This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Link Lists
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks getting my heart torn apart (and stitched back together) by animated series.
First, there was the seventh and final season of The Clone Wars, which steered the series to the pitch-perfect and devastating conclusion that fans had given up hoping for after six1Can you believe it? Six! Season 6 aired in 2014! I can barely even remember January of this year, god. years. Ahsoka Tano is the best addition to the Star Wars canon post-original trilogy, and this final season did justice to the character and the vital role she plays in the stories of both Anakin Skywalker and the Jedi Order as a whole.
Then there was the final season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, a series that I’d refrained from mainlining because it was a remake that hinted at some radical ambitions — and I wouldn’t have been able to take it if they couldn’t stick the landing. Spoiler alert2Not actually, but it’s a verbal tic at this point: They did, and I’ve caught up on everything, and I have spent the past few days laying on the floor, bursting with love and pride and gratitude.
I got up to yell on Discord every now and then, though.
There’s so much I want to say. I don’t think I’m at a point yet where I can lay out any of it, if only because the experience is still too raw and visceral. It’s probably ridiculous to have such an outsize reaction to what are essentially cartoons, but what can I do? I needed these stories; I’ve watched them unfold over the course of years. These goodbyes will take a while.
In the meantime, Emmet Asher-Perrit wrote a couple of thoughtful pieces over on Tor.com that really hit home:
Bonus: Noelle Stevenson3Whose work I have loved ever since she doodled the Fellowship of the Ring as roadtripping himbos on Tumblr all those years ago — bless this talented soul has given nothing but excellent interviews about She-Ra, especially now that the final season is out. Here are a couple of my favorites.
I know some people tend to associate jazz with muzak / elevator music, but to me, jazz has always been the best example of music as communication.1This being, of course, an opinion bounded by my rudimentary knowledge of jazz. I don’t claim to say this with any kind of authority or expertise. I’m an occasional enthusiast at best, lol. Which reminds me that there are some related notes from the Kindle that I should probably try to save here. Someday.
For today, some newfound gems2The Corea & Hiromi improv + Esperanza Spalding’s more recent track and old favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KmBV1j5UMI
Two of the best jazz pianists on the planet in freewheeling conversation.
This is still my favourite Hiromi piece, tho.
On the subject of favourite jazz pianists / pieces, this is another of my all-time picks. There aren’t any good live recordings of this on YouTube, which is unfortunate, because there’s nothing like watching Brad Mehldau set a piano on fire.
Jazz has its fair share of Personalities-with-a-capital-P, but it’s also a genre heavily defined by bands and collaboration. Even the Benny Goodman and the John Coltrane spent most of their careers playing in groups. Snarky Puppy, with over 40+ musicians in “The Fam,” is one of my favorite examples of the connections built when talented musicians play and create together.
Which isn’t to say today’s jazz doesn’t have capital-P Personalities, because whew, the luminous Erykah Badu.
And the incomparable Esperanza Spalding
And Takuya Kuroda, who manages to make a trumpet effortlessly cool
Let’s pretend for a second that the answer isn’t yes.
You throw a notebook into your backpack and check your phone for the time. A couple of hours to go before the first class of your last term. You’ve been back for all of two days, so home and your flat aren’t quite the same thing yet. When you reach for your trusty old cardigan, your hands shake.
A chill eats through your stomach and trickles down to your legs. When you bring your hand to your neck, it burns like an ice cube held for too long.
You stumble to your bed and wrap yourself up in threadbare blankets. If your brain weren’t rattling in your skull, you might have realized how ridiculous this is. It’s a fine day, and sunlight is streaming through your window, golden and benign.
A couple of hours to go. Maybe, if you curl up tight, you can dissolve into something warmer and reconstitute yourself in time to get to school.
You miss class.
You only have enough energy for one text asking the groupchat to inform your professor. Several people tell you to get well soon, to take care of yourself.
You remember that you’ll need a medical certificate, dated and signed, to actually be excused your absence.
You don’t have any medicine in your cabinets. Not that you could have gotten to them anyway. You’re shivering too much to crawl out of bed, and the other end of the room is miles away.
It’s mid-afternoon on a work day and the flat is empty. Even if it weren’t, you’ve barely had a conversation with any of your flatmates. Now, with your throat in tatters and your body collapsing in on itself — well, now you couldn’t ask them for help even if you wanted to.
