Author Archives: Sophie Lee

End of January 2023: On the Interior

So it’s another year of end-of-month posts! I am choosing to break from my pattern of titling each monthly post with a gerund, so maybe these posts will make even less sense. There are no rules this year. Who knows what will happen!?

Right now I am thinking about the future and watching the squirrels run across the power line outside my north-facing window. Usually there are two of them, chasing each other up and down the big tree. Sometimes I stare out the window until they show up. I wonder if they can see me.

January was a long month for me. I am reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse again. It’s one of my favorite books and feels especially appropriate this time of year. Maybe it’s something about the coldness of the prose or the way that time moves throughout the book. Woolf also knows exactly how to write about introspection and the interior lives of people. That really resonates with me. I think she is such a genius. Few books make me think as hard about the human condition as that one.

What else? Here is a list for you: I have been saying yes to doing things with friends. I have been watching a bunch of movies. I have been drinking a bunch of orange juice. I have been writing letters. I have been trying to observe the moon. I have been walking a lot. I have been sleeping strangely and logging my dreams. I have been drinking two cups of coffee a day. I have been stressed. I have been hopeful! I have been.

For the best of times
For the worst of times

Survival

In a zombie movie you panic
and clamor for paper. Blood(?) 
seeps through the door but 
you need to write a friend 
and just can't put it off. 
You fumble with the address 
(the seven is a two) and may not live
to find a stamp, but 
why else be alive now? 
Why else put your pen to paper 
in search of some words 
that you know will not do? 
Still, you scribble
I remember feeling ill 
with love 
for everything 
and you
then stare at the page 
while sunrays die into you 
like rain, for sometimes it's dusk 
when the world looks most rosy
with ideas and justice 
and you notice at last how
your forearm is gone, 
lopped off for a mile 
while you were still
in your head 
with a warm memory.

[Note: I am finishing editing this poem and posting it quickly to avoid self-censoring too much. This one is a little bit wacky, but I love movie tropes; I love writing letters; I love sunlight, and I love memories that make me pause for a minute. I think romanticization and dystopia go well together. Life can feel like that sometimes!]

End of December 2022: Time and Time Again

It’s the last day of the year and time has never felt more vivid. Happy New Year’s Eve!

How was this year for you? Some have said that 2022 has felt like a continuation of 2020 (AKA the Lost Year, AKA a year that didn’t happen). I don’t think this sentiment rings true for me, though the pandemic and its effects are still widely felt. I’ve found that the people around me have had a renewed commitment to living a certain way this past year. I’m not really sure how to describe it more precisely, but there is a different energy. [I am trying not to use the words “vibe” or “vibes” but it turns out that this is very hard?]

I time-travelled recently when I was traveling home from a trip. I left Singapore at 8:00 AM local time and arrived in Seattle at 8:30 PM local time in the same day, but had travelled for 31 hours in between. OK, maybe time zones don’t count as time travel. But I was contemplating the year during those hours spent in limbo between time zones. I felt time stretching around me while the hours were simultaneously condensing. Though I guess I was so tired I would have believed a lot of things.

Yesterday, I ate breakfast with Anne, one of my oldest and best friends, and we talked about resolutions. They are so hard to set and keep for some reason! I think there is some science about why they do not work. But there is definitely still value to goal-setting. At this point in life I am still just trying to figure out how to do it better. So no resolutions to write about at the moment. Sorry.

Tangential sidenote: Something else that makes me very aware of the passage of time is the Vanity Fair Billie Eilish interview that comes out every year. Change probably just feels more palpable for young people, especially for someone who is in the spotlight and thus feels pressure to keep reinventing. I love reflecting (hence this entire blog) but I don’t necessarily like reliving the past. Nor do I like watching videos of myself or hearing my own voice. But that’s probably a different thing.

