Recent reads and recent thoughts

I've really only been reading teen/young adult fiction, and honestly, I've no problem with that.

Today I finished Scarlet by Marissa Meyer. It's been a long time coming, since it feels like I read Cinder ages ago. Technology, thankfully, made it easier for me to actually get to it, even if it was in the form of an e-book. In fact, I probably read it even faster in the form of an e-book, without the strain of trying to fight the pages as I laid down to read.

Not that I don't love the feeling of turning pages, that is. I read Wink Poppy Midnight by April Tucholke recently (see previous post) on a whim because of the intriguing font and "mystery" label it had received on display at the library from my last visit. I read, O Great One! by David Novak, a non-fiction story disguised as a fiction one demonstrating the role of recognition. (That was a feel good read that I recommend, but I can see where some would not find the same sentiment.) Finally, I actually acquired two physical books because I just couldn't help myself: Romeo and/or Juliet by Ryan North and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

I don't purchase books often because, as far as I can tell, I have never reread a book that I decided to own for a reason other than school. I've reread The Westing Game and portions of Atlas Shrugged and countless volumes of manga but never really the books I've purchased. I may reread You're Never Werid on the Internet just to be encouraged by Felicia Day's voice again. But yep, never an actual novel. So I've strayed away from buying books because it ends up being just a desire to have a pretty cover on the shelf and far away from actual use of space (and money). 

However, I did pick up Romeo and/or Juliet for it's throwback to the popularity of choose-your-adventure novels and resultant re-read likelihood. Or rather, the inherent necessity of a reread for the full experience. That's something you would never really want to experience as an e-book, something in which the medium takes away from the experience. 

And let's be real. I picked up A Tale for the Time Being mainly for its cover. I bought it in hardcover and its dust jacket is stunningly vibrant and enticing. I tried to read it last summer but lost momentum around halfway through (not necessarily because of the book itself, but perhaps the timing). As a result it's been sitting on my Goodreads "Currently Reading" list, well, not being read. It's still there long after I had to return the copy to the library. So I got my own.

This summer has kind of been about getting through series I've meant to finish or reading quick stand-alone novels. I would also like to clear off my "Currently Reading" list. They're a sad reminder of the stories left in limbo, unfinished, in my brain. It's true that I've likely really forgot what exactly was happening in these stories in the moments I stepped away from them, left them behind, so they're not necessarily taking up head space. However, every time I open up Goodreads, I see them sitting there, on the side, neglected, never updated, and it weighs on me. 

As I mentioned, A Tale for the Time Being is on that list. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is right there beside it. These two novels keep each other company, a reminder of the days I willingly surrounded myself in that mystical feeling of the world being more ethereal and enigmatic than it should be. It was a phase of liking something I'm tempted to call magical realism without not truly knowing exactly to what that label and genre refer. I want to (and perhaps need to) revisit that reflective phase again.

Here's my reading list as I move on from Scarlet and wait for Cress, and subsequently Winter, become available to me:

1. The Last Ever After by Soman Chainani (borrowed from Phoebe)
2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (so Becca can borrow it)
3. rest of The Lunar Chronicles as the appear
4. A Tale for the Time Being and the rest of the unfinished books that I own

Let's see how much progress I can make!

From "Extraordinary Means" by Robyn Schneider

Written on snippets of scratch paper, to ponder on. The most interesting part is pondering the reason I felt compelled to write down these parts. I think I'm working hard on finding meaning in my own existence.

No one kept in touch, they just kept up. And then, when they couldn't keep up anymore, they forgot. (p. 170)

Yes, we'll party like nameless minor characters in a novel about someone else. (Sadie, p. 246, about Great Gatsby)

We mourn the future because it's easier than admitting that we're miserable in the present. (Lane, p. 249)

Haven't you ever thought about it? What you want to leave behind, and what you don't? (p. 261)

It's strange how we can lose things that are still right there. How a barrier can go up at any moment, trapping you on the other side, keeping you from what you want. How the things that hurt the most are the things we once had. (p. 276) 

Being temporary doesn't make something matter any less, because the point isn't for how long, the point is that it happened. (p. 284)

I was tired of being an empty box, of maintaining a checklist instead of a passion, of having skipped so many rites of passage that were lost to me now.