Do you even really want to? They’ve lived here for at least half a year longer than you; your arrival forced a change in the flat’s day-to-day rhythms, and you’re still trying to make up for that by leaving as few signs of your presence as possible. Maybe, you’d thought, if they can forget that you’re there, it will be okay for you to stay.
So, again: Do you even really want to?
Here’s the thing: you’ve only skimmed the surface of everyday life in Singapore. You can do little things like deposit and withdraw money; buy groceries or odds and ends from the usual shops; use mobile data and an app to figure out which buses and trains to take.
The thought of a doctor’s appointment leaves you feeling completely out of your depth. Not just because you can barely keep your eyes open, but also because you have no idea where the nearest clinics are, let alone how to arrange for a consultation. You’re not even sure if you can find a clinic that doesn’t operate exclusively in Mandarin (or Hokkien, or Cantonese, or Hainanese, or Teochew) on the first try.1Idly, you marvel at the many ways the process of getting better can be unintelligible to you.
The good news is that it takes you two more days to do anything other than drift in and out of wakefulness. It’s just enough time for you to muster the energy for a short conversation. There are a handful of people you want to call. You wonder if it’s a good time to try. They are so far away that a sudden bout of flu would surely appear infinitesimal.
In the end, you call your school’s medical insurance provider. The staffer sounds tinny through the phone, and most of what they tell you is straight off a script, but at least you get your referral.
When you put on your jacket, you zip it up tight, like that will help hold you together long enough to make it to the clinic and back. The same thought tightens your grip on your phone, which hasn’t been able to charge beyond 20% because of a hardware flaw that you haven’t had time to get fixed. The coincidental commiseration is nice, but you’d trade it for the reassurance of a device that won’t abandon you at any moment.
You have to pre-load the map and turn off your mobile data to conserve power. When you make it to the bottom of the HDB stairs, you have to pause to catch your breath. You slump into your bus seat; you stumble out at the designated stop. At this point you realize that the transport app couldn’t update its recommendations offline, so it couldn’t tell you that there was a better route to take, one that would have spared you the need to walk the length of an endless avenue to get to your doctor’s appointment.
This is a part of Singapore that exists outside the usual circuit of your flat, your school, and occasional errands, which is to say that this is a part of Singapore that you never planned to exist in until today. Home and this place aren’t quite the same thing yet. Maybe, if they had been, you would have known better.
The clinic is tucked into a corner of an HDB complex, and it takes you five minutes to find the front door. It takes twice as long for you to fumble through your bag for your Student Pass, just so you can get your Foreign Identification Number right for the patient intake form. When the receptionist reads the form back to you for confirmation, she trips over the syllables of your last name.
You settle into a hard plastic chair and watch the next patient sign in. Thirty seconds, tops, and you never learn their name or the color of their NRIC card.
There’s nothing more you’d like than to huddle in a cocoon of blankets and plushies until you can stand to exist for more than three hours at a time again. Instead, you force yourself out of bed and force down desultory spoonfuls of oatmeal to avoid throwing up your meds.
There’s no rhythm to it, but it becomes routine all the same. Officially, you’re home sick for a total of 8 days. When you shuffle into the second class of your last term, your phone still can’t hold a decent charge and your hands still shake. But you go the whole evening without coughing your lungs out. You international kids learn about “sian” and “jalat” from the class uncle when someone uses them during discussion. Your jacket keeps you warm throughout the seminar. Your classmates walk you to the usual bus stop — and from there, at least, you know how to make your way home.
This series might be the longest-running commitment in my life right now. Ha. That’s probably because it doesn’t feel like a chore or an obligation, just something that comes into being over time.
It’s funny: there are only three playlists so far, but they span three years, which is too long and too short a timeframe at once. A lot can happen in three years — a lot did happen — but so much also stays the same.
Just reliving all these tracks again, 2019 feels almost as tumultuous as the years that came before. In some ways, the facts agree: leaving a job designed for somebody much older than I was; moving to a different country by myself; navigating a new programme and new expectations and new people in an entirely foreign environment. I took on a lot, and the enormity of these changes is jarring in retrospect. As much as I fretted about everything at the time, in the end, it was a matter of getting through each day, and that didn’t feel quite so huge in practice.
At the same time, though, not a lot has changed.
I got by mostly thanks to the openness, generosity, and kindness of different people. From G and his family to my classmates to professors and school staff, plus my friends (who put up with so many late-night calls and lengthy messages) — there was an outpouring of help, far more than I deserved, and that’s the sole reason I’m around to type this.
Which is to say, there was no point when it felt like I’d undergone some kind of massive personal upgrade. I don’t feel that much different as a person, not significantly more skilled or competent than I was before. Objectively speaking, I know more about various topics like media relations, behavioural science, data science. But that all feels external, or at least removed from my fundamental qualities as a person, if that makes any sense.
I feel, at the most basic level, the same as I have ever been.
Is that sad? All the changes of 2019 came about because I thought things would be better if I just tried to do something else. As though my life would improve if I could just capture whatever it was I was chasing after — even if I was never clear on what it was beyond just more space, I guess, and change.
In retrospect, this is a persistent pattern: I keep asking for change, terrified and thrilled by it at the same time; and some part of me expects that change to wipe the board clean and that act of resetting to automatically translate to something better.
It doesn’t, of course. If there’s any lesson that I hope will stick after this whirlwind Singapore experience, it’s that: the recognition that no big endeavor or event will ever be enough to give me all the answers, and certainly not in one go.
There’s a track in this playlist that I don’t even remember adding. But it sums up 2019 pretty well:
And I used to think that when I was grown up I’d have my life figured out I’d know exactly who I was I’d be set in my ways, not needing to change But now that I’m here, I feel more like a child Still learning my lessons and needing direction Still needing direction
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the spaces that people occupy in each other’s lives.
Relationships are hard work. This is true in that the most enduring ties are built on daily decisions to maintain them. The metaphor shouldn’t stretch to the point of relationships being toil, the work punishing and desperate, undertaken in fear of losing everything if you stop.
And that’s where I think I might have gotten lost, too nervous about the tenuous space that others have allowed me in their lives.
A couple of days ago, The Paris Review published a column from Sabrina Orah Mark that reflected on worth, job markets, crisis. Read broadly, it’s a sharp picture of capitalism as fiction, as a fantasy that asks us to take on roles where we are nothing but our functions — and therefore nothing without them.
The essay lingers in my head, mostly because of statements like this:
In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is banishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.
As trenchant a commentary as this might be when it comes to working life, I can’t help but stretch it to the anxieties of personal relationships, too. Isn’t our presence in people’s lives possible only through the role(s) we’ve taken in their stories?
What happens when those roles no longer fit us?
The simple answer is that change happens.
But that’s simple only if those roles are founded on something beyond functionality or happenstance. To put it plainly, change is less scary if the people involved go into it aiming to retain their places in each others’ lives, no matter how different the particulars might look on the other side.
How often are any of us completely assured of that?
There’s this chain of posts on Tumblr that I’ve seen several times over the years:
Tumblr getting too real these days.
I think about that tag a lot. It distills all the questions I was tiptoeing around earlier: change is less scary if you know that people still want you around despite everything, i.e., despite you having shed a lot of the functional roles you might have filled in their lives before.
The thing is, each of us decides that entirely on our own, and that means we have no power over whether other people will want to keep us around, too.1Thank God for that. Can you imagine the hell we’d all be in otherwise?
For any normal person, that would be enough reason to let it be. Anxious buggers with a perfectionist streak (i.e., me), though, could end up twisting that realization: It’s safest to assume that I will never be liked enough to be kept around, but people will allow me to linger a bit if I can be useful.
You can see the kind of internal pressure that creates.
This post will have a bit of an abrupt end, mostly because I’ve yet to untangle this chain of thoughts in any permanent way. The standard for being “useful” is so vague and amorphous that it’s impossible to live up to.2And yet, more often than not, without anybody even asking, I’m driven to chase it anyway.
In lieu of any neat conclusion, here’s a somewhat-related column from The New York Times circa 2016. Moira Weigel examines the evolution of dating practices to tease out how “[t]he economy shapes our feelings and values as well as our behaviors,” writing:
We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. … We use this kind of language because the ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.
It’s a little depressing to think that economics has seeped far enough into my psyche to shape my current neuroses, and so obviously at that. But it’s not just me, and it’s not just about dating, of course. The (false) comfort of a simple quid pro quo remains alluring to many people, no matter where along the wide range of interpersonal relationships we find ourselves. It gives people the illusion of a safety net: If I can’t trust sentiment and emotion3If I can’t stand the unknowability and uncertainty inherent in human connections, more like then I will revert to the reliable logic of transactions. Conventions of exchange, at least, are things our bleak environment forces most of us to live by, regardless of how we feel.
