writing space for now

Since I managed to get a life this weekend, I will not be posting – I’m having a staycation at Astoria Plaza with my friends to celebrate the February-March birthdays.

On a happier note, I finished Crash Landing On You last night. As far as K-Dramas go, it was truly enjoyable with a cast of characters you get attached to in the end. The leading lady is not annoying, and the leading man is indeed G.G.W. (God’s Gift To Women). It was nice to have a K-Drama that had a message of peace and hopefulness towards the reunification of the Korean peninsula, and I’ll miss this drama a lot.

But come now, the nurse calls. I have to prepare to go. Ciao!

Hello, it’s been quite a week. I filed my resignation and am currently applying for another job, so I’m in the middle of a distorted headspace.

I don’t think I can write much today except for updates. I haven’t been following my resolutions strictly, so there’s that. I started watching the latest trend drama Crash Landing On You, and it’s really good so far.

There’s too much going on in my life to sit down and write, though some may argue that perhaps it’s best to write when life goes flapjacks. We’ll see. As always, let’s do our best and stay healthy!

Running Time: 135 minutes

And oh, what a wonderful 135 minutes those are – if you are a fan of the Louisa May Alcott books “Little Women” and “Good Wives” (which is probably better known as the second part of Little Women).

I think Greta Gerwig is a genius, mostly for how well she understood the story and the characters enough, that I – who has disliked Amy March forever – really loved her too in this film.

Most adaptations focus on Jo March, obviously – but giving Amy infinitely more dimensions (God bless you, Florence Pugh) breathed new life into it. I know the book pretty much by heart and I am mostly set in my ways and opinions on it; Greta Gerwig managed to change my mind and revisit things in a new perspective.

I think a major problem with the Laurie-Amy arc is that it felt too sudden. Like, yeah, Laurie spent time with Amy when she was at Aunt March’s house during Beth’s bout with scarlet fever in Book I, but Laurie was basically a babysitter. Then everything in Europe happened quickly and you just don’t feel like anything except that Laurie settled for Amy to become a legit member of the March family, just because he couldn’t have Jo.

In this film however, they really set it up at every turn so that Amy gets our empathy. Her adoration for Laurie is evident from the start, so much so that when he finally turns to her, it physically hurt me when Florence Pugh tells Timothee Chalamet (aka the most gorgeous Laurie ever, don’t @ me) that she will “not be second to Jo…. Not when I’ve (Amy) loved you my entire life.”

Did you hear that? The sound of my heart breaking? The tissues I used up?

ALSO this adaptation gave us the hottest Professor Bhaer. Good Lord, with his sleeves rolled up and dancing and laughing with Jo? I was dying. The actor’s name is Louis Garrel, I am told by Wikipedia, and he is French so he mostly stars in French films. But get this, he is super duper cute – so it makes you understand how Josephine “Jo” “I’m never going to marry” March would be charmed by him at least. He gave her a set of Shakespeare plays and critiqued her writing. S W O O N.

I need to get back on track now. Saoirse Ronan’s Jo is a lovely, relatable mess. Winona Ryder’s 1994 Jo was also very good, but Saoirse gave her more roughness and vulnerability, which is really very Jo. Her chemistry with Timothee Chalamet was on-point as well, all affectionate and sibling-like. (I should quit my day job and become a full-time Timothee Chalamet stan account – despite having only watched his performance here.)

As is tradition in the Little Women canon, we don’t get much of Beth. I was pleased to see more of the details of her story come to life, though. The dolls she always cared for, the slippers she makes for Mr. Lawrence, and all of that – really, they got most of the details on-point. They show us Amy pinching her nose, rather than using the clothespin too, which is fine I guess.

Emma Watson is always a victim of detail though. They turn her dress pink (again! like Hermione’s Yule Ball dress!) rather than blue. I also wish there were more Daisy/Demi antics because that chapter was a laugh. Truly, I appreciated that the story chose to focus on the aspect of Meg wanting the finer things, a struggle she had to contend with until adulthood, but I wish they also included the part where the society matrons gossiped about her and Laurie to show the expectations people had for Meg, and how she followed her parents’ footsteps and disappointed these in favor of true love.

I also loved the two alternate endings: the one the publisher wanted for Jo which was romance and marriage and babies, but also the one Jo won for herself: independence and a book baby. I’m thrilled Greta Gerwig and the cast really were able to condense such a vast source material and refine everything, even the characters, so that we get this shining example of a well-done and refreshed adapatation. Cheers!

