foggies

accidentally deleted TWO better-written drafts because i still don't know how to use dreamwidth... gen z problems (i'm not gen z). i'm so tired. i consumed more media in march but you can see that nothing else has stuck with me. i accidentally got into mid-2010s captain america film dynamics again

books:

the expatriates by janice y. k. lee — 4/5
this is a good argument for why i should watch more shows first before consuming the book, because the book is almost always better. maybe it's because i know hong kong, but i thought that this book set up such a gorgeous, muted, old, claustrophobic atmosphere of this city that even the most beautiful ultra-2020s-tinted establishing still shot couldn't do. these characters are much better when you can understand why they're so intent on behaving insufferably and setting back their own lives. about the social (socioeconomic) commentary of the expat in hong kong: stunningly accurate, as far as i can tell. i have half a lived experience. not really. (an expat of, not an expat in.)
i think the tv series markets itself a little more like a mystery, not that anything is solved in the end. on the contrary, the book is very clear from the beginning that it is about grief, responsibility and lack thereof, women's suffocation. how to reconcile the grievous, heinous acts you committed in the past with the person you think you are now.
one of my moots used to say, "let's just all live." the end of this book delivered this message very well.

music:

favorite new song: hot by le sserafim
favorite new album: fe304: forward by nmixx (what else!!!)

letterboxd

currently:

• the snap by elizabeth staple
• olive days by jessica elisheva emerson
• my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh
• long bright river (tv series)

i do sadly have to take mock board exams and then real board exams in quick succession over the next couple of months, so maybe you won't hear from me! but maybe you will! writing about myself on the internet to nobody in particular: my favorite vice!

hello. i have decided to give dreamwidth a try again. i was thinking that one immediate change i could make to my life that would have major improvements and zero drawbacks would be to massively roll back my consumption of short-form media and exchange it for any thoughts from anywhere at all that are more than two ideas deep and forty-five seconds long. if self-reflection is the goal (though it may simply be poorly-disguised narcissism), then wouldn't it be easier to read through my thoughts in long-form?

i am, at my core, a logger. life-long, obsessive, hoarder-like. starting from middle school through the end of college, i timestamped my handwritten journal entries, and if i took a pause in writing, i would timestamp the time that i started writing again. my high school tumblr reblogs were militantly tagged by fandom, ship, and character. i used to handwrite lists of every single movie, television season, and book i consumed, manually sorted into lists for class and for fun. last september, i started logging every single patient encounter i had in school, what happened and what i did and what i learned. still haven't missed a single patient, and don't intend to until i graduate. the previous sentences are literally a meta-log of what i used to log. i'm getting sick of single-genre media-logging platform. no more letterboxd, no more goodreads, no more imdb...!! the great unification of the things i consume seriously will happen on dreamwidth!

genuinely, i am a shittier writer today than i was at 15 years old. it 100% has to do with the fact that the most frequent long-form "writing" i do is when i write patient encounter notes in my school's EHR. this is searingly humiliating to admit. i can't even blame anyone for this. how can i be so, so much worse at expressing myself today when it is literally my job to learn how to communicate clearly an almost-expert in my field.

i don't think it is possible for me to do a complete digital detox. i don't think i've lived a single day without looking at my phone since i got the lg optimus slider in seventh grade and discovered you could read ao3 on its funky little native browser. i don't have a desire to completely separate myself from consuming content, only to redirect it. being fed random content deemed entertaining to people of my age/gender/racial demographic that i forget about as soon as i close the app: horrible! choosing to follow certain topics of interest where posts and chatter are contributory to my engagement with said topic: surely better.........

final thought: obviously i still can't quite kick internet validation and narcissism, but i'm also over humiliating myself in front of my irl colleagues. the happy middle-ground is clearly another blog-type thing that about three people are going to read. it's literally fine this is for #me
 

actual media log, (mostly) jan 2025:

books

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid — 2/5

• sadly, i really don't think this book lived up to the hype. the entire novel is so tell-not-show, a principle of creative writing we were meant to kick by the fifth grade. i mean, i understand that it's supposed to be memoir-style, but she really beats it into the reader that evelyn is telling this story at 80 years old with decades of emotional detachment from the events we're meant to care about. evelyn's life outside of her multiple platonic husbands is so incredibly simple — how does she not have more friends, more enemies, more complicated workplace relationships? author seems not to understand that the average reader who picks up a book about golden-age hollywood drama is probably quite nosy about it all. book is as if someone had the task of writing a novel strictly off the facts of a "personal life" wikipedia page section, no extra research or embellishment allowed.


• the one interesting husband relationship was the one with harry cameron. guess i've never rly thought about whether one would develop strong partner feelings towards their beard if they had a biological child together but were dating someone else. never even crossed my mind


total garbage: how we can fix our waste and heal our world by edward humes — 4/5

• this one was really fun!! i am a layman and a somewhat lapsed environmentalist from my college days (hello environmental biology bachelor's degree that i never used for even one day), and this book gave me ideas for and validated a lot of the current unconventional choices i make in decreasing personal waste. i retained a surprising amount of information about induction stoves but almost none about clothing waste. also realized through the course of my reading that maybe my interest in sustainability isn't as self-driven as i thought — the place where i grew up, the city where i went to college, and the city where i live now were all brought up pretty explicitly in the examples of places that are reducing certain types of waste. not that i can find many peers irl who are interested in more sustainable practices within our extremely high-waste field. idk. my colleagues don't get it but this book really really does. i love individual sustainability; just need to get a little bit better at it

television

squid game season 2 — 3/5

• started watching this with my friends, pirated a few episodes on my own (living a blissful netflix-free existence), and didn't finish the last couple. i thought it was super unrealistic that people could watch other people get executed and know that they could die next and still vote to keep playing, then felt a bit contrite for not empathizing hard enough with whatever dire life situations they must be in to feel this kind of life-or-death desperation, which felt both fun ironic (not empathizing with people who don't empathize, haha) and stupid ironic (worrying about if i'm worried enough about people who are taking action to take my rights and opportunities away; am i too much of an internet liberal). i will probably finish this season. i wish park sunghoon weren't a fucking scumbag. stan jo yuri


the morning show season 1 — 3.5/5

• i love you reese witherspoon. mark duplass's character reminds me a lot of my clinic group leader

podcast

i listen to probably more podcast minutes than music per day, but it's never occurred to me to a podcast round-up before! here are some that i sort of keep up with:

news:

• up first
• the journal
• the npr politics podcast
• today, explained

journaltainment:

• planet money
• search engine
• pop culture happy hour
• the big flop
• diss & tell
• crime junkie

audio fiction:

• midnight burger
• the nosleep podcast

movies

my letterboxd

see you in the next one!