> how to make a LINE stamp
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: making LINE stamps.
Hello friend,
Last year, I edited a zine on gratitude. In that zine, my friend Damon wrote an essay about making Blingee stamps that was actually about new rituals and routines made from quarantine.
The essay begins:
do you place the head of the week on Sunday or Monday? why January, and why midnight? if your quarantine has been like mine, these questions have become severely open-ended: weeks mash into a paste, months run through one another. my calendar looks like an acrylic pour painting of soymilk and oatmilk and almondmilk, and I lie on a bed of napkins, tilting its surface over in new ways, and honestly that kind of works.
I’m thinking of the essay again because Taiwan has gone into lockdown, nationwide level three, schools closed and online, hand sanitizer and contact tracing forms at every door. It’s an echo of last spring in Bloomington: new country, new town, new work, same pandemic. It’s uncertain when I can go back to work, although there are optimistic estimates and the sense that, if we react strongly enough this week, the next will be better. We can go back to school, crawl out of our homes, clutching our masks.
Last year in quarantine, I had the impulse to make things, as if this was a way of preserving my sense of living. I finished knitting a blanket that I had started in high school. I started a writing group with friends and wrote a chapbook of poems. I took long walks, read my way through the stack of books I had checked out indefinitely from the now-closed library.
In Taiwan, it was easy to forget about last year. Get past the COVID-19 tests and the two-week hotel quarantine and one-week self health management and there was a world that was mostly untouched by the pandemic. Deaths in the single digits, few if any active cases.
I’m not lamenting the fact that COVID is spreading in Taiwan. I’m not surprised or particularly disappointed. The news accuses the Taiwanese government and people of being complacent, but I’m not convinced that this is that case. Last week, there were flyers posed outside the school nurse’s office, circulating online. Each page was for a different COVID case, a complete list of locations and times where they had been. Imagine if the U.S. could have done that early on. Taiwan handled the pandemic more responsibly than my home country, but Taiwan was also lucky.
It’s just that I’m again left with cancelled plans and a lot of time the next week or so or for the indefinite future. Last weekend I biked around Green Island, taking in the waves, the water, watching the main island close its borders, knowing it was the last weekend trip I’d take for a while.
So again I’m left with the impulse to make things. This time I’ve been making LINE stickers, doing hack jobs trimming silly photos and adding decals and filters. It’s not really the same as a Blingee stamp, but I like to think that the intent is there. Not to prove that I’m productive or working, but more like, I’m finding a way to accept that my days do not have clear beginnings or endings again and this is how I’m processing.
The fact is that the meticulous, jenky way that I’m trimming around photos on my phone, leaving choppy edges, making digital stickers gives me a kind of peace. The mindlessness, the way I can spend hours doing this.
I’ve also been watching movies with my roommate: yesterday Tarkovsky’s Stalker and today Kogonada’s Columbus. I teared up only once while watching Columbus, at the cheesiest line: “You grow up around something and it feels like nothing.” I thought of the hate-love letter I had written to my hometown last year and felt a little homesick for Indiana.
Toward the end of Damon’s essay, he writes:
how can something develop when it ends where it began; how can it do work without displacement?
Doing and making is a kind of moving. The direction is less important than the moving. My hands tracing sticker outlines on a touch screen. In the time I’ve been in Taiwan, the ends of my hair have faded from purple to blue. There is an impulse to interpret this lockdown as a repetition, but I’m hopeful that in the last year we’ve learned something. And so I keep making, moving, moving.
Cheers,
Tiffany