I wish everyone reading this a great 2023! I have a feeling it will be a great year with many challenges and new revelations. This blog will be continuing into the new year (because I forgot to turn off auto-renew for WordPress yet again) so stay tuned. Or don’t! Change your whole life! Or don’t 🙂

Year in Lists: 2022

Goodbye, 2022! You were very good to me, though I had kind of a flop year in terms of media consumption. I am also usually fashionably late to things. Nevertheless, here are some lists of things I enjoyed that came out this year.

Movies and Film

- Fire of Love 
- Cha Cha Real Smooth 
- Everything Everywhere All at Once 
- RRR
- Fire Island
Television (new episodes this year)

- Ziwe (Showtime)
- Wednesday (Netflix)
- Money Heist: Korea - Joint Economic Area (Netflix)
- Succession (HBO)
- Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend (Netflix)
- RuPaul's Drag Race (VH1)
- The Rehearsal (HBO) 
Albums

- The Loneliest Time - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Being Funny in a Foreign Language - The 1975
- Hold the Girl - Rina Sawayama
- Renaissance - Beyoncé
- Midnights - Taylor Swift
- Crash - Charli XCX
- SOS - SZA
Podcasts/Webseries

- Modern Love (New York Times)
- Las Culturistas (Big Money Players & iHeartPodcasts)
- 5-4 (Prologue Projects)
- Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlin (Ramble)

- Make Some Noise (Dropout)
- Game Changer (Dropout)

- Never Too Small (YouTube)

A few lists full of non-media items: Fight me!

Overrated in 2022:

- The word "vibes" 
- Cow milk
- Two-factor authentication (I'd rather get hacked)
- Stress culture 
- FOMO 
- Living in fear of “The Big One” (this is just for me)
Underrated in 2022:

- Using Venmo like social media
- Trader Joe’s Taiwanese Green Onion Pancakes (sorry these are so good)
- Going to restaurants alone
- Sitting on a bench in the sun with no other stimuli
- Juice... especially orange juice
- Dressing up for things for the sake of it
- Using the US Postal Service recreationally (huge advocate)
- Facetiming your sisters and playing Splatoon 3 together (when possible)
Forecasts for 2023:

- Demise of Facebook (I hope) 
- Demise of NFTs (I hope)
- Legwarmers become mainstream fashion
- Resurgence of wired earbuds and headphones
- Elon Musk appears in a Marvel movie
- Teenagers on TikTok mobilize to solve a major crime
And?
- Everyone reading this has a great year 🙂

Things to Love

Dear world. To save myself from finals-related spiraling and from listening to way too much Lana Del Rey, here is a blog post slash poem slash meditation slash prayer.

Lately, my days are not very dynamic. I am severely vitamin D deficient and I feel like my body is hibernating while my mind works too much. So I have been compiling a list of things that are life-affirming to me. I am inspired by a poem called “Love” written by Alex Dimitrov, who is one of my favorite poets (and also my former professor). Every line of his poem starts with “I love” and it continues indefinitely on Twitter, one line a day. Anyways, as an exercise in gratitude and poetry, here are some things that I love. They make me feel more real. Here is the (non-exhaustive) list now while I am feeling earnest. Thank you for reading and I hope all is well with you!

THINGS TO LOVE:

* A good night of sleep
* Orange juice
* Friendships that last years
* Sunlight and how it streams in through the window unapologetically 
* Laughter that hurts the ribs
* The color red
* Hearing people talk about what they love
* Preparedness, until it doesn't make sense
* Sweaters and my favorite jeans
* Doing nothing because I can't help but think about everything
* Being alive because it is so hard sometimes
* My pothos plant 
* Music that people put their entire souls into
* Seasons and what they represent to people
* Calendars
* Cinnamon rolls 
* Aestheticism, beauty, things that exist for no practical purpose
* The solemnity of mornings 
* The solitude of nights
* The squirrels that run across the power lines outside my window and chase each other 
* Impractical clothing
* Birthdays (not mine)
* Dusk
* Writing letters to friends, of course
* This poem by Eileen Myles, called "At a Waterfall, Reykjavik":

	I still feel like
	the world
	is a piece of bread
	
	I'm holding 
	out half
	to you.
	
