do-over

let’s do this again
play it again
go dancing again
sing to me again
hold me again
ask me again
have me again
write me again
read me again
tell me again—

      (i promise i’ll 
      say it back this time)

see me again
see me again
see me again

salt and heat and memory

An admission: I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump. It’s been a frustrating few years.

As much as I want to say that I don’t know what brought it about, I’m pretty sure the reasons are clear as day. I got busy with Elision and school. I got sad. Ridiculous as it sounds, I got an iPad—which, let’s be honest, did kind of play a major role in fucking up my attention span. 

The point is, I’ve always been a book person. But for quite a while I was only ever able to devour and love books in theory, and the thought of actually getting through them without skimming and finishing them became a far off improbability. I had a handful of starts and stops, and then I just stopped kidding myself altogether. 

This week I finished Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue.  

And now, after what feels like a lifetime of not being able to write about what I’ve been reading, here’s me gushing about it. 

Three years ago, the world was ending. At least, the students of Gracetown High, inspired by Ray Bradbury, were pretending it was. Rachel was spending her last night in town. She was leaving a love letter in her best friend Henry’s favorite book and waiting for him to call. 

But that’s all in the past. Before Henry broke her heart and she stopped responding to his letters. Before she failed Year 12. Before she lost her brother Cal to the sea and everything she’s ever known stopped making sense.

Almost a year after Cal’s death, Rachel moves back to Gracetown to live with her aunt and work at Howling Books, the secondhand bookshop owned by Henry’s family, even though she’d rather be anywhere else. Henry is there all the time. He works there. He lives there. And these days all he does is mope because his girlfriend dumped him and he just voted to sell the bookstore, even though he loves it, because he knows it’s the practical choice. 

Neither of them is sure about the future. But their days at the bookstore, with the written and unwritten histories that surround them, see them begin to reconnect and find hope—on dog-eared pages and beyond.

I barely remember how I found out about this, but I knew I’d adore it immediately. Not only because I had read the author’s Graffiti Moon a few years ago, but also because the blurb promised me everything I’ve ever loved reading about—unrequited crushes on friends you’ve known forever; estrangement from said friends that only adds to the tension; miscommunication and grand, anguished declarations of affection; grief; and bargain bookstores—thrown together into one love story. And before you mistake me for a sap (which I am), it says “a love story” right there on the cover. It was such a simple but unprecedented premise, I couldn’t help but fall for it.

So, it might’ve taken me more than a couple of days to finish this and I’m still not back to my glory days, but I think it’s finally taken me back on a real literature kick again. I think I just needed to get to a healthier mental state for it. I was patient with the book and I held back the urge to skim far ahead and check the last page (bad habit) because I was super invested and glad to be experiencing it. Also, it’s about people and their relationship/s with books, so I couldn’t have chosen a better comeback pick!

That said, it felt very good to immerse myself in its universe. The novel, told from both Rachel’s and Henry’s perspectives, takes place in a small Australian town in the summer. However, there are also a few scenes on the beach because, among other reasons, Rachel’s home away from Gracetown is located right by the ocean. Personally, I’ve been away from the water for quite some time, and it was fun to live vicariously through and seemingly within the nice little fictional world Cath Crowley has built. You can practically breathe in the briny air and feel the splash of the waves.

Of course, most of the plot unfolds in and around Howling Books. Again, I loved the idea (and execution) of a secondhand bookshop as a setting. In one of Henry’s chapters, he says that the appeal of secondhand books comes from the way they can be full of mysteries, and I completely get what he means. When I buy previously owned books, especially copies that have been around as far back as the 1960s or even the 1940s, I always get to thinking a lot about all the sediments of past lives they carry with them. Who were the owners, to whom my life is now weirdly bound in the smallest yet most amazing way? What became of them, and were they anything like me? How far have these books traveled, and what sorts of events did they get to watch unfold?

