What I learned in 2021

Year 2021 taught me many lessons that I want to cherish, remember, and update. I wanted to capture them here as a reminder to myself, as guideposts toward the North Star.

I learned that I am a writer, and that I prefer writing to producing, and producing to directing.

I learned when I live with my parents I expend a lot of my creative energy to appeasing / worrying / anticipating their wants and needs. 

I learned that not writing regularly makes me so unhappy and ragey and inhibits my ability to be productive in any other area in my life. And that that the act of writing gives meaning to my existence. 

I learned that I’m a genre writer, and that genre - specifically thrillers - allows me freedom to explore the shadow side of both myself and others. And that in exploring this, I gain greater understanding of myself as a whole - both light and dark. 

I learned that I love living by myself. But also that it sometimes get unbearably lonely around the holidays. And that having a glass of wine and milk chocolate somewhat helps.

I learned that a movie projector is one of the best purchases I’ve made in my life. 

I learned that prestige, accolades, honor are useless indicators of how good a someone is as a collaborator. In fact they may work to disguise red flags in a person’s character, so they obfuscate rather than reveal.

I learned that I love writing about what it feels like to be a girl in Silicon Valley.

I learned that I love making podcasts, and that its limitation (lack of picture) is actually very freeing for a creative.

I learned that I May Destroy You is about introspection and not consent, and I loved that. 

I learned that I get ahead of myself and land myself in a hole when I get too excited and too ambitious about some future achievement or impressing someone. And that a remedy to this is to let that go and come back to myself, and write just for myself. 

I learned that budgeting sucks and takes a long time. But necessary. This goes for both movies and personal finance.

I learned that my current job is a day job. And that day jobs require a different mentality than a career. It’s not about outperforming to get ahead and earn more money. Day jobs are to be contained, enjoyed, and should be used to support the real job of being a creative. 

I learned that it’s critical for me to be financially self-sufficient in order to create sustainably, and also that best jobs are the ones that allow you to write and give you the satisfaction of meeting other people who are doing creative things. 

I learned that I can cook.

I learned that the sense of safety I have been seeking is from my twelve year old self. And that reminding myself that I’m here in the present and that the current reality is safe, helps me feel calmer. 

I learned that therapy helps. 

I learned that remote jobs don’t work for me because so much of what I am seeking in a job is dependent on interpersonal interactions and connection.

I learned that writing groups really help. 

I learned that when I feel stuck, I can take a day off from work and just be.

I learned that I can walk to museums and many of them are free or have free weekends. And that audio visual experiences are healing and inspiring.

I learned that writing characters that are too dark in a one-sided way lands me in hole that’s non-productive and unhappy. And that the stories I want to write have characters (protagonists, antagonists, supporting) that can elicit my empathy.

I learned that I need to always remember and choose to get the right results the right way. And that taking shortcuts that feel overly self-justified and live in a shady ethical area will cause me much unrest and anguish until I can see what I’ve done, make it right, and surrender it to God.

I learned to say “yes” only to things that deeply resonate in every cell of my body and in my soul. A “Hell Yeah or No” as John August calls it. No to everything else. Remember Oprah’s words: "Never again will I do anything for anyone that I do not feel directly from my heart. [I will say no to projects] in which every fiber of my being does not resound yes. I will act with the intent to be true to myself."

Gardening

My parents let me take over the dirt patch in the front yard when I told them I wanted to start gardening. They even gave me a small seed fund (forgive the pun) to get started. I bought a book to learn more about gardening; the book is called “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home Scale Permaculture”. It taught me a lot about how nature creates self-sustaining ecosystems. The book appealed to my sense of aesthetic inspired by years of living in Northside Berkeley during college. It made me think of the organic farm co-ops, the Berkeley Rose Garden, and the hills near the Berkeley Botanical Garden and the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. I miss running through those hills and buying produce from the farmer’s market every Thursday morning. So it has been really nice to be able to harvest little things like the red chard from our front lawn. Here are some pictures of the garden that’s been a source of small joy during the pandemic.

My mom makes miso soup with the stalk and leaves of red chard. It gives it a deep flavor as if the miso soup is made from bone broth. Our garden doesn’t produce nearly enough red chard leaves for her soup so we have to supplement the recipe with store bought red chard.