* Brutality (only in theory)
* Bone broth 
* The feeling that I am becoming my own person 
* Movies with stunning combinations of sound and color 
* Looking forward to other things
* Dvorak's New World Symphony
* Flowers as gifts
* Clarity 
* And bravery (may we all have it!)

End of November 2022: Permanence

A futile attempt at cohesion… many rambles this month!

Happy end of November, which is often one of the hardest months (at least in my book). November feels like it’s for suffering; it has neither the intrigue of October, nor the celebratory nature of December. Maybe that’s just me. But I should also say that this doesn’t mean that November has to be a bad month! Mine was lovely. I think.

I chose to reflect on permanence this month for a few reasons. (1) Big life decisions often feel permanent and I feel like I am in a transitory period. (2) Something about winter also feels very permanent, as if all the trees, animals, and people are buckling down and hardening. Everyone knows that spring is coming, but for a span of time, there is a suspension of confidence that it will actually arrive. Like we are all holding our breaths. Do you relate? Winter feels infinite for a brief minute. (3) And I got a tattoo!

Even this personal-journal-blog feels permanent in a way. The internet is scary and I do not live in a European country that exercises the “right to be forgotten.” Oh well. It can be hard to cope with permanence sometimes, but I guess writing helps me deal with the passage of time. In a nihilistic way, there is nothing that really matters because nothing will really outlive us, I suppose. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that nothing matters. In a truer sense, everything matters. Ok I’m going to move away from this topic actually.

I think the fear of permanence also has to do with external pressures. Perhaps it’s school, jobs, family, friends, etc. Pressure to make the right choice makes every choice seem more permanent. Idk. I am self-diagnosing here because I am a very indecisive person. I feel like a newborn deer most of the time, wobbling on my legs and seeing everything for the first time… but in a way that makes me oscillate between feeling overwhelmed and feeling full of awe at life. [I think I’m just describing anxiety lol.]

Ok maybe this post was a little too honest. I guess I am just trying to help us all be less anxious about the future, but I regret getting so empirical. Let’s all be hopeful, shall we? Life is sweet. I don’t know how to end this, so I’ll leave you with a poem by the late Bernadette Mayer.

Reverb

Everyone returns. Lately 

I cannot stay awake enough,

the coffee eats itself to bits,

I missed the blood moon

and blamed the weather. Turns out

I missed the rain too. No, 

it's true. I cannot keep my mind

from clouding up with knots,

vitamins, pine needles, 

and futurisms. A tough word,

futurisms. I don't mind. 

Nothing makes me more sure of time

than the solemn close of the year

for this is just for now. The sound:

an open window in the living room,

water running, another person,

a plane overhead, and then,

The Planets, by Holst, everyone 

trying again for a feeling. Oh

how the day feels slow

waiting for you, waiting for cold air.

Yes, I missed the cold air.

On Living: Mary Oliver and the Woods

So I don’t post much on this blog beyond my end-of-month posts, but today I was absolutely floored by a Mary Oliver poem and had to put my thoughts down. Here is the poem:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.


“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

I don’t know what to say. But here are words anyways. Mary Oliver is a genius. I don’t know how she gets away with so much little repetition, yet manages to keep pace in this poem. I don’t know why the choice of “three things” works so well when this is not a fairytale. I don’t know how she can get away with using the word “salvation.” I don’t know how I can see the Blackwater Woods in my mind now, though I have never been to Cape Cod.

I love the woods. I love the cyclic nature of the woods. I love the peace and the slow growth. I love big existence. Nature is a trope that is all at once so overdone, so necessary, and so true. I don’t know! This poem makes me so emotional; it makes me think about how there are so many things and people I want to hold against my bones. And how everything is so ephemeral. But still, it is better this way.

Here are some songs that give me a similar feeling: the bigness of life and existence. The smallness of today in the scheme of everything. Enjoy them today and every day.

I think this song is in a famous movie from the past thirty years. I don’t remember which one.
This song is so phenomenal and so beautiful. I think the title is genius too.
This song makes me want to be in love.