this is where i've settled

*I am currently living in a small apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. It's not a main street, but it's not a quiet street either. There's a lesbian bar on the corner, and on occasion, I'll hear Mexican karaoke when I'm about to go to bed. The elderly Asian woman across the street rummages through our recycling bins on Monday nights after we put them out, taking all of our bottles and cans to sell back for the California Cash Refund credit.




*My room is small but cozy. The bed takes up approximately 85% of the room; I use half of it for book storage. Even though my room is about half the size of the other bedroom in the apartment, I chose it because I like the light that pours in through the windows in the mornings and through the afternoons. I don't mind the smallness because I don't need that much space. I'm still attached to some of my material things, but my intention is to live a more compact life.





*Material things, case in point. Necessary candles, post-its, eye mask, ear plugs, glasses, lollipops, pens, water bottle...



*This is most of my room. I can't get much more my room into a single photograph.



*My two houseplants and some empty vases. I try to take good care of these houseplants but find myself googling houseplant ailments every other day. This does not bode well for future pets or children.



*The hallway from my bedroom. The main door is at the bottom of those stairs. The bathroom (which houses a tub that has talons as feet!) is at the top of the stairs. To the right, the kitchen, the dining room, and the laundry room. The closed door is my roommate's bedroom.



*This is the living room. We have an electric fireplace, empty book shelves, and a television I do not know how to operate.



*I wash dishes about four times a day so I spend a lot of time in this little nook.



*The dining room. My mom gave me the cactus. My roommate received those orchids in the mail. There is a copy of The Economist on our table but it belongs to neither my roommate nor me. We receive all of Adam Flynn's mail, and that is his subscription. Who is Adam Flynn? I do not know, but we have a stack of Adam Flynn's magazines and other paraphernalia in case he is ever interested in reading them.



*On most weekday nights, I choose the quiet life that my apartments, a respite from the production and attention of work. But the world outside, in all its grit and color, is the perfect counterpoint, and I'm reminded every time I step outside that there is so much to see and so many places to explore. Everyday I navigate the dichotomy between the indoors and the outdoors; I struggle with sitting in a cubicle for so long, and sometimes I am scared to walk anywhere at night. Some days I want to sit at my dining table all day long and on others I find myself bolting down 18th street, sucking in all the fresh air I can get as I weave through the Mission and into the Castro. I'm still trying to figure out all sorts of balance in my life right now, but I love being out of an institution and just living in the world, which can be messy in a really beautiful way. Just living in the world right now, and trying to make the most of where I am, who I am, and all the things I have here with me...

this is la buissonniere

*Overlooking Lake Leman, on windy road in the hills of Evian, France, there is a little estate called La Buissonniere.

*It is lived in occasionally -- a refuge for sojourners and travelers. A place of respite, it has taken on the motley characteristics of everyone who has ever passed through.



*It is imprinted but still untamed and wild. It is kept and unkept.



*A simple structure of unpolished wood leaves little to be desired. The place is strange and unimaginable because of all the incongruous things it contains, the things left behind by each of its inhabitants -- half-drunken bottles of wine, dusty porcelain dolls, cross-stitched pillows with outdated aphorisms. Surrounded by forests, sandwiched between a sky and lake of blue, La Buissonniere is plain and unaffected -- purposefully, it seems, so that the wild beauty on all sides is an overwhelming embrace.

*It is easy to just sit and look here. It is easier to be still, to be okay with this one present moment.





*Someday I'll return.

  

this is my kin

this is a dinner scene

*Dinner with Mom's side of the family at the Japanese restaurant Mitsui in Taipei, Taiwan.
*Grandpa knows how to eat well.

this is me without you

*Sometimes I question our culture's lionization of individualism. On one hand, it pushes us to differentiate ourselves and affirms that it is okay, if not best, to do so. On the other, there exist social norms that bind us to a certain extent of individuation. Our culture's individualism equates dependence with weakness, making the Jack London-nomad and the Indiana Jones -- explorer the heroes of our lives, the characters we should strive to embody. Yet this exhortation to differentiate, when superimposed on a social context -- a context most of us have to and choose to navigate-can result in cutthroat competition, surges of jealousy, and the playing out of Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game." Or are those things just the darkest projections of human nature?

*One of the greatest relational ironies then is the fact that the most intimate relationships are also some of the darkest. Obsessive loyalty and obsequious empathy somehow mandate a counterbalance of treachery and malice, which are all the more treacherous and malicious because of they are subtle and more importantly because they are yoked to the most angelic of virtues.

*Me Without You (2001, dir. Sandra Goldbacher) is a coming-of-age movie that traces the lifelong friendship of Holly and Marina, two girls growing up on the Isle of Wight in the 70s. It is difficult to watch without seeing some of their lives in your own -- moreso the nuances and attitudes embodied in their friendship than the plot itself. You see the imbalances of their friendship: the way Holly always feels mousy and invisible next to Marina and how Marina uses that fact to bolster her own self-image, the way Marina is so needy and can manipulate the shit out of Holly but Holly ingratiates herself to Marina and can see that Marina depends so much on her; but those very imbalances also prove complementary in some good and other sick and twisted ways: they give each other social security; Marina quells the timidity in Holly while Holly tames the wild child in Marina; Holly's calm and balanced family is the antithesis to Marina's unstable and broken household. Yet to reduce the friendship to such simple declarative statements would be too easy -- and false. Every relationship is more complex than that. There are no straight lines, no clear actions, and no easy dichotomy of right and wrong.

*Holly and Marina's friendship is riddled with the anxiety of growing up, the necessary discomforts of discovering and shedding skins, of needing the security found in each other but so desperately wanting security in an identity apart from the other. When uniqueness becomes so personally significant, jealousy also becomes easier, and loyalty feels suffocating. Holly loves Marina's brother but Marina does everything in her power to prevent the fruition of that love, for Holly's loving anyone else, especially her own brother, seems to be a threat not only to their friendship but to Marina's own worth and existence. A manifestation of this horrible tension plays out in the separate, furtive romances that Holly and Marina each develop with the same professor. Each so longs to be loved and desired outside of their friendship. At the very least, each wants to be assured that this is a possibility.

*The thing about friendships is that they are as beautiful as they are messy. They are far from ideal, as I've learned and slowly swallowed. The amount of intimacy often directly correlates with the number of words and feelings left unsaid. Me Without You is not so much about two lives in tandem as it is about the single life formed out of two people, and that is a life so fraught with both love and hatred -- or something that is the combination of the two -- that it can be excruciatingly painful to watch. It's hard to love any of the characters more than another. This isn't a movie trying to further a storybook plot. Instead it sheds light on the delicate complexities of relationships that we can recognize outside of ourselves but are obscured or ignored in our own relationships. At the end of the day, even after the worst of betrayals, Holly and Marina lie side by side with their back on a bed, legs propped up parallel to the white bedroom wall, smoking cigarettes to their toes. They're together, even thirty years later, but this is no fairytale ending. Friendships never are.

*A quote from Jacques Derrida on friendship, taken from my friend Alyssa's thesis on friendship:
"The possibilization of the impossible must remain at one and the same time as undecideable – and therefore as decisive – as the future itself ... but not without suggesting that friendship is implied in advance therein: friendship for oneself, for the friend and for the enemy."

*I'll let you think about that one.