Sometimes they’d leave clues. A personal bookmark, notes and highlighted quotes right on the pages, inscriptions on the title page that read To Katie, on your graduation. Love, Dad. (Katie, you heartless bitch, throwing away a present and a perfectly good book! Love, Fiel) Which brings us to the Letter Library, Howling Books’s claim to fame. It’s an entire section of books that aren’t for sale; instead, customers are invited to write on them and leave notes in them. It’s such a romantic notion, people leaving a mark in books that have left a mark in them. Samples from the Letter Library are interspersed between chapters, and they're mostly letters exchanged between the characters that are very telling of character and relationship development. It’s a charming and actually useful touch to the narrative. 

Don’t laugh, but sometimes I’d forget that Rachel and Henry were fictional. They were painfully real, flawed people with distinct voices and ways of looking at life—she from a scientific viewpoint and he with a more literary take. I have nothing but love for Rachel, who hides her sadness in deadpan snark and a lot of introspection, and is just effortlessly cool, insightful, and level-headed. She still wants to dive and swim across the world despite her newly conflicted feelings about large bodies of water. She’s too sensible to believe in ghosts or time travel or transmigration, but she’s still the kind of person who wants to believe, anyway. Henry, on the other hand...man, I don’t know if I want to throw a book at him or write poetry about him. He makes some truly questionable and immature decisions and pines over a girl who clearly doesn’t deserve him, but at the end of the day he’s a kind, intelligent boy who genuinely cares about the people in his life, lives for literature and the shop, and is prone to goofy self-deprecation. 

The minor characters are all very rich and endearing, and they all have their own unique way of loving books, but I particularly grew fond of George, Henry’s sister. She gets shit for being a “freak” at school and has turned to a moody, tough-girl, fuck-off exterior as a defense mechanism, but she’s really a softie who loves reading science fiction with her cat and isn’t afraid of being herself in general. There’s a beautiful side plot involving her and an anonymous pen pal/secret admirer that just took my breath away.  

The novel wears its subtitle “a love story” with a quiet confidence that, holy shit, delivers. Rachel has loved Henry like that for years, and she leaves his life feeling jilted because she thinks he’s ignored her bold, fuck-it attempt at making a move, finally. Henry, on the other hand, has no idea  why Rachel ended their friendship and forgot all about him—all he knows is that it hurt and that she’s come back “rude and gorgeous.” Three years of distance and change is a long time. Rachel returns feeling like she’s gotten over Henry, and Henry’s as clueless as ever, so they both get to experience the deliciously slow process, built up through a series of swoon-inducing moments, of realizing that they’re actually (still) in love (all along). 

There’s a kind of warm and fuzzy unresolved sexual tension going on between them, amplified by interactions that range from funny to stilted to pining to intimate. Part of it’s because they’re actually great at being friends; they know everything about each other. And yet, in some ways, they don’t. And their discoveries are sweet and tender and promising. It’s all in the details. For example, Henry absentmindedly reaches out to touch Rachel’s bathing suit strap when he notices it peeking out from under her dress. It never becomes super explicit, but the writing more than makes up for it. See:

‘You’re very neat,’ Henry says, looking at my handwriting, and it feels like he’s said something sexy.
‘You’re very messy,’ I say.
‘And yet, I’m the one who passed Year 12,’ he says.
‘You’re very annoying,’ I say, smiling at him.
‘You’re very sexy,’ he says, like it just came out and he had no control over it.
‘So are you,’ I say.
‘It’s not the way I’m usually described,’ he says.
‘Tonight feels sort of unusual,’ I say.

I mean...?! See also: “You owe me an apocalypse,” falling asleep together right inside the bookstore reading T.S. Eliot, “You smell of apples.” / “Don’t smell me, Henry,” unbuttoning someone slowly, etc. 

This is also a novel of grief, and it’s handled in a way that poignantly captures what real grief feels like. Sometimes it’s like it’s not there, but it’s ever-present, a current surging even when you don’t sense it. Sometimes you just pretend it isn’t. Rachel’s lament that her brother’s life ended up as a set of boxes collecting his abandoned belongings is soul-crushing, but through her eyes, we get to know Cal, and mourn him, and keep him alive.

The way Cath Crowley ties sentences together is just something else. So wonderful. Sometimes I get too wrapped up to highlight my favorite passages, but with Words in Deep Blue I couldn’t help it—the lines and paragraphs are so pretty or painful or funny or full of wisdom or #relatable or real or all of the above that I needed to remember them and keep them. There’s not a lot of flourish to them, very tell-it-like-it-is, but they sound incredibly nice. I also love that she seamlessly added a lot of references to literature and the theories of time and explored themes of family, gender and sex positivity, and diversity.

