Broadly speaking, the brain encodes the passage of time not as a linear sequence of events but in terms of periods of novelty and change. When you experience new stimuli, your brain has to work harder to process and encode it, and it takes up more space in your internal timeline. Conversely, a monotonous routine gives your brain nothing new to latch onto, so that period of time smushes together into a single, indistinguishable haze.

I occasionally feel as though I’m experiencing the opposite phenomenon, where my brain is trying to process so many new things that it can’t fully finish encoding any of them before moving on to the next. The days blur together in a different kind of haze—a haze that somehow stretches out and compresses simultaneously, like one of those woven finger traps from my childhood. The past 6 weeks have been that kind of whirlwind: from the Sail4th 250 celebrations for Independence Day to Fleet Week to San Diego Comic Con to a week spent road tripping in North Carolina to chasing meteors in upstate New York. And when I wasn’t unpacking or repacking or doing laundry or catching another cab, I was sacrificing sleep to finish an overcomplicated craft project (see below), or frantically hunting down a ticket for The Odyssey before it left theaters (see below), or catching up with friends I’d been neglecting for weeks (see my text inbox), or trying to find the time to finish this newsletter (see below).

If there is one guiding principle in my life, it is to seek adventure, and I’ve certainly covered solid ground on that front in recent weeks. But I’ve also felt bone-deep relief to be sleeping in my own bed again, and respite in being surrounded by my own trinkets and clutter instead of impersonal hotel decor or the carefully curated aesthetic of some suburban Airbnb. A few days ago, I took the subway for the first time in a month and felt an unnoticed tension slough off my shoulders. Not just because I was finally beyond the reach of tailgating GMCs on the interstate, but because I was finally back within familiar territory. Paradoxically, that sense of familiarity had itself become unfamiliar to me; novelty had become commonplace, while the ability to turn off my brain and rely on muscle memory was hard won and harder come by.

I think a lot about how experiences gain valence through context—how you can deem something good or fun based on having experienced bad and boring things before, and vice versa. I forget sometimes that adventure works the same way, shining brightest when contrasted against the comforts of a quieter life. After so long spent wandering off the beaten path and mucking about in the underbrush, the road more traveled, with its benches and warm meals, is a welcome sight.

Sail4th 250

As I’ve become more and more of a nautical nerd over the past 2 years, I’ve begun curating a Tall Ship Bucket List. It’s not very long (yet), featuring just 3 ships at the moment: the Royal Clipper, a 5-masted fully rigged cruise ship acclaimed for being the largest oceangoing square rigger in the world; the Götheborg of Sweden, a full-scale replica of an 18th-century merchant ship that enjoyed some press in 2023 after answering a distress call from a 2-person vessel with a broken rudder; and the Amerigo Vespucci, a full-rigged ship that was rather romantically deemed “the most beautiful ship in the world” in 1962 by the USS Independence.

I routinely check all 3 ships’ upcoming tours to see whether America is featured on the route, which is how I learned that the Vespucci would be part of an international fleet sailing up the Eastern seaboard in July to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. (Incidentally, this is also how I learned America turned 250 this year. Oops.) The fleet comprised more than 40 tall ships from 20 countries, and planned to participate in a Parade of Sail on the 4th of July before docking for a few days and opening their decks to tourists.

Obviously I cleared my schedule immediately.

On the morning of the 4th, I trekked to the Upper West Side to watch the Class A and Class B tall ships make their way up the Hudson. It feels inadequate to say the sight took my breath away, but it’s a true description. The silhouette of a tall ship cruising under full sail is undeniably majestic. And I had not anticipated the sheer scale of some of the ships participating in the Parade: the BAP Unión, a gargantuan 4-masted barque of 379’ length overall, genuinely had me contemplating my insignificance in the context of the universe. In proper Sonali fashion, I struck up a conversation with the people standing near me so we could marvel at the spectacle together. One woman was old enough to have seen the tall ships the last time they visited, in 1976; another man helpfully shared the names of the ships as I identified the naval flags I was familiar with.

My ship tours began the next day, starting, of course, with the Amerigo Vespucci. Her sails were furled just as they’d been during the Parade of Sail, which means I never got to see her in her full glory, but she still cut an elegant figure with her tidy rigging and her black and white stripes. She had the longest line of any of the ships I toured: the line to simply enter the pier stretched more than half a mile, and once you’d made it through that, another hour-long line wended its way across the pier to the gangway. Luckily, I’d snagged a ticket for expedited entry, which allowed me to skip the worst of the throng and check this ship off my bucket list.

With the Vespucci squared away, I turned my attention to visiting as many Class A tall ships in the next few days as I could. I eked out last-minute entry to the Capitán Miranda and the USCGC Eagle on the 5th; caught the ferry to Staten Island on the 6th to see the BAP Unión, the equally large Esmeralda, and the significantly smaller ARC Gloria; raced to Brooklyn to escape a building actively collapsing in my neighborhood on the 7th and toured the Gorch Fock II, the NS Mircea, the INS Sudarshini, and the Sagres between work meetings; and capped off the whole adventure with one final NYC Ferry ride home.

