It’s almost over / It’s just begun

Friends,

Pictured above is Taipei Fuhsing Private School, the place where I’ve spent the majority of my weekday waking hours for the past two school years. Last Friday was my last official day. My exit process included collecting stamps from all the offices of the school and then a fifteen minute conversation with the chairlady of the school who talked to me about Texas and then gave me a bite-sized Snickers. My students were so incredibly sweet, and I’ve gotten so many wonderful notes from them since that day. It’s a pretty big bummer the semester and my stint there ended online, but hey, I have silly Zoom screenshots to look back fondly on forever.

My homework for Chinese class this week was to write about “My Taiwanese graduation,” and I’m not sure exactly what my teacher meant when she asked me to write about that, but I chose to interpret it as the end of the school year. So tomorrow during class my teacher will tell me what grammar errors I made when I wrote simple sentences trying to capture the experience. “我又一點傷心又一點安心又一點緊張”: I’m a little sad, a little relived, and a little nervous. Sad because I will miss my students, relieved because I’m very ready for some downtime, and nervous because I’m not entirely sure about my next step. I’ll be teaching part-time at a university-affiliated language center, which seems like it’s going to be a perfectly fine job, but it’s one I’m uncertain about, and uncertainty sucks.

My homework, by the way, was part of a lesson about using past tense and sequence-of-events words, so I’m pretty sure my teacher wanted me to talk about actual things happening and not just about my feelings, but it’s called art, look it up. I’ll end up having to redo it, which means I’m basically the same kind of student I was twenty years ago.

This week has been a good chunk of video gaming, reading, listening to Carolina’s interminable conference calls, cooking, and answer a giant pile of emails that I’ve put off from the past month.

If I owe you one: soon. No promises on exactly how soon.

I know I’m really late on this to the point where it’s not helpful anymore, but here are Graham’s Three Important Tips for Surviving Lockdown:

1. Keep a bag of dark chocolate chips in the refrigerator. When you need a pick me up, take three or four to brighten your world.
2. Get in the habit, during every transition (getting up to use the restroom, get water, between meetings, whatever) to do a small round of exercise.
3. Figure out a way to get some sun, and take some additional Vitamin D anyways.

Just kidding, those are my important tips for any time. During summer, you are allowed to substitute mango in for the chocolate chips. For a treat, you can even use a Ferrero Rocher.

On the subject of lockdown, normally I’d put something like this in “Further reading,” but Bo Burnham’s Inside on Netflix is one of the most powerful things I’ve watched in a while. The first couple of songs are very similar to the kind of work he did before he stopped performing comedy (and are the weakest part of the show, imo), but then it digs into overlapping creative performativity, depression, the internet, and the lockdown. It’s really intense and just hit me hard. I can’t get it out of my head. I think my favorite song from it is “All Eyes on Me,” but don’t listen to the songs without watching it. I’m still looking for an article or essay about it I really like, but I haven’t found one yet. This one gets kind of close, and I love its ending:

“In some moments it’s Tristram Shandy , in others it’s Parks and Rec ’s Ben Wyatt holding up a Claymation figure and asking, ‘Do you think a depressed person could make this??’ But it is also mesmerizing throughout, catchy and astonishing and captivating and self-absorbed and desperately thinking of everyone else, all at once. ‘Can I interest you in everything, all of the time?’ Burnham sings, about the internet but also about this special. The answer is yes.”

But I still want more. Find it for me?
​

Further reading:

• Uplifting read: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s statement regarding declining UNC’s tenure offer is a pure, masterful takedown of an institution that chose to prioritize a racist rich donor over an award-winning, peer-approved writer who would’ve been a huge boon to their students and community. I agree entirely with her decision and her justification; UNC might have changed their mind, but it would’ve never been welcoming for her. Congratulations to Howard on UNC’s loss. Really looking forward to seeing what comes out of her and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work there.
• Another good one: in 1979, James Baldwin was interviewed for ABC’s 20/20 . For annoying reasons, not only did it not air, but it’s just now seeing the light of day. It’s a good one, as every piece of film with Baldwin on it is.
• This essay gave me names for “paranoid” vs. “reparative” readings, something I’ve thought about a lot but didn’t have terms for. What a heartbreaking story.
• I played two video games I really liked in the last month. CONTROL is a first-person shooter about a paranormal government agency. Little bit of Lovecraft, little bit of Twin Peaks , little bit of the X-Files . Outer Wilds is a puzzle exploration game that I can’t say much about without spoiling but it does so much right. Both are pretty short (12–15 hours). I’m also unreasonably hyped about the upcoming Elden Ring , which means it’ll be horribly disappointing.
• Gene Demby on the recent American “crime wave.”
• I’ve written before about the raw magnetism Daveed Diggs has about him, and these photos of his and Emmy Raver-Lampman’s house in Architectural Digest only adds to that. I’m not sure about his posture in the photos but wow those colors and the spacing are so fantastic.
• I have a tendency to listen to the exact same music over and over and over again, and that’s not a bad thing, especially when I’m working, but for the last couple of months I added a bunch of friends on Spotify and being able to browse through what they’re listening to has been really wonderful in terms of finding new music. Here’s me . One more place I’ve been leaning on to get me to listen to new stuff is Hanif Abdurraqib’s Instagram story feed — he’s so incredibly thoughtful, and his pictures aren’t hard to look at either.
• The new Mountain Goats album is just okay :(
• My favorite Twitter account at the moment is a bot that posts lines from Frog and Toad . Here . Helen Rosner’s tweet here is a close second.

This week I read half a book in one day for the first time in a long time and even though it wasn’t a spectacular book, it felt so great. The next big hurdle is, as the case # drops, making myself get outside and doing that whole sweating while putting one foot in front of the other thing. It’ll be rough. After that, who knows? Going to go knocking door to door trying to find someone to teach me to make the best 酸菜 . What are you learning?

-g