I cried. I mean, obviously, I cried. I cried at the letters and the way some of it turned out because all of these characters are facing many different kinds of loss and the effects of growing up or growing older. But, again, there’s a lot of hope and tomorrows to go around, and it brings people together. It’s a brighter kind of realism that reminded me of Sing Street. Life’s shit, but you have to swim against the tide or with it, whatever, something like that. 

I don’t think I’d ever had the pleasure of being able to read the exact book that my sensibilities were calling for at a specific point in my life, until Words in Deep Blue came around. It was so lovely I didn’t want it to end. I almost want to un-read it just so I can experience it all again for the first time. It was completely in sync with me and it’s both unfair and perfect that there will never be anything like it. I’m certain that it will remain with me the way the books in the Letter Library stay with the people who’ve written in them—the way only the best books can and do.

all hallow's blues

10/31/15

We'd been in the same room once, at a music club in the basement of a Chinese restaurant, where a tribute show for some it-band was being held until well into what was called the "vulnerable hours" in a book I'd read.

It sounds cooler than it was.

I turned twenty-one that night, staring at my dying phone in the middle of a raging song. I watched the numbers change on the clock portion of my lockscreen. And at midnight on Halloween, for a moment, I was the only one who knew.

It was a strange feeling—I'd spent many newly-minted birthdays alone before, but never in a room full of people. I tried sensing a certain change, any change, within me, but I was as unremarkable and still as ever. I downed some of my beer (it was horrible and I hated it and I probably wasn't built for drinking of any sort) and tried to focus on the musicians on the makeshift stage, their faces half-hidden in the dimness. I felt out of place, like I always did, because everyone seemed to know everybody else but me.

But you were there, and you were a sight, with your cellophane eyes and your unruly hair, and I just knew I would never see you again. You were one of them, of course; you fit in.

I slipped away and left halfway through the show, already the slightest bit irrationally sad that I was losing you, a total stranger. I spent the rest of the night slowly finishing off the cheap caramel cake my parents had gotten me from the local bakery and wondering if I'd ever been truly drunk before.

(I probably have, once. I found out I was the space-out kind; lots of unfocused distant stares, speaking less and sinking even deeper into my head.)

I wasn't then, I don't think. But I was something.

forgotten journal entry dated january 21st, 2016

Found in a notebook with a poster of La Parisienne (1957) on the cover. It spans two pages of writing; the rest of the journal is empty. 

*

I don't know how I keep finding ways to survive.

It's so weird seeing my friends tweet about the flow of their routines, which are suddenly moving very differently than mine.

On my way to the mall I passed a man selling goldfish from a nifty little station built out of a bicycle. If I were in a French film, there would be a shot of me—having just taken an unconventional path that goes against my responsibilities—gazing pensively at the goldfish, then it would jump to a shot of me struggling to cradle a small water-filled plastic bag in my lap, my new fish friend swimming around inside. It would become a symbol of character development and plot movement. 

I didn't buy a goldfish (I wanted to), but I just know: When shit inevitably hits the fan, it dies. 

Here I was, dying inside, and they were talking about perpetual motion.

On fanaticism, girlhood, moving beyond, and the endless search for 

emptiness, prompted by my life's collision with Nicholas Hoult's.

At seventeen, I was invincible and stupid. 

I was a year out of high school and, having finally left behind the suffocating (and very limited) confines of my Catholic secondary education, I was eager to discover what else was out there for myself. I was reading over ten books a month. I was writing poetry almost compulsively. I was exploring my city and getting mugged and learning to love both train rides and walks home. I was starting to become preoccupied with planning and putting together a webzine with a small team composed of my friends, which in a couple of months would become Elision, its name picked out of a list of obscure music terms, referring to the occurrence in which a note begins where another note ends.

I hadn’t fucked up my life yet, but I would. 