I’ve been staring at a blinking cursor for some time now, wanting to share more details from that weekend but unable to weave them into a cogent narrative. My struggle stems from the fact that I spent the weekend mostly learning things: learning how to identify different sailing rigs, learning how many English idioms have nautical origins, learning about each ship’s history and dimensions and inner workings.

It’s hard to translate a disjointed collection of trivia into a compelling story. There’s no smooth way to introduce and define the word “baggywrinkle” (which is a sort of padding made of clumps of old rope that hangs from ship rigging to prevent the lines from chafing against, and damaging, the sails). I don’t know how to make the differentiation of a topsail schooner from a barquentine interesting if you aren’t already interested in tall ships, or at least in learning random bullshit.¹ I can tell you this was the Indian Sudarshini’s first visit to America, which she reached by traveling through the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and finally the Atlantic Ocean in a journey lasting 5.5 months with stops in 9 countries, according to the captain—but there’s not much else to say.

So in the absence of a well-crafted narrative, I leave you with these few tidbits and an invitation to reach out if you’d like to hear more. In a year replete with grand adventures, Sail4th 250 stands out as possibly my favorite of the bunch, and certainly an experience I’ll never again be able to replicate.

San Diego Comic Con

The other event dominating my July was, of course, San Diego Comic Con. My Arrietty cosplay came together in a bit of a flurry, with the final piece falling into place just hours before my flight out. Of course my inner critic immediately fixates on all the things I need to fix or make more robust, but I’m trying to simply revel in the completion of this project. It’s the first cosplay I’ve made in a decade, and I’m unbelievably proud of how source-accurate it is. As a lovely bonus, I was even recognized by a few people during SDCC!

Like most first-time Comic Con-goers, I was only able to secure tickets for Thursday and Sunday, the first and last days of the con. These days were quieter, with shorter hours, fewer attendees, and none of the big-ticket reveals that characterize the cultural perception of SDCC. Lines for both panels and exclusives ranged from short to nonexistent (aside from Hall H, which is another beast entirely). You could walk through Artists’ Alley of your own volition rather than be buffeted by the crowd, and it was easy to find seating in any of the pavilions.

That’s not say the SDCC magic was entirely absent, though. There were plenty of exciting industry panels with notable guests on my docket: a panel on immersive storytelling featuring one of the creators of Meow Wolf; a panel on the upcoming Ramayana movie where the producer, director, and actors Ranbir Kapoor and Yash had all been flown out to discuss the film; a Q&A about multi-genre storytelling featuring authors VE Schwab, Olivie Blake, and Chuck Tingle. I picked up a number of exclusives, too, ranging from chocolate to trading cards to a special Ramayana artbook. And of course the cosplay game was off the charts. Though I didn’t see any fully functional Iron Man suits, there were multiple Hollow Knight/Hornet duos, countless characters from Witch Hat Atelier and Bleach, an impressive Homelander, someone in full-body foam armor who I think was cosplaying a Transformer, and even someone in a 12-foot-tall inflatable Trogdor suit.

On the days that I wasn’t flitting about the convention center, I worked my way through off-site activations and themed food trucks and street fairs and the unaffiliated Maritime Museum. In the evenings, I explored the nearby Gaslamp Quarter, a lively historic neighborhood abutting the convention center that was brimming with nightlife. I joined a bar crawl; I went to an anime rave; I danced my heart out at an emo night that I stumbled into completely on accident. And through it all, I reveled in the collective infectious joy permeating downtown San Diego, the result of thousands of con-goers finding community and creative expression with each other.

I didn’t realize how much I missed going to conventions until I was in the thick of one again. Though I used to attend cons regularly as a teen, moving to NYC (and, soon after, Covid) put an end to that hobby. I want to revive it, though. From the frantic pre-con cosplay prep to the post-con fugue state, from talking with strangers in line to buying fandom prints without knowing if I’ve got space for them on my walls, every aspect of con-going lights up a part of my soul. I’m already counting down the days to New York Comic Con in October and scouting ideas for my next cosplay. Give me a shout if you’ve got any suggestions!

In elementary school, my math teacher, Mr. Taylor, would give us Neopets trading cards as rewards for doing well in class or winning class competitions. One full wall of his classroom was honeycombed with small wooden cubbies reaching from floor to ceiling, each holding a plastic box packed with trading cards. The cards spanned the full spectrum of rarity, too, and were dispensed with proportionate value to the difficulty of the qualifying task. The shiniest cards were reserved for the highest-stake challenges, and we counted down the days to those scarce few opportunities for securing both the coolest cards in Mr. Taylor’s collection and the bragging rights that came with them.