We all reach for whatever we think is going to dull the pain, and sometimes we don't even want whatever it is, we just want not to be miserable, you know. 

I really did enjoy this novel, particularly the humor of the characters. The medical aspect of it (XDR-TB) was also very compelling and emotionally moving to me. Prior to this book I finished Allegiant, and currently I'm reading Wink Poppy Midnight. All three books have the multiple-character first person format, and so far, Extraordinary Means felt the most natural and easy to follow. Granted, I'm just getting into Wink Poppy Midnight so I feel like the flow will pick up as I keep reading. Allegiant was difficult to get through from the get-go and I only truly appreciated the switching perspectives at the very end  -- I couldn't feel connected to the male voice at all, after hearing the female voice for the previous two books.

Also, while I'm cleaning out papers with quotes on them, here's a few more I found from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. They have a completely different feeling:

If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages. (p. 80)

It's so egalitarian it's beyond democracy. (p. 87)

And some things from Divergent, I guess:

I don't need them -- but do I want them? Every tattoo I got with them is a mark of their friendship, and almost everytime I have laughed in this dark place was because of them. I don't want to lose them. But I feel like I have already. (p. 275) 

Believe in the ordinary acts of bravery. (Dauntless)

Finally, here's that reminder to myself to someday watch, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness about Hayao Miyazaki.

What the receipts remind me

From El Paso and Las Cruces, snippets of the week spent there for MTNA.

Shot glasses and animal keychains, NMSU memorabilia in maroon and black. A captain crunch frappe from the Barnes & Nobles/University Bookstore, an acutely retail feeling in a quiet college town. Walking past frat houses on flat streets, not a student in sight.

Extra-large egg shakers from the zoo, textured with colorful, raised designs, one for each sister. The brisk winter air, the scrawny animals slinking to the corners of their pens, the closed Dippin' Dots cart. Empty walkways, like the zoo was ours and ours alone to enjoy. Sitting together on carved benches and statues of animals of all types. Our stupid faces squeezed everywhere: from meercats and groundhog peekholes, to the Christmas toyland cutouts at the mall, a bright, sunny bus ride away.

My first purchase from Express: a slightly worn denim jacket, slightly too small, but too cute and too on sale to pass up. Tyler picked himself a blue tie. Then, later, in the hotel room, Shawn, shrugging it on, much to tight and binding to his frame, a goofy image not to be forgotten. Playing mau in the dim light on the round table in the room, and my bed, a nest of blanket and pillows in the corner of the room.

An $8 ride up Wyler Aerial Tramway. The perfectly cool and clear skies, the sun that lent a glow to the dry Texan slopes speckled with bushes, and the stretching, endlessly stretching, expanse of land. Shawn, with his fear of heights, and Ryan, with his blatant disregard of them, forever confident and brave and proud within himself. Gold and silver pencils, two feet long,

Chachi's on the final night, and Ryan's stomach of unrest that followed. No qualms, sipped perfect horchata, walking distance from our hotel, bundled in the cool night air.

Of course, there are things that they can't remind me of: the hours on the plane, sandwiched between Tyler and Shawn playing Pokemon X in earnest, the moments waiting in the airport as the new year chimed in. The hours together, walking and riding and eating and practicing, tears and smiles and laughs and all.

2014. I am so very fond of these memories.

Monday, July 18, 2016

Today is a day that felt like a Sunday, slow and sweltering with the summer heat. I woke up at a reasonable hour feeling sticky from the storm the night before. The reasonable rise was only to bring my car to the shop to repair the damages from the littler fender bender I'd gotten into a week or two ago.

Traffic on the H3 was gloriously speedy to the point that I forgot that it was Monday, a day where people slog through crowded cars to get to their equally crowded workspaces. Leaving my car in the lush beauty of the Windward side was far from a gloomy experience. I'm sure the next eight days will be its restorative vacation.

Time ticked even slower back home as I trapped myself in my room without a fan, or a breeze, to accommodate the space necessitated by Mariah and her elementary school friends. Their laughs were so earnest and so loud, I wondered if I would've been that joyful with the friends I had then. It crossed my mind that it may be interesting to reconnect with them, but honestly, what would be the point? Our lives took separate ways long before and it would only be an act of earnest curiosity that would bring us back into each other's lives again for more than a passing conversation, much less an afternoon together.