Unpopular opinion: they did not deserve to win the Best Costume Oscar, however. I said what I said. The Oscars are suckers for period costumes, but they don’t see the faulty construction of it all. Ugh.

Song rec of the week: A Party Song (Walk of Shame) by All Time Low

I celebrated my 22nd birthday this week. I am… disheartened. Yesterday, I turned down a job I got accepted for, and the world is generally topsy-turvy. I was hoping someone would wish me a happy birthday, but I guess I’m just down on my luck for that friendship.

Tonight, I think I’ll watch the new Little Women. I wish for better days ahead.

Last night, I watched “Miss Americana”, the Taylor Swift documentary released on Netflix. There I was, in the cover of darkness – my tear-streaked face illumined by the screen of my iPad. Why was I overtly emotional, you ask, dear reader?

I was around nine or ten years old when “Love Story” was first released. I became a huge Taylor Swift fan after. I downloaded the songs on LimeWire (of course) and I would play those every Friday night, while I was playing Club Penguin and Disney Fairies while chatting with friends on Yahoo Messenger.

I’m turning 22 next week. (Yes, of course, I am fully aware that Taylor Swift’s RED album has a song called 22 and that it’s a jam.)  I’ve been a Taylor Swift fan for that long, and it kind of blows my mind.

The first concert I ever went to was for the Speak Now tour here in Manila back in 2011. All my friends, my siblings also loved Taylor Swift – she was universal to us. Fearless got us through the middle part of elementary school. Speak Now brought us to its end. RED guided us through sophomore year, while 1989 graduated high school with us. During one school carnival, someone put in a song request for “New Romantics”, and I remember dancing and singing with my friends through the halls.

Her songs grew with us – through joy and through pain, through heartbreak and the exquisite possibility of love that’s just around the corner.  I was especially keen on how Taylor would use her words and her stories. That was her biggest strength, she admitted in “Miss Americana”. No other musical artist can tell a story like she can.

That is one of my biggest emotional attachments to Taylor Swift. She is a writer. Like me, she has to find the exact words to fit, or else she’d explode. I also relate to the fact that she’s this perpetually misunderstood do-gooder who just wants to do everything right.

So it was painful for me to see Taylor have to undo her belief system and reconfigure her life. At some point, during college and during the time of the Kanye-Kim issue, I took a break from being a fan and she took a break too. I was disappointed with how she handled it, but I knew deep down that I can never stop supporting her. To do so would be like turning my back on a kindred spirit.

In “Miss Americana”, they also showed her writing the songs for Reputation – my least favorite of her albums. I realized while watching that this album was for her. It was her therapy album, a way to unburden all the dark feelings inside her, which is why most of it sounds raw and resentful. It vibes with the diaries I wrote back when I was an angry teenager in high school. But despite all of it, there were still bright spots – Delicate and Gorgeous were hopeful and brighter. My favorite track, Getaway Car, was an admission of guilt.

When Lover came into the picture, I was able to embrace the album openly because Taylor finally sounded happy. She was overcoming everything she had to deal with, and through that process, helped me overcome the everyday I had to deal with too.

I don’t think I will ever fully regret being her fan, because I know she is a person actively seeking growth and goodness. I guess this letter is a thank-you to Taylor, for being herself, all these years. It’s also a thank-you for her music and lyrics, and all the magic we made. Long live!

恭喜發財！

Contrary to popular belief (of friends for whom I am the token Chinese friend), I am not stuffing my face with tikoy, surrounding by delighted relatives in red.

My participation in these Lunar New Year events are very minimal and un-Chinese. We don’t have doting Chinese grandparents imposing these traditions on us, so we skip out on the festivities and expenses.

But today, we all did work downstairs at the office and had lunch together. There is nothing more Filipino-Chinese than the hustle of working for the family business.

I do love the stories accompanying Chinese holidays. Chang’e and her rabbit on the moon, the magpies helping the cowherd and the fairy meet up….

The Lunar New Year’s story is about a rat race (heh) instituted by the Lord of Heaven. The rat wins the race by betrayal. It doesn’t wake the cat on time to run the race, which is why they will forever be enemies. It allies itself with the ox, only to jump ahead to the finish line. I think it says a lot about the Chinese psyche that the first animal of the Zodiac is a tiny rat.

I do wish everyone good health and good fortune this year. May the moon watch us closely and shine brightly on all of us.