I think these nasturtium leaves look like little puppy paws or a baby’s hand. I high five them in the morning and they bounce up and down and make me happy. I can’t wait to see the flowers in the spring.

I spotted a caterpillar feasting on the leaves of milkweed flowers. The nice thing about permaculture garden is that there’s lots of stuff for critters to eat so they don’t all go for the same stuff that humans like to consume like red chard.

This little bird flew into my shot while I was trying to take pictures of the flowers. The hummingbirds also seem to visit more often now that our front yard has more flowers.

There are two squirrels that think that our backyard is their home, which it is. We have to share the avocados, guavas, and other fruits with them. They also like to hide my parents’ golf balls strewn around the yard. My dad found fifteen golf balls hidden in different places around the backyard. The squirrels must think that the balls will ripen or sprout if they are buried under the dirt.

These flowers are a hit with the hummingbirds. The nice thing is that they bloom all year-round

This is my next project, which is a keyhole-shaped garden in our backyard that will house herbs and salad greens. I am in the process of mulching, which is just gathering leaves and sometimes compost to nourish the soil. The bricks were lying around the backyard, half or entirely buried under the dirt. I dug them up to create a low barrier for the mulch.

Moonrise Kingdom

My roommate, Nicole, invited me to the showing of Moonrise Kingdom as part of her birthday celebration. I had seen the trailer and gathered that it's a film about two kids in New England who decide to runaway together. The film takes place in the sixties. I would have dismissed the movie if it wasn't for the cast and the pretty movie trailer (and the 94% rotten tomatoes rating also helped). I swept aside my Asian guilt (I thought about spending this evening coding) and joined her and her friends for the movie showing.

Moonrise Kingdom, whose title sounds like a Chinese martial arts movie, is so pretty. It's like candy to your eyes and ears. It's so pretty that I wanted to take frames out of it and post it around my room. Every scene is like a vintage polaroid photo. An advertisement from the 60s. It's as if Wes Anderson shot the movie through Instagram.

The plot is simple and yet each moment is full of innocence, wonderment, and adventure. And Wes Anderson  portrays children as complete human being with full mental faculty and emotional complexity! But frankly all that stands out in my memory is the color palette. The sepia and pink hues, the golden fields, washed out blues, red and green standing out against the desaturated background. There is such a decisive and consistent look throughout the film.

I guess one thing that slightly bothered me was the visual imagery of the night time scene. The rain is pouring and it's the evening. And either the director or the post-production crew decided to blue-filter the sh#$ out of it. So everyone's faces look blue. Like ghosts. I didn't particularly like the look but maybe it was the look they were going for.

I appreciated that the film didn't water down childhood. I find that childhood portrayed through Hollywood is either idealistic, fantastical, really sad and dreary, or some other end of the spectrum. The subtlety and complexity is usually entirely missing. Wes Anderson deals with it very delicately, being careful not to shift to the extremes I mentioned. And the acting from these kids is amazing. I loved the gaze of the main character (the girl). It's always distant and full of meaning, and we can never really guess all that goes inside her head.

Overall, I loved it. Two hours well spent and coding could wait.

Caramel

Ever since I heard about this movie, a foreign film from Lebanon that takes place in Beirut and written, acted, and directed by Nadine Labaki (a female director to boot), I wanted to see it but kept pushing it off. It came up again on my Netflix watch list so I finally decided to watch it tonight.

And it whirled me into its world: a small beauty salon in Beirut where people come to share their personal drama, joy, worries, and hopes. It's a pastiche of different stories that involve women who work in the beauty salon and their frequent customers.

And you will never guess what the caramel is used for. Hint: it's not for eating.

There are many poignant moments in the movie and what I appreciated the most was the honesty in which these poignant stories are shared. Unlike in Hollywood movies, where the story takes expected turns to satisfy the audience, Caramel has moments of disappointment, disillusionment, but ultimately hope. The beauty of life shown through its most mundane, every day moments. I loved it.

I was reminded of a quote from Gogol's Dead Souls, which strangely fits this movie:

And for a long time yet, led by some wondrous power, I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.