I found it within myself to dig into that Express bag full of unsorted receipts. I'd been reluctant to touch them; I didn't want to go through the work of inputting them into my transaction spreadsheets. The beauty of these sheets, though, is that they only start in January of this year. I was pleasantly surprised to find receipts from December of 2015, which I tossed after a quick glance if it wasn't for a major purchase. (Thankfully, but embarrassingly, a lot of my receipts were for food). However, when I found a bag of receipts from 2013-2014, I was taken aback. A little afraid, even.

In the haunting way that receipts can be, they chronicled just a small part of my final year as an undergraduate. They are parts of that final semester leading up to graduation, when I didn't drive myself places but took the bus to eat instead, when I still went on adventures with Megan and Cheyenne after classes, when I took naps in my dorm with the setting sun leaking between downtown Honolulu onto the black and green and brown and white that predominated my UHM experience. My dinners were with friends or alone, the meal decided by me. Compare that to now, in which dinner with family is the norm and when leaving them feels like a betrayal.

I threw away those receipts save for the one for textbook purchases. They remind me too much of the person I used to be, left behind, let slip away. Time really does fly... whether or not you're having fun. I can't tell if, since graduation, I've not been having enough fun or just too much of it.

Whichever it is, I made a little progress today letting go of some of the clutter of the past. I'm still, as always, trying to get a grip on who I am in the present. Even that's changed in the course of these few summer months. Here's to that continuous destruction and reconstruction of self, a cycle of rebirth through simply being that repeats on every level of our existence, from our thoughts down to the cells that create us.

Past, present and future

I went to the Disney concert today, entitled Tale as Old as Time. Boy, was it a concert that made me think about the passing of time. I somehow spent the whole day before it accomplishing nothing much at all, simply absorbed in media. And then, I spent a lot of time driving around to accommodate  other's schedules and requests. We had coffee (tried the new latte macchiato with hazelnut syrup) before getting ice cream (Hawaiian mud pie grabber) and curly fries.

The concert itself surprised me with visuals to accompany the audio, as well as a whole group of singers for the program. (I should've expected this based on all the previous Pops concerts I've gone to, really.) I found the singers decent, but one of the male singer's "gruff" character voice got tiring by the end, and one of the female's got quite nasally. In general, I found the drums and singers too loud; They covered the orchestra. By the end I just wanted to hear more strings, so I was thankful for the Tchaikovsky and Sleeping Beauty feature (though it seemed too chaotic). Favorites; Tangled and Beauty and the Beast.

As we watched, I realized that most images being shown were things that I didn't remember, making me question if I'd seen the actual movie. My childhood was filled with playing Disney songs -- I was my own soundtrack - so my knowledge of them could have easily come from just the book and not the movie. Things that were familiar to others, from Hercules to Tangled's songs, were far from familiar to me. It did make me realize that my memory has little hold.

Driving everyone home made me kind of feel empty, in addition to not really eating full meals today -- I had a lot of potato skins instead. I didn't have enough water and, in the end, I was the one left to make the final call about eating... Even if it was the decision to NOT stay out and eat. I got to chat a bit with Tiffany after the concert, but it just reminded me of how much time has passed since graduation and made me ponder what I should be doing to establish a future for myself. In the present, may people talk about getting a "real" job, which I can kind of now imagine as actually involved in the functioning of our society.

I got some great new tapes today, but everything feels only moderately exciting in the end.

Wardrobe growth

I suppose the capsule wardrobe article influenced me more than I'd expected it would, because after a morning of driving up winding hilly streets, delivering presents with my sister, we ended up shopping the clothes sales.

I pretty much ended up with complete outfits today:

• TOPS: sparkly black cami (flexible), relaxed white v-neck (casual), floral black & blue split-back tank (formal)
• BOTTOMS: sleep shorts (casual), laser-cut black skirt (formal), dark blue jeans (casual and much needed!)
• FOOTWEAR: brown & black strappy sandals (flexible), white & grey patterned slip-ons (casual)

With all the sales, I managed to increase the flexibility and cohesiveness of my wardrobe without making too large a dent in my funds. It's just as well since I saw the cost my tuition would be if I took all the classes I want to this semester.

