Moments, Musings, and Months of Transition
It’s hard to get long-form writing done during periods of disquietude/transition in life. Here are some musings from the last few weeks instead:
1. Every year, I forget about the monsoon season, and I'm always surprised when it starts raining in May. I’m not a fan of this lukewarm interlude between spring and summer. I miss the days I would wake up to thunderstorms and Sun News declaring vidumurai (holiday) for schools and colleges.
2. Somewhere at an unfathomable 14.8 billion miles away from our planet, the Golden Record sits tight aboard the Voyager, awaiting discovery by intelligent life in interstellar space. The 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph contains images, sounds, music, and greetings, forming a small archive of life on earth, “intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.”
I’ve always wondered which human experience is representative of our species. Childbirth, war, kissing, and sports come to mind, in no particular order.
But on a more day-to-day level, I think of small talk about the weather. No social norm is as prevalent or consistently evolved across the world as starting conversations with comments about the weather. Topic-wise, it is as non-contentious as it gets. There’s plenty of room for improvement, so if you wish to take things to the next level, it serves as a window into the world of your conversation partner.
Do they enjoy the snow or stay shut in? Do they complain as much as you about the weekend forecast of rain? Do their weather preferences present segues into other topics?
With a little tact and genuine attention, weather talk can gradually grow into a more meaningful connection.
But should you choose to keep things casual but still friendly, it is already a perfectly self-contained interaction on its own.
3. When life gets overwhelming, my body goes numb. I am either drowning it in food or sleep or lack of either or both. When I am not swinging between deprivation and indulgence, I go out for a walk and sometimes feel the urge to run and drown my body in something else.
My lungs start protesting 30 seconds in and my forelegs - or the tibia as a Google search later informs - feel like gas cylinders about to explode. My entire being throbs with exertion, my vision strangely sharp and focused on my immediate surroundings. It’s an excruciating yet liberating feeling that slams me back into my body. A hard reset, if you will.
4. When June rolls around, I’m thankful for the longer days, but not so much for the clouds of mosquitoes that take over my walking trail by the river. The deep berry skies are breathtaking and descend in waves over the Tokyo skyline. Every time, without fail, I am awestruck by the apartment windows blinded orange in the setting sun. This is the time of day the real world takes on an anime-esque sheen where everything is soft, glowing, and vaguely hope-inducing.
5. After years and years of my sister badgering me, I have finally started watching anime. Other than those I watched out of nostalgia like Doraemon, Shin-chan, and Studio Ghibli, my anime consumption was non-existent. I feel embarrassed to admit that I considered it more as a genre for children and silly moods than a legitimate medium for storytelling.
Even for something as simple as watching anime, change had to come from within (aka my social media feed). I’ve always been resistant to recommendations. There are way too many things to read, watch, and listen to that I feel constantly behind. I hate seeing the backlog of recommendations grow and grow as I run out of time and inevitably fail to keep up. So, I dismiss them upfront until I stumble upon them on my own, my interest freshly piqued by the algorithm.
Should I be worried that the internet does a better job of persuading me than my own friends and family?
6. I wish to live on a street that makes me feel like a part of the local ecosystem, on par with everything and everyone that exists in the community.
On the 99 percent invisible podcast, the team discusses the difference between streets and roads. Simply put, a street is a stretch of land designed for humans to spend time on. A road, on the other hand, focuses on transporting you as efficiently as possible from one point to the next. And as we are humans, we also have a lot of stroads that try to accomplish both but do so poorly.
Tokyo is full of stroads and roads that make me feel small and inconsequential. For most of my life, I’ve lived on streets of some sort, but given the limited real estate in Tokyo and the disproportionate number of people it needs to accommodate, we stack ourselves one on top of the other in identical high-rises. You hardly see your neighbors and know them exclusively by the interesting noises they make that piss you off.
I had teething troubles getting used to Tokyo when I moved in 2017. It was painful in the beginning when I mostly isolated myself and detested the city like a body rejecting an organ it could not afford to lose. While I am not yet a fan, I finally have a cordial relationship with the city, after almost six years. I understand why it is the way it is but it’s not my favorite place in the world and that’s totally okay.