Incoming Rabbits

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/incoming-rabbits

Friends,

Welcome to 2023. New Year, and my rapidly approaching birthday is always a time of checking in. Looking back, looking forward. Are you where you want to be? Are you doing what you want to do? Are you moving in the right direction? These are questions that we might answer differently one day versus the next, or even before lunch versus after, so let’s be generous to ourselves. In 2022, I did not kill our bonsai, so I feel like I’m doing okay.

Last year I wrote to you from quarantine, and ironically I am writing to you from a more self-imposed quarantine: I finally got Covid. Tested positive Sunday after a sore throat that started Thursday morning and a negative rapid test Friday morning. My symptoms have been incredibly mild — an occasional cough, a sore throat primarily when I lay down or first get up, and possibly a little more tiredness than usual (though, really, who can tell with that sort of thing?). Carolina also didn’t get it — we both got booster shots in December and have just been lucky. The biggest annoyance has been that I’ve had to miss meeting up with a couple of former students back home in Taiwan after their first semester of university.

The combination of the new year, a lot of recent conversations, and beginning to yet again have to think about next school year and what I want to be doing for work (my job at National Taiwan University is going great, but it’s part-time and not guaranteed to continue) has me thinking a lot about a conversation I had about 11 years ago. It was right after I’d finished undergrad, right before starting grad school, and I was going to my first academic conference with a few classmates from undergrad and our professor. As is typical for conferences, the night ended with alcohol-fueled conversation, and I remember very distinctly (so distinctly I probably shouldn’t trust it) four of us being gathered around a hotel mini-fridge pulled out from the wall to be used as a table for our cups of red wine. One of my classmates, who I believe was recently engaged, asked our professor if they regretted not having children. This led to a long conversation about how as adults you make some decisions and then you don’t look back, because there are always what ifs and you never know what the other path would’ve held for better and for worse, and how similar questions are not very fun to ask or answer because one answer is too boring and the other answer is too sad.

My memory of that conversation is probably not very accurate, but one of the reasons I keep playing it over in my mind is that shortly after we had it, the professor had a very unexpected medical issue and abruptly disappeared from public life. So it’s all bound up, added punctuation to an already complex mess of thoughts on regret and commitment.

And in a way this conversation is echoed some in what I’m telling a lot of disappointed seniors right now: that the differences between universities is much smaller than they seem to you right now, that what will make for a truly amazing university experience is unable to be measured by USNews rankings, that they are not choosing between a perfect option and imperfect options but instead between multiple good-as-far-as-you-can-possiblyknow options, which is its own kind of existential difficulty. Which is to say that the only sane path is the choose and commit and not look back. Which is to say that sometimes what you should do is basically impossible.

This newsletter marks the six-year anniversary of my Tele-Graham, which is very strange to think about. Thank you, Lovely Reader, for coming along on the journey. You will hopefully forgive me if I begin to repeat myself. If I don’t notice it, hopefully you won’t either.

I have resolutions, but they are boring. Read more, write more, put more effort into learning Mandarin. The only thing I have planned a little special for 2023 is that I intend for about half of my reading diet to be rereads. I want to go back and see what I think of books that I previously loved, what I think of them now. Which, of course, probably has more to do with me than with them (though it will also have a lot to do with how much I’ve forgotten). At the top of my list are A True Novel; Gilead; The Master and Margarita; Native Speaker; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ; and Solanin . Who knows what I’ll find.

What are your resolutions, Dear Reader?

Further reading:

• Callback to last month’s discussion on weak ties. New research published in PLoS ONE shows one of the primary drivers of podcast listening is as a form of parasocial relationships and social engagement. Obviously podcasts have good aspects beyond that, and obviously other forms of media also serve up parasocial relationships, but I’d posit that there is a correlation between that specific type of engagement and the lack of third places / weak ties in modern life. I’d love to see a deep dive into a similar examination of the role of vtubers in young people’s lives today (if you don’t know what a vtuber is, please don’t look it up, nothing makes me feel older than trying to understand their appeal).
• I’m kind of fascinated by ChatGPT . For the uninitiated, its the newest version of a machine learning-driven chat bot, which will respond to you in conversation, but will also write for you what you ask it to write. I’ve had great fun asking it to write poems about my board game group and letting my tutoring students mess around with it, but I’m also very curious about its future. There’s a lot of conversation about it! Many people are predicting it will become a big catalyst for change in education, because it can almost instantly write a decent essay for a student that is undetectable as plagiarism and only requires a small amount of editing to be pretty good. It can’t use citations, yet, so it’s mostly going to affect middle/high school classes, university personal statements, and research proposals. I’m not as convinced it’s actually going to change much as, say, Stephen Marche writing for The Atlantic , mostly because I’ve learned how many students are already not writing their assignments thanks to tutors, essay writers for hire, and even parents. Guess we’ll see!
• I greatly admire this intensely honest and wide-ranging memoir essay from Parkland shooting survivor X González .
• There were two heartbreakingly beautiful essays about Taiwan published last month: Katherine Hu on going to Taiwan to say goodbye to her grandparents, and Rhoda Kwan on how Taiwan has absolutely failed to be the home it should be for people fleeing Hong Kong.
• Every four or five years I’m reminded of The Internet K-Hole, a gigantic collection of “pre-internet non-professional pictures,” mostly of 1980s white America. Warning, the site has A LOT of nudity, but it’s just wonderful to scroll through. Here it is , and here’s a 2015 article from Vice about its origins.
• Finally, if you haven’t seen Glass Onion , you should do so immediately. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the original Knives Out (which you should most definitely watch first), but it’s really close, and it’s a delight, and Daniel Craig and Janelle Monae are so wonderful to watch.

The Lunar New Year begins relatively early this year, starting on January 23. Next year is the year of the Rabbit, so if you’re a fan of cute rabbit iconography being absolutely everywhere (like I most definitely am), then Taiwan is the best place you could possibly be. We have our rabbit red envelopes, our rabbit-accented spring couplets (春聯), and our rabbit greeting cards ready to go. We already had various rabbit-themed paraphernalia, both from having rabbit pets and from rabbits’ association with Moon Festival (a rabbit or many rabbits live on the moon with Chang’e, who floated to the moon after drinking an elixir of immortality). We are currently in possession of two rabbit-themed Starbucks mugs. If we make it through this year without acquiring more, I will be surprised at our fortitude.

I hope you allow yourself to indulge in cute, hopeful, or inspiring iconography, whatever form that takes for you. Happy New Year, Gentle Reader. Or, to use my silly Lunar New Year bilingual pun a couple of weeks early, Happy New Year 兔 You!

-g