Category Archives: Blog

End of 2024: List of Love

Happy end of 2024! I love the new year and its shiny promise… but for now, I made a list of the things I loved most over the last twelve months. Best wishes to us all in 2025.

  • Old friends
  • New people and optimism
  • Carrot juice
  • Wavy perms
  • Caffeine twice a day (once on the weekends)
  • Audiobooks in the car, especially
    • Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
    • My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
  • Calling friends weekly
  • Sweaters ugh I love them
  • Staying in
  • Jump rope for fitness
  • Malatang and other spicy soups
  • Having multiple beverages at once
  • Songs by women with short titles
    • “Impossible” by Clairo
    • “Scott Pilgrim” by Plumtree
    • “anything” by Adrianne Lenker
    • “Track 10” by Charli XCX
    • “Heaven” by Mitski
    • “Dreaming” by Blondie
  • Movie scores while studying
  • Relearning how to be alone, after forgetting
  • Big daunting academic projects, now done
  • The lasting desire to be a better reader
  • The lasting desire to be a better writer
  • Forgiveness and stillness and not saying anything
  • Video games, alone and with friends
    • League of Legends (yeah)
    • Stardew Valley
    • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
    • Mario Party Jamboree
    • Night in the Woods
  • Hoarding many of the same picture of my dog
  • Wearing the same four outfits all semester
  • Feeling melancholy about school
    • But saying bye to nostalgia
  • My Yoshitomo Nara flip clock
  • My Gentle Monster Kiko sunglasses
  • Unexpected letters and postcards from friends
  • Zines, as always
  • Selfies
  • Ibuprofen
  • Sleeping well
  • Feeling like myself, again
  • French fries
  • Lamb biryani

See you next year ❤

End of November 2024: Adoring

How is December treating you so far? I walked to the store and enjoyed the white winter sun in Los Angeles. I bought raw marinated crab, leafy vegetables, and a handful of chestnuts to roast later.

I am doing laundry and remembering what it means to be a person during the winter. I am also struggling with my interior life. I don’t quite know how to sit with it. (I wish I could be the perfect amount of busy for the rest of my life.)

It’s finals season, but I can only think about writing and creating. I made a crochet tapestry that says “MORE ZINES!! MORE LIFE!!” Life is too short to resist pursuing slivers of universal truth in the form of art. But then again. Life is too short to not be grateful for what we are already doing. Can’t both things be true? Change your life. Or don’t! Roast your chestnuts and do your laundry. Write your new manifesto. Do what you can, then do what you want. Then do what you can again.

End of October 2024: Going Forward


"This Room" by John Ashbery:

The room I entered was a dream of this room. 
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. 
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up. 

We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

I want to write with the luminous clarity of Ashbery. He paints a picture of something mundane, something routine. But he sees the portal in it: the refraction of daily life sparkling underneath. Suddenly, something makes sense, or we learn something about ourselves. Or about someone. “You are not even here.” We haven’t solved everything, but there is a moment of realization and the poem becomes a photograph. He finds gems embedded in sedimentary rock. He polishes them and sits them on his desk.

This webzine and blog is dedicated to going forward. I try to keep myself grounded by living through the mundane, seeing and logging moments of luminous clarity. It is really hard sometimes, and it was hard this month. We can peel back layers of the past, but I want to keep going forward. I want to keep discovering more about myself and the world, even though it can be so hard to be. But as long as we are still willing to walk into the opaque mist, there will be more to find.

I hope you enjoy November and find some peace and clarity. I wonder how things will change, improve, and progress next month. We’ll just have to see.

July and August Again

“Meanwhile the world goes on,” says Mary Oliver. I repeat her poems to myself like mantras—for comfort. Lately I am finding it hard to achieve balance in my life. I want to focus on myself, but I don’t want to sink too far into myself. I want to want things, but I don’t want to obsess over them. I want to feel everything, but not too intensely. Or maybe I do. In retrospect, I always do (it makes for better writing). But I cannot control everything. I can barely control anything. It must be necessary to let go of that urge to dictate the timeline that the world has for me. Otherwise I am wrenching myself from the hands of greater forces.

Taking my own advice this month has been hard. I have been living extrovertedly this month, and now I find that I cannot be alone. I am proud of the person I am, but also seeking nervous attachment. It kind of sucks that the struggle to achieve healthy self-esteem is a lifelong process. Somewhat relatedly: I have a hard time accepting that nothing is really innately fair. The world owes us nothing, but we owe the world everything!

I am on a plane and missing optimism. But it will find me again soon because these things are cyclical. I will make something and return to myself shortly. I will listen to “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” and think about movies. I will eat some pesto. I will put these thoughts out into the ether like I do every month, letting them float there miraculously as lines of code and otherwise meaningless symbols. Meanwhile the world goes on.

End of June 2024: Addition

This has been a good month. Lots of fulfilling weeks, days, and minutes. I write now just a few hours before I need to post this. In my fatigue and commitment to myself, I am finding a well of gratitude for the people in my life. In the blank minutes where my mind finds rest, I feel happy. Reader, thank you for reading.

End of May 2024: Somewhere on a Beach

I took a solo day trip to the beach and had a wonderful time. I drove the Pacific Coast Highway. I hiked around Point Dume in Malibu. I smiled at some strangers and let them pass me. I brought water and taro chips. I read Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others on the beach. I parked my car so that I could open the back and look at the ocean. I saw the waves on the backup camera. I wrote this when I was staring at the water: 

I am sitting on a slope at the beach having just read "Story of Your Life" and the day has not cleared up. The sky is still white and murky. I looked up and sat up and became filled with a renewed sense of hearing. I could hear it all and appreciate it all. I sit in a sweater and the wind from the sea floods my lungs and it feels clean. I am happy to be alive here! Happy to be now.

End of April 2024: Poem for You

Hi out there. April is National Poetry Month and also National Make Sophie Incredibly Busy Month. April is also my yearly reminder to never let people forget I majored in Creative Writing. So here is a poem for you from my most recent zine. It is my favorite of the few poems I have written in the last couple of months. [An Ars Poetica is typically a poem about the craft of writing and poetry itself.] Enjoy your spring! Rooting for you!

Ars Poetica

I'm going on Survivor
to write about nature.
It will be brutal,
but the wilderness calls. As Whitman says
in "Song of Myself,"
these are the days that must happen to you.
Out here I am born, winds
slice like machetes
and the sun is my flint,
but my team is so sick of me
I hear them plotting all day:
Why do we keep the poet around? 
She works so hard, 
but she is not strong.
I say, Do you see the blue hermit crab
inhabit a room
to inhabit itself? 
Don’t you know "stanza" means "room"
and the sky is a house?
So they vote me off 
and I leave on a boat, now
I write this to prove
I am still from the world,
my poems and the waves
both taking me back.