*Alternate titles include: 1% of Something, 1% of Anything

Running time: around 35 – 45 minutes per episode, for 16 episodes. If you are me, the time spent on this drama is a big blur.

I originally planned to write about Cebu for this week’s post, but I wasn’t really feeling it because my feelings were so consumed by this drama.

So the plot goes, lovely and kindhearted teacher helps out an old man from nearly dying. Old man turns out to be a rich chairman who is not a frequent recipient of unconditional love and help. He decides he wants to reward her by leaving her everything in his will, provided she be married. Whoever gets the girl, gets the fortune. Whack.

Old rich man, of course, has an asshole chaebol grandson. This grandson is of such concern to the old man that he desperately wants to set them up so she can whip him into shape. Asshole grandson wants the fortune, so agrees to date the teacher for six months. If it works out, good. If it doesn’t, they just chalk it up to fate. Both parties agree to this despite their mutual, initial dislike of each other – which means that them falling in love is inevitable. And because it is “merely a business arrangement”, there is pining and drama and domestic cuteness.

Cue the swooning.

I love all these tropes, but executing them as realistically and as neatly as this drama does is difficult. The pacing, the tension, the chemistry are all very important.

Though it stars the rich, stuck-up asshole guy from Drinking Solo (Ha Seok-Jin – it’s funny because he falls for a poor teacher there too), and yes it features my K-Drama pet peeve of the *wrist grab*, the drama is refreshing for its characterisation of the lead girl and the swiftness it takes to clear up miscommunications.

Jeon So-Min plays the teacher character, which I thought was really drawn well. Most K-Drama female leads annoy me a lot because they act so dumb when they’re not supposed to be dumb, and so cowardly when they are supposed to be brave. The teacher character here is charming, smart, fierce, and loveable without being Mary Sue about it. She’s president of a K-Pop boy’s fan club, has a nouveau riche best friend who is equally magnetic and loves her a lot, and she’s charitable without being irritating. She feels like a whole character, who is in fact, able to stand up for herself even if she is physically treated like a rag doll. (Will there be a day in K-Drama where the female lead does not get kidnapped? Rare.)

And because she can stand up for herself, she can clear up miscommunications easily. She asks the male lead questions, rather than acting in foolish assumptions, so it doesn’t take so long to resolve petty misunderstandings. It’s what made their six month relationship so wholesome – the fact that they communicated and exerted effort to meet each other. They even tackle adult stuff like sex and consent (“You’re not a human if you touch a drunk woman.”) without being preachy about it. It’s the kind of relationship that proves that loving someone is really a choice.

My admiration for the drama’s clear, respectful lines and my investment in the relationship then, made The Last Trip Episode (another K-Drama classic trope) really painful for me. Because they were like “Please find a good man, so I will feel less bad.” and “If I’d known I’d like him so much, I would have given these six months my all so I would have no regrets”, and I was like “Please stop, you guys, this is wrecking me.” This drama was Drinking Solo on rom-com steroids.

“Most people break up because they don’t love each other. I don’t understand why we have to break up because we do.”

My crops have been watered. My skin has been cleansed. This was the death blow. I’m drowning in my own feels. The year is 2020, but emotionally we are in 2013. I would recommend this drama to friends, but I think I want to keep it for myself for now. Because I am still in the middle of processing my thoughts about it. Which is why this blog post is so, so long and so, so *hand gestures* messy. omg.

Short of giving up my whole entire heart to this drama, I can no longer find the words to describe the joy it brought me over the past week. Aside from the short episode lengths, I really just ate up the whole damn thing as fast as I possibly could. Healthy K-Drama couples without losing the spiciness and the cuteness for 2020? Amen.

Resolutions are intimidating. Every year, people come up with a list of things they resolve to become/do, only to quit because the changes they need to incorporate into their life get too daunting or they aren’t getting the results immediately.

I’ve fallen into that trap a lot over the years, so I’d like to actually see through some changes this year. Based on what I’ve read and researched, some experts recommend chopping up goals into more specific, manageable bits so you can gradually have them in your life.

There’s a big difference between having a resolution like “Write more” and a goal like “Write one blog post every week”. There are more details to the latter, which means you won’t be at a lost as to how to proceed.

Since I have a lot of things I want to accomplish this year, I’ve decided to post my goals and my plans for this year. Another aspect to achieving a goal is accountability. We like to save face, so we are more inclined to finish with a little bit of pressure from the expectations of other people. Even though I know that no one is reading this, I feel like I’d be encouraged to complete my task list this year if I write about it publicly.

