back to our regularly scheduled hedonism
"when the world opens back up" is arriving in fits and starts
A lot of people have bemoaned the tragedy of losing their 20s to the pandemic, but at least in the beginning, I was quietly, guiltily grateful for the mandatory time-out. Finally, a legitimate excuse to cancel plans that I didn’t have to conjure out of thin air and that would also keep everyone else from having fun without me! It was an introvert’s dream come true. I don’t mean to diminish the toll of the pandemic – loss too vast and senseless to comprehend, grief that has become a permanent shadow tailing our every step – but I can’t deny that in some awful, selfish corner of my brain, I didn’t mind that we all had to stay home for those first couple weeks last spring. It was the least objectionable part of a worst-case scenario, the everyday mundanity that disaster movies gloss over in favor of Earth-shaking explosions, government conspiracies, death and destruction and disorder.
Without external pressure or influence, my default setting is to stay firmly within my comfort zone. I’d probably get sick of sitting on the sidelines eventually, but it would take a while for me to reach my limit. (Case in point: I might not have even created Homebody were it not for my friend Mbiye suggesting I start a Substack.) When I was a teenager, I told myself that this hesitancy to insert myself into the action was the result of my circumstances, not my nature. Once I got more independence, more experience in the real world, more distance from my parents and my old routines – then I would be able to shake off this perpetual bystander mentality, surely. But getting older doesn’t mean you automatically become the version of yourself that you aspire to. It just gives you more time to understand the fundamental ways in which you’ll probably never change.
That’s why I furtively welcomed a mandatory quarantine – for a little while, I didn’t have to worry about my life bearing little to no resemblance to the endless montage of sexy, interesting experiences that I’ve been conditioned to expect from my 20s. What did parties and dates and concerts and happy hours matter in the face of life or death? The standard decision making calculus restructured itself with safety and survival as the top priorities, effectively rendering my youth, and my apparent failure to take advantage of it, irrelevant. But now it’s 2021 and a summer of vaccinated hedonism awaits, the doors thrown wide open for life to rush back in after so many months of cloistered paranoia. The illusion of hitting pause on the world is fading and, as grateful as I am to be able to see the other side of the pandemic at all, I’m no more equipped to deal with my feelings of inadequacy and age-related ambivalence than I was a year ago. If only we could all emerge from this once-in-a-generation (fingers crossed) ordeal with a tidy lesson learned or character arc completed. Roll credits on the season finale of COVID-19.
Welcome to Taurus Season
Today’s my second pandemic birthday. In Korea, you’re already one year old from the moment you’re born, and you also age a year every New Year instead of on your birthday. The fact that I can simultaneously be 25 in America and 26 in Korea makes the whole concept of age feel precarious and insubstantial, like all the other things – gender, money, religion, race, etc. – you come to realize as an adult are made up and don’t actually mean what you believed they did as a kid. These constructs only really matter in their capacity to help us recognize and relate to each other, so this is me, telling you that as of today I am a 25 (or 26) year old. And like my fellow Taurus Grace Jones, I do my own shucking.
The rest of this newsletter will just be Videos That Are Making Me Happy Right Now because it’s my birthday and I can do what I want, including make a newsletter with only a semblance of a coherent theme.
Linsanity Was the Last Time I Truly Felt Alive
Once every few years, I rewatch the highlight reels from Jeremy Lin’s two-month fairytale run with the Knicks just to remind myself of how fun sports can be. There’s a reason sports stories are the perfect vehicle for underdog tales – Jeremy Lin, in all his undrafted, unheralded glory, couldn’t have provided a better example. In general, I can only bring myself to be invested in sports during the Olympics or when documentaries about athletes come out because both mediums use sports as a framework to tell compelling narratives with clear stakes. Linsanity also feels like something out of movie, but the difference is that no producers or directors ever waited with bated breath to see how Jeremy Lin’s career would play out. The magic of Linsanity comes down to spontaneity and surprise, the sense that nobody could’ve seen this coming, least of all Jeremy Lin himself. The collective reaction as he outscored Kobe, hit a game-winning three-pointer with less than a second remaining on the clock, and took the Knicks on a sorely needed seven-game winning streak was: Holy shit, is this really happening?
Linsanity inevitably fizzled out, of course, but before we knew how it would end, when every game felt rife with potential – what a ride. Checking Jeremy Lin’s Google News alerts under my desk during Calculus class, I fairly vibrated with the thrill of witnessing him do the impossible, night after night. I couldn’t have dreamed up anything better and, all these years later, I still find myself returning to these videos in an effort to recapture some of that electricity.
Music to Transcend the Mortal Plane of Existence to
You may remember Melanie Faye from her Instagram post that went viral in 2017:
She’s been busy since then – releasing an EP in 2020, playing guitar for Hayley Williams, and more. But I always come back to this 2018 performance of hers, embedded above, for the way she’s able to make the guitar sing so expressively. When she transitions into Mariah Carey’s “My All” at the 2:36 mark, it’s gorgeous beyond words.
Am I a BookTube Stan Now?
I try not to wade too deeply into BookTube/BookTok/Bookstagram/book twitter because it all feels a little too spiritually reminiscent of Tumblr circa the early 2010s for my comfort, but over the last few weeks I’ve gone through more of Read With Cindy’s videos than I care to count. She’s funny and filthy and seems to have a balanced relationship to the art she consumes, which is the only approach to discourse I can tolerate at my advanced age of 25/26. Her meanest videos (like the one embedded above) get the most views because of course they do, but her channel has positive content too – my personal favorite is her reaction to Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology, which I read earlier in quarantine and loved as much as Cindy does. (Side note: Six of Crows enthusiasts can see their beloved crows in Shadow and Bone, Netflix’s adaptation of Bardugo’s Grishaverse, which dropped today. Happy birthday to me!)
And Finally: Fan Editors Are the Backbone of Society
What it says on the tin. (Thanks to Amelia for sending this to me!)