I wasn’t dating or rounding up the requisite vices of a reckless youth—not for a lack of trying, mind you. That kind of thing just didn’t come naturally to me, I guess. It still doesn’t. Instead, like a true-blue loser, I busied myself with a slew of come-and-go fixations, live music, bands, and the internet. My days turned into a series of hotel lobbies, fiction and indiscretion, and close encounters, too close, with false heroes who no longer matter to me as much, if at all. Years have passed since I deleted their music.

This part of my life is very well documented. I feel like it’d be redundant at this point to recount it all here, and, if I’m being honest, downright embarrassing, although I know it sort of makes no sense without context to the people who have no idea what I’m talking about. But I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. I miss my friends most of all. “Look at our lives,” we’d say in jest, echoing some cyber-phrase we had learned off of Tumblr back when it was socially acceptable to be on it. “Look at our choices.” 

And I do look at them now, and I think, Well, shit. All those horrible decisions. All that wasted time. 

But what’s a past self if not the most ideal recipient of a swift kick in the face? 

The friends I made on the internet because they liked the same bands that I did, we’ve come to look back on these days as though we were buddies who’d been through war. We were, for lack of a better word, part of a scene. It felt at the time like it would never end, but a subculture—especially one rooted in music—was always going to be ephemeral, a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. Eventually, of course, we were pulled apart by differing interests, college, and whatever else. For me, I suppose, it was Elision and having outgrown the very musicians I once cried over and claimed I would love for the rest of my life. Somehow, we turned into our very own “Where are they now?” 

We began to think of ourselves as “veterans” of a dying movement. We’d seen it all and done it all. We were growing up and we were ready to move on. 

*

When I think of the year I turned seventeen, I look at it in terms of markers—what I was listening to, what I was obsessed with, what I loved. One of these things was Nicholas Hoult. 

I first became truly conscious of who he was two years earlier when I found him in an issue of Teen Vogue. I remember finding it endearing that he’d had no idea who Tom Ford even was, aside from his cameo in Zoolander, before filming A Single Man. The article mentioned that he’s 6’3”, and in the accompanying photo, his pale blue jacket and the sky around him brought out the color of his eyes. 

That was the year I really started paying attention to Skins, already a couple of years too late. I had been too young and a little too un-hip to have been able to fully appreciate it at the time of its original release. His turn as Tony Stonem, the Sartre-reading, choir-singing, ambiguously bisexual (and equally ambiguously sociopathic) antihero with a heart of gold, gave me all kinds of epiphanies. 

He became Hank McCoy, he read a Nick Hornby audiobook and did funny voices, and he played a zombie in love. In real life, he was shy, sweet, and self-deprecating. He was the ultimate: this impossible dreamboat, this great ideal, on whom I projected my hopeless teenybopper admiration. He would never be within my reach. 

Magazines I’d read had called his type “cotton candy.” You could fall in love with him, and you could move on with your life. 

So when it was announced that Nick was coming to Manila for AsiaPOP Comicon, I was, as the kids say, shook. 

I found myself weeks later in a hotel lobby, alone and uncertain. Call it a Fangirl’s Lament: How do I unlearn the obsessive tendencies that anchor me to overemotion? How do you like something casually without needing to experience more? The days leading up to the Con and Nick’s arrival had come and gone, leaving me an unruly, unraveling bundle of nerves. This combination of excitement and unease manifested physically—I could feel it at the tips of my fingers, and dead center in my chest. The weirdness of it all settled over me and clung to my skin. 

Like I said, I was “retired.” I’d left that life behind a long time ago. My old crew was gone; when I asked my friends to come with me for old times’ sake, none of them were free. Four years ago, I didn’t even have to ask. I was too old for this shit, I no longer belonged. Well-adjusted, stable adults did not go to hotels to orchestrate meet-cutes with the boys of their girlhood dreams. I knew this, and yet at that moment I had become very convinced that I must take a photo of Nick on film. To do that, I needed to rely on old habits and attempt to make it happen. 

But the whole time I was there all I did was ask myself, “What am I doing here?”

My exploits as a teen superfan had never been so existential. 

I walked out of there at half past noon with nothing to show for it. I wasn’t disappointed—I was relieved. My body lagged with the after-effects of an unwarranted adrenaline rush that went