In hindsight, it’s remarkable how successful this was as an engagement strategy, given only 2 kids in the class were aware that the cards had any use beyond being hoarded. For my part, I liked the art, and I liked winning things, and that was enough to keep me invested. By the time I left elementary school, I’d finally collected enough cards to constitute a Neopets deck (albeit a poorly curated one), but having lost my access to Mr. Taylor’s collection (and, thus, the ability to collect any more), and not knowing what to do with the cards I already had, I packed them away and promptly erased the concept of trading cards from my mind.

And then I became friends with a bunch of gamers who love Magic: the Gathering, and I finally learned the point of collecting trading cards, and also that you can make trading cards out of literally anything. For instance, did you know that some airlines have their own trading cards? Many pilots carry a stack on hand, and they’ll give you one if you ask them while deplaning or in the terminal. I got my first one this July, for an Airbus A321.²

So when I was trying to figure out how to turn my Sail4th 250 adventure into some kind of tangible souvenir to share with my friends, I lit upon creating trading cards, featuring photos I’d taken along with the specs of each ship and a fun fact or two.

Unsurprisingly, I immediately experienced a descent into madness. (It wouldn’t be a proper Sonali project otherwise.) I’d assumed there was some standardized way of measuring the dimensions of a ship, and that this information would be easily accessible online. I was wrong on both counts. The “length” of a ship could mean the length overall, the length at the waterline, or the length of the deck. The “height” can be measured from the waterline or from the deck. Sail area is sometimes presented accurately but sometimes with just a lower bound. And that’s only if you can find this information to begin with; I spent more hours than I ever could have expected feeding naval blueprints in foreign languages and scans of 50-year-old articles into Google Translate to extract and cross-reference some of this information.

Once I’d finally gotten all the data I was looking for, I moved on to assembling the cards. If I’d been smart, I would have placed a bulk order at a professional print shop. But I bought a fancy printer a few months ago that I’m perennially trying to justify the cost of, so I decided to do the printing and assembly myself. For each card, the front and back are printed onto sticker paper, carefully cut out, aligned and pasted onto thick cardstock, then trimmed again to clean up any misalignments. Then I package them in sets of 4-5 in foil packs, made of cosmetology foils and double-side tape, in order to simulate the experience of opening a proper trading card pack. There’s definitely a roughshod look and feel to the finished product, but I think that adds a bit of charm.

In total, there are 10 different ships to collect, and 60 or so cards in circulation. So if you ever encounter one of the 12 other people who know me, you might be able to trade your way to your favorite unlicensed tall ship card. Or, as with most of my crafts, send me a note if you’d like a pack for yourself and I’ll get one in the mail.

The Odyssey

⭐

I knew I was in for a rough ride when I heard conspicuously bad ADR within the first 3 lines of dialogue.

I cannot offer a critique of this movie that is more intelligent or offers anything more to the discourse than the critiques that already exist. I can say only that I found the whole thing tedious, and at points astonishingly amateur. For all that Nolan’s practical effects and IMAX cameras are gathering critical acclaim, I wish even a fraction of those resources had been reallocated to basic technical competencies: better editing, better set pieces, better dialogue, better ADR.

This movie is all the more disappointing because I felt I could see the bones of something better. I could see how the vastness of the monsters Odysseus encounters, the interchangeable sandy beaches that stretch out toward a sky with no horizon, the cuts between shots that leap over minutes and months with equal indifference, all worked to create a sense of being unmoored, a direct projection of Odysseus’ state of mind as he speaks with Calypso with his memories lost and the anchor of his family beyond his grasp. And I could see how Nolan was creating tension with the tangibility of the gods’ dictates despite their invisibility within the narrative, a tension that promised to force ever-defiant Odysseus to properly reckon with his understanding of the world.

But those tensions went nowhere and said nothing. All of these immense, profound, existential ideas were dropped in favor of a choppily edited combat scene and a self-pitying monologue. Frankly, I had stopped caring about Odysseus by that point. He wasn’t interesting or clever or witty. He was just a sad guy in a shawl. I didn’t care that he loved his wife, or that he felt bad about sacking Troy, because those throughlines were woefully underdeveloped. And I didn’t care that he was going west to follow the way of the gods, because Nolan had just told me that Odysseus’ guilt arose from facing the consequences of his actions rather than from any epiphany that the gods were worthy of respect in their own right. In the words of Emily Wilson, Nolan presented an uncomplicated man in a movie that lacked depth, leaving me feeling like I was enduring an odyssey of my own just to make it to the credits.

Also, “our age of bronze is collapsing” is a frankly unforgivable line of dialogue, and Christopher Nolan owes me $10,000 for making me hear that in IMAX surround sound.

For the fun of it, here are 3 Letterboxd review options that I axed in favor of what I ultimately posted:

• This was less an odyssey and more a clip show with a reprehensible budget

• Sets $200 ADR $150 actors $800 boats to destroy $3,600 editors $150. Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. My age of bronze is collapsing

• I genuinely would rather have bought an IMAX ticket to watch Haelian stream Hades 2 for 3 hours