, but after a quick consultation with a friend, we established that yeah a lot of people experience these feelings in some perverse "new normal", but we try to strike a balance in being open about sad thoughts without making it our personality.

0. Who are you?
Given a scrap of downtime, I'll turn into an over-thinker, but a self-aware one at least. I've been casually mentioning the topic of how to craft an identity outside of being a student to my post-grad peers, but most answers seem to reduce aptly to "it's a work in progress." Granted, I can probably attain a wider net of answers by reaching out to more people, but I honestly don't know too many older folks aside from my parents and people at my work (in which I feel asking the question "Help IDK what I'm doing in life" may not give the best impression to my manager. I'll have to workshop the wording a bit.)
Anyhow, I thereby employed the all-knowing source of how-tos (aka WikiHow), to figure out who I am. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I've done the prerequisites for self-actualization, namely writing down my thoughts (obviously) and setting some goals and priorities (see question 2 below). The remainder of the article is less-satisfying, ending on an airy "be patient and curious about yourself", with the latter suggestion clearly being the impetus for this article in the first place. 

Short of resolving to live, laugh, and love, I'll settle for some updated fun facts (!!!) about myself. I'll add a gentle reminder that fun is relative, and that there is already probably too much information about myself on the internet, so as a result these facts will be of the shallower variety. 

Me in some garden in Oslo, circa 2022. 

• Compared to my 16-year-old self in the "About Me" section of this blog, I:
• sadly can no longer read on moving vehicles without incurring nausea
• still see myself 44 years in the future in the companionship of at least one cat
• no longer have access to a bass clarinet
• don't talk about vincent 😶
• I do enjoy reading YA fantasy novels, webtoons, and occasional contemporary/historical fiction.
• My potential places of habitation are inconveniently dependent on access to Chinese vegetables.
• Some hobbies include biking around, visiting libraries, being self-conscious about enjoying playground swings in the presence of small children, and mocking hipster culture as penance for my hipster tendencies.
• As stated in previous blog posts, my favorite form of self-indulgence is writing blog posts about myself for absolutely no one to read. (hi julia!)

1.What are you doing?

It is currently 22:31 PM, and I was thinking about falling asleep to the delightful background commentary of Seaweed Brain: A Percy Jackson Podcast, as once does, but I figured I should finish writing this post before having to register for classes for the upcoming semester. 

I'm interning at a company that produces consumer electronics, and I am pleasantly surprised to see synergy between theoretical knowledge and practical skills gained from school, and the technical know-how from teammates who have experience engineering actual stuff. I am also slightly proud at enrolling in dental/vision insurance from my employer and utilizing those benefits, which tips the scale of job satisfaction in the opposite direction to my 35 mile commute.

Aside from work, I've been watching a lot of Iron Chef, much to the chagrin of my parents, who would rather watch me cook than watch me watch people cook. 

I'm slowly crafting a post-grad Kaitlyn, and it is not unlike drafting a DnD character sheet. Should I invest in +3 charisma to help me get through daily conversations, with a tradeoff of -2 in dexterity? Or should I shun our human desire to fit into society and pour all my stats into constitution to ride out the impending apocalypse... Someone back in college told me that to converse lightly with coworkers, it is handy to have a hobby to wax poetic on to show you have a life outside of circling back to key learnings.

I've designated biking as my non-shop talk of choice (note: this is not my bike). I was also talking to a friend about the distribution of DnD stats people would select if they could design their child on a character sheet, but then I got called a nerd :c 

2. What do you want?

As a bit of a late bloomer, I think my sentience as a human being really began around the age of 16, and grew exponentially upon entering college at 18. Prior to my awakening, I lived my life on a day-to-day basis, fulfilling the basic rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I existed innocently and ignorantly, and soaked up all the nutrients that my family and community afforded me without question. Accordingly, I never had to think too far ahead of what I actually wanted, as the subset of potential outcomes was constrained enough (at least in my mind) to the point where I figured I would bump into the opportunity at some point.

And then bam, I entered college and the subspace of potential outcomes multiplied, and bam the same thing happened after graduating undergrad. To once again use gaming analogies (as the non-gamer I am), I spent a lot of time investing in my stats and 'leveling up' to unlock new paths. But coupled with my self-inflicted need to justify my existence as a person (with I attribute to either astoundingly high or cripplingly low self-esteem -there is no happy medium), you can see how I was faced with decision anxiety. 

A subway station in Stockholm. Alt text: where does the escalator of life lead to *whoosh*

So what do I want? I want to be comfortable with myself individually, as well as a part of a larger society. The first 16-18 formative years of my life molded me from a blob of cells to a semi-independent, generally-functioning human being. Years 18-21 expanded the breath of people and paths I saw available, while honing the depth of skills that allow me to be employed. 

In anticipation of the next few years, I've always felt turmoil about the debate surrounding stability vs adventure, nobility of a cause vs a living wage. Why the two are always framed as diametrically opposed, I am not so sure, but I've another year to once again open up a few more paths in the career department before etching out some grand plans for myself.