1. Work on the yearbook at least once a month: Since there is no moving forward on the yearbook from my high school’s end, I’ve decided to compile all the information, ideas, and plans into a powerpoint and negotiate from there.

2. Learn a new recipe once a month: I learned how to bake last year but haven’t practiced in a while, and I want to learn how to cook so I’m going to try out new things and see how that goes.

3. Get my drivers’ license before June: All my friends have their licenses but don’t drive, so I’d really like to learn how to drive and THEN figure out how to get a car.

4. Exercise at least thrice a week: It’s hard with my current schedule, but I think I can do this on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. There are lots of workout videos on YouTube that fit into a single K-POP song so I’m also going to try those.

5. Finish a TV show/drama every month: I am notoriously slow at finishing TV shows, so I’m hoping to watch continuously every month.

6. Grow my hair out and donate it again: Five years ago, I grew out almost 12 inches of hair and donated it to the YMCA Downtown’s Strand Up for Cancer campaign. I think it’s almost time to cut my hair soon for this.

7. Grow at least one plant on the rooftop garden: Our garden is really hot so plants aren’t doing so well there. I’m hoping to do research and grow useful crops and herbs.

8. Try out the badminton court near the house at least once: It’s a walkable distance and quite cheap. I just really need a playmate for Saturdays, I suppose.

9. Try out the archery range at SM North Edsa at least once: I also heard about an archery range at the mall nearby, and I really want to take my shot at the sport (pun intended).

10. Study Chinese at least once at week: It doesn’t matter whether or not I learn new characters, phrases, idioms, poems, or finish a new level on Duolingo. I need to be more purposeful about improving my Mandarin.

11. Finish the existing embroidery projects I have before moving on to the next project: My attention span on my projects isn’t very consistent, so I want to finish all my ongoing projects before the year ends again.

12. Try to use the sewing machine at least thrice: My sister bought me a sewing machine as a 15th birthday present, but I think a thread snagged somewhere on it and I have to check that. I would really like to learn how to operate it and to do basic repairs on my clothes.

13. Journal at least once a month: I used to go through one journal in one year. My current journal is a little thicker to be sure, but I’ve been writing in it since October 2017.

14. Draft an itinerary for a trip to the U.K. before the year ends: To visit the United Kingdom has been a dream of mine since high school, so I think I have to plan in order to will it into existence.

15. Avoid soft drinks: I don’t think I can avoid junk food or sweets yet, so I’ll try to avoid soft drinks this year.

16. Clean out the toys in the attic and the old magazines in the shelves: Some things haven’t moved since we moved into this house in 2016.

17. Invest in at least two pairs of shoes and a nice bag: I’m considering a pair of sneakers with East Asian designs and a leather satchel right now. I want to buy pieces that are more unique and last longer.

18. Reread old books: I really loved YA when I was 14 years old and up until I was 17 or so but I haven’t read some of them in so long so those are due for a reread.

19. Host a birthday party: My 22nd birthday is coming up soon and it is only fitting as an homage to Taylor Swift’s “22”.

20. Grow out fingernails, one finger at a time: A lifelong resolution of mine, since I can never grow my nails out. We’ll try our level best this year. Maybe. Hopefully.

So in no particular order, these are my goals for 2020. Will I see them through? I’m hoping to complete at least half. See? I set a realistic goal to meet my other goals.

Happy New Year to everyone, Auld Lang Syne and all that jazz. Things I’d recommend other people to do this year? Stream Red Velvet’s Psycho, and stan SHINee!

No blog post tonight, on account of the holiday parties and overall exhaustion with life. Normal dumbass blogging will resume next week – I think.

I don’t have desires anymore. Is that weird?

The older I get, the less I’m sure of what I want. I mean, I do want some things – to attend concerts, to travel. But for the path of my life? No clue.

My thoughts for the next five years are a blank, to be honest. I don’t know what career I want. It used to be so specific, so clear in my head. I wanted to work for a magazine someday, to become Editor-In-Chief somewhere.

But I think that clarity, that burning wish is gone now. I dearly want to bring that passion back, because I think I’m a little lost without it. A writing professor once taught us that we should write when we feel strongly about something – whether that be hate or love. But I think, I feel like I don’t care so much about anything anymore, to pour myself out in writing for it.

I guess, I still have to search for it. For Christmas, maybe my wish is for a new dream in life. Something to work towards for. Till then — we’ll hold on.