Furthermore, I just learned what "chambray" means from yesterday's reading, and today I ended up seeing that style of shirt in nearly every store we visited. Let me be honest: I kind of like that style a lot. But, since everyone's selling it and everyone's already wearing it, I'm over this fad before it's even really set in!

Anyway, I'm excited to flesh out my look and reorganize my closet. With mild cleaning, teamwork, and chill adventure as a sister pair, I thing I'm getting ready to turn over a new leaf. I'm excited for spring clothes to reveal themselves!

Hello, 2016

Here's what day 3 of this new year has been like:

READING

Veronica Mars: The Thousand Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham
A book picked purely because at one point in my life I'd been addicted to Season 1 of Veronica Mars in a way I hadn't felt about a TV series before. Currently about halfway through and the mystery and thrill levels are up.

Un-Fancy: How to Build a Capsule Wardrobe and other posts
I'm not the most fashionable of girls and my wardrobe is a complete mess. I saw this linked on another person's Facebook wall and couldn't resist giving it a read to satisfy the Teen Vogue reader in me. Let's face it - some day I actually want to look more put together than I actually am.

Pitchfork: Albums of the Year 2015 Honorable Mentions mostly for future reference
I'm constantly trying to find new music. Semi-consciously, I tend to stray away from the mainstream and go for the indie or the underdog. Sometimes, that ends up with weird music and me listening to things for the wrong reason. This is a list from which I hope to find something new to love.

LISTENING

Galaxy Swim Team releases, in particular:
- into stardust by astroskeleton, which I listened to in full and found no harm in downloading
- lumine by bansheebeat, which I listened to in part, mostly only "lumine" and "polestar"
- [GST-01], because I wanted to get an idea of the label (I am mid-listen and liked "take me with you" by SYNCHRONICITY)
- a sentimental cry by clover & sealife, something I only got halfway through yesterday because I enjoyed the production but needed to get over the not-quite-as-satisfactory singing

Car Seat Headrest
"Something Soon" and "The Ending of Dramamine" in the first 11 minutes of this KEXP live session because someone on Tumblr posted some really well-shot photos of the frontman and, let's be honest, I have a weakness when it comes to those glasses and that kind of hair. Terrible, I know. Anyway, from what I've heard I am not quite into this kind of music. But I will probably give it another chance in another mood.

FEELING

I Skyped with Katherine earlier this evening and what lingered with me is the consideration of feeling lonely, after all these holidays are over and the rush of family time has passed. It's one thing to stay connected with all the people you know and love and a different thing to spend time in their physical presence. Even though absence is the lack of presence, "nothing", it can still be felt.

And it's that feeling which has settled into me as I've read the slightly chilling Veronica Mars mystery, as I've listened to the spacey sounds of astroskeleton, and the seemingly angsty and distanced vocals of Car Seat Headrest. Honestly, I've tried to move away from lingering in this weird place of loneliness and hyperawareness of the realities of life. I try as best as I can to listen to pop music, to chiptune that moves me emotionally to positive feelings. I avoid thinking about space because it reminds me of nothingness, death, and our fleeting existence. I drown myself in media so I don't drown myself in thoughts.

I know that it is up to me to make 2016 as good, emotionally, as I want it to be. I also know that fears are normal things to have and that they shouldn't constantly be ignored. There will be good in every day, as long as I choose to see it. Skyping with Katherine is a strong example, and will continue to be one in the months to come.

Some other great things from today: sharing Buca's with loved ones (even though amazingly, someone named Roman had reserved for exactly the same time as we had), hearing the youngest sister go through piano books to learn a little bit, and hearing from G about potential planner-things. It's all been encouraging me to do more, such as returning to this blog.

We'll see, 2016. Whatever you hold, I'm sure I'll find something I love, soon.

Me: Do you ever listen to music you dont particularly like cuz you think the artist is cute?? I was trying to find new vaporwave but 2016 music hasn't been satisfying enough...

G: That is literally Kpop

G: So much of the music is just trash

G: But I'm too deep it starts sounding good..... 

XO
R