But I want at least begin to narrow down what I think it means to be a decent human being, where my existence can have a net benefit on the world, while balancing it with the need to live for myself as well. 

My post is getting a bit ramble-y, but this blog post about 'Your Life in Weeks', helped put some things into perspective. Our time on Earth is neither infinite nor instantaneous. Faced with my mortality in the form of a grid of blank squares, I feel at the age of 21 that I'm on a decent pace -neither accelerated nor (thankfully) cut short. And there are a lot of future squares to live through as well, with their blankness being both nerve-wracking to my choice paralysis and enticing to my fear of stagnancy. 

To finally end all this wooshy pondering, I'll just commit some tangible goals down here in no particular order: 

A list of some potential aspirations of varying effort:

- record a podcast episode (topic TBD)

- drive a stick shift car

- become a teacher

- get good at being an engineer

- camp!

A clean room is in sight eventually q.q

updates

 per usual, procrastination spawns another blog post

this time, instead of synthesizing research updates for the professor who allowed me into the Masters program, i will once again attempt to self-actualize and be cool with myself as a human being.

the daily concern is that i am degrading in quality as a person. are the choices i make solely to benefit myself? where am i to offload my uncertainties and confusion and indirection without the guilt of burdening people?

is the intrinsic value of trying hard just to spend time well on earth. sdjflkdsjf why is this so cringe-inducing. 

i think i'm just a bit tired and burnt out. 

oops

rejections on multiple fronts both indirect and quite direct

the more i want something, am i less likely to attain it

but if you don't want anything, can you progress

farming motivation!

In response to my previous haiku, written in the midst of dead week during which stringing together complete sentences takes far too much thought, here is a stretched out piece in which I try to figure out the coming few years of my life in the main way I know how -synthesizing other people's blog posts, cherry picking bits that I like, checking my latest occupational obsession based on the currently airing Kdrama, applying a weighted filter, and tossing it all to the wind.

My current status is a bit flighty. I feel competent but not confident. I suppose I can carry out tasks adequately (or maybe people are too nice to tell me otherwise), so theoretically I can probably jump off any branch, struggle a bit, and safely land. Nonetheless, this approximation of competency isn't too helpful in deciding which branch to leap off of.

To roughly quote my roommate and Captain Levi, "choose for yourself whatever you will regret the least, but don't get eaten".

So, I will turn to others who have mused the question of direction and see which suits myself.

Picking a Career

What can I enjoy in the "tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life"? What is a career I can choose that will mold so many aspects of my life (for better or worse). The author offers the following framework to help guide such a decision. Considering my risk tolerance and personal values, I would proportion my Yearning Octopus to be approximately 20% personal (driven by a fear of deathbed regrets and forgotten dreams), 5% social (I'd like to think I'm immune to the judgment of the broader society, save for a few people who hold my delicate ego intact), 5% lifestyle (a fun Friday for me is buying a new flavor of ice cream from Safeway), 20% moral (please let me believe that the world can get better), and 50% practical (thanks, Mom and Dad). 

Unpacking the previous revelations, I think a fear of failure is still the main "scary monster" of my life. Rationally, it isn't a fear of failing society, as I already decided to lower my social tolerance to 5%. I suppose then it is more a fear of practical failure, personal failure, and moral failure. Given my lack of an actual career, surely I cannot have personally or morally failed in those aspects yet. But the practical tentacle isn't exactly quaking yet either given the world's current tech obsession. So really there isn't much for me to fear, and I simply am hesitant to commit to a career that can potentially lead to a path of failure. Which, as I am typing this out, is self-admittedly a bit silly. 

So my general conclusion from this current career advice piece is: try something scary but don't do it half-heartedly. Mind the pace I am attempting life, retrospect and wallow in existential crises once in a while, apply a feedback loop, and keep chugging along. Also, try to get over the fear of fearing potential failure. I'd like to think that the added layer of fear abstraction is some character growth from my previous stage of direct fear-to-failure connection. 

Keeping Friends

Continuing along the theme of figuring out life, the proximity and spontaneity that college provides and friendships thrive on are likely to fade a bit in the coming years. For me, this boils down to putting in the work to reach out to friends and remaining genuine in our interactions :) Appropriate levels of vulnerability and empathy are helpful as well. 

Higher Education!

On the theme of farming motivation, I read a few blogs by people applying to grad school and was somewhat relieved to learn that they also were slightly clueless and not necessarily dead set from birth to pursue a higher degree. It does not need to be about something I think day and night about, as long as I am sufficiently curious and willing to work on it. The prospect of boosting my confidence with a degree I worked on, as well as the comfort of remaining a student perched above the jaws of corporate America for another year, are my main motivations so far. Year One into the pandemic, I thought that a direct pipeline to industry would feed my practicality yearning. Year Two has also passed, and given the constant state of ~uncertainty~, I think my tolerance to last minute swerves has been increased to the point where I apply to a Masters program two months before the deadline. 

Now that I have sufficiently procrastinated by writing this post and decided to Do The Thing, I suppose I should get started. Wish me luck! :D

Yes, I spent the last three days watching four seasons of Attack on Titan. No, I can't be bothered to properly format this image.