Chicago recap, Everything Everywhere, and studying abroad
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
I would like someone to please clap for me for writing this newsletter, because I have overcome a great deal of hardship (feeling glum because it is still raining in LA, my tea being cold, an overwhelming urge to procrastinate in any way possible) to sit down and coax words out of my brain. As we all know, writing out one’s thoughts to a willing audience (I presume) is one of the greatest individual challenges any member of our species has ever faced, and I should be lauded.
I returned this week from Chicago, where Turn the Spotlight hosted its first (and hopefully not last—ahem, ahem) meetup of this year’s fellows. Here I am, second from the left, doing the sorority squat:
It’s always incredibly futile trying to describe a great meetup or social interaction—any deep conversation inevitably comes off as inane or cheesy the moment you try to summarize it for someone else—so I’ll just say that this is such a great group of people and I remain mildly flabbergasted that I get to be one of their number. It felt so special to meet and talk with so many people doing really cool, trailblazing work in the arts, and to discover how much we have in common. One of the Spotlight mentors who interviewed me said “The world of classical music is small, but it’s also very lonely” (absolutely correct!) and finding connection with so many other driven, passionate people encountering the same issues does a lot to mitigate that loneliness.
Unrelated, it was absolutely wild that, on my first ever visit to Chicago, I landed the day they dyed the river green and the city was out in full force to celebrate an early St. Patrick’s Day.
I was absolutely not prepared for the madness that is St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. I was woken up by the sound of crowds cheering outside and as my (very frustrated) Uber driver crawled slowly through hordes of green-festooned revelers, I kept gawking at the sight of people cheerfully standing atop barriers, cars and buses covered in green streamers and balloons, and the general type of merriment that you don’t expect to see while snow is falling. (Because yes, it was so cold in Chicago that it was snowing, and my soft Californian self did not know how to handle it.)
I recently read Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich, and because I am a normal well-adjusted person who does not over-intellectualize things, I was mentally like “wow, modern-day Dionysian festivity in action, how rare to see unbridled joyful solidarity, which scholars say challenges the barriers separating elites from the lower classes, within the strictly hierarchical system that is our late-stage capitalist society” which is a very normal observation to have on St. Patrick’s Day, I think.
Also, those of you who are snail mail subscribers have postcards from Chicago coming to you, assuming that the very nice woman at my hotel’s front desk is better at following through with tasks than I am. Several of you are getting a postcard featuring Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds IV (which is twenty-four feet/eight meters wide in real life!!!) which struck me as 1) having very Porco Rosso vibes and 2) nailed the serene majesty of being in an airplane right above the clouds, as seen in this terrible photo I snapped on my flight back:
Thank you to the Academy
Because I am a big f—king dork who is overly invested in the self-congratulatory spectacle of an industry to which I have the most tenuous connections, I brought an Oscars ballot with me to Chicago and watched the Oscars from start to finish, with my husband on FaceTime the entire show.
Back in November, I wrote, “I am fully gunning for Michelle Yeoh to get that damn Oscar for her jaw-dropping performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and if someone else—even Cate [Blanchett]—gets it, I will riot” and I am so, so relieved that I am off the hook for any rioting, which I secretly did not actually want to do.
I was also so, so thrilled for Ke Huy Quan, and for the whole team in general, and thought that all the EEAAO peeps gave the loveliest speeches (shouting out that drag doesn’t hurt anyone! the message that children should be loved no matter what they do and don’t accomplish! that greatness comes from community and support, not individual genius!). While the Oscars are imperfect and problematic and, in the end, utterly meaningless, it felt genuinely like a win that a completely weird, tonally bonkers movie with a non-diasporic diaspora narrative that made an impassioned plea for kindness and vulnerability swept the night.
There have been so, so, so many words written about Everything Everywhere All At Once and what it means/represents (including this clear-eyed analysis that, yes, it benefited from a shrewd strategic campaign that its creators waged flawlessly), but my favorite piece was this heartfelt comic from Zoe Si.
The first thing that shot me right between the eyes was how accurately and compassionately and sensitively this movie portrayed the dynamic between Waymond and Evelyn. The idea that she feels she has thrown away her whole life to be with this man who she always has to rescue, but later we see the montage of her realizing all of the beautiful small things he does to fill their fraught lives with love and joy, and I am a literal puddle on the floor because this is a story about mothers we all fricking know but that has never been told, let alone with this level of care.
The biggest disappointment of the night to me was that Turning Red did not win Best Animation, because I kind of felt like it was the animation equivalent of EEAAO in that it was a weird, special, celebratory film that broke a representational barrier, and I think it’s one of the best things Pixar has put out in a long time. Also, while I think “Naatu Naatu” is a banger that deserved to win, how—HOW!—was it that the Y2K-licious boyband confection from the movie wasn’t even nominated for Best Song?
“Nobody Like U,” you will always be Best Song in my heart.
(Other Oscars/EEAAO articles I enjoyed: this very sensible proposal for how the ceremony should be done, and this incredibly sweet and heartfelt profile of the family-run laundromat used for the movie.)
Young 20-somethings should not post their study abroad experiences on the internet, unless they’re me
My timeline had a field day with this objectively awful woe-is-me piece by an NYU student about her “awful” study abroad experience in Florence. I fully believe that the Business Insider editors should never have published this, as it is very clear from the start that this was intended to be a hate-read and they made the deliberate decision to sacrifice this poor girl on the altar of online engagement.
This piece also made me think, “Gosh, you really should not be allowed to post anything on the main internet until your mid-20s at least” before I remembered that I blogged my entire study-abroad summer semester in Austria, and that all my posts are still up online.
I frantically raced to my posts to see what awful self-pitying things I wrote, and was faced with the realization that, oh my god, young me was adorable.
I wrote ecstatically, for example, about how small Austrian trash cans were:
The trash receptacles here are TINY. The trash compartments in my host mom’s kitchen are the size of what Americans consider desktop or counter-sized trash cans. The first time I saw a dumpster here I stopped and stared because it was so cute. You know how American dumpsters are so huge that people make swimming pools out of them? Austrian dumpsters are small enough that you can actually look down on them. Street trash cans, likewise, are tiny. My first day in the city I had a wad of tissues wedged in my pocket because I couldn’t find a single trash can, until someone pointed out that the trash cans were these little barely-two-gallon-sized cans tied to traffic poles. Despite the trash cans and dumpsters being small, they are never full. My conclusion is that Americans just produce way too much garbage.
I wrote about anxiously ordering at an Austrian McDonald’s and being stymied at what gender a Big Mac is:
So I went in, stood in a line, and anxiously tried to figure out how to order in German. Of course I could have gone up, done my requisite “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” and ordered in English, but for goodness sakes, I am taking German here. I just had my German midterm. If I couldn’t order at McDonald’s in German, then I would be a failure of a human being.
I ordered a Big Mac because what else is more representative of McDonald’s? I wasn’t sure whether to say “ein Big Mac” (masculine) or “eine Big Mac” (feminine) and decided on “ein” because Big Macs just seem masculine to me.
My present-day self lost it at my past self being utterly confused by being given a glass of water along with a cup of coffee:
My coffee arrived very quickly, on a silver tray with a small glass of water and two pretty packets of sugar. I could only assume the water was for drinking…? I hope there isn’t any cultural practice I’m missing out on in which you use the water to wash your spoon, or baptize the nearest infant, or something. In any case, I drank it.
I also laughed so hard I almost cried at how poor Young Sharon could not even figure out how doors worked:
It was a day of hilarious mishaps, related to my inability to navigate a world that isn’t filled with signs in a language I can read. At McDonald’s I opened the door to a private office because I thought it was the bathroom, and I walked into an unyielding board because I thought it was a door. At H&M I got stuck on the men’s floor because I couldn’t find the exit, and in my attempt to get out got myself stuck on the children’s floor. Then I got stuck on the men’s floor again. After I finally asked for help I almost opened an alarm-rigged emergency exit.
I fully believe that insufferable young Americans should not publish their study abroad experiences, unless they’re me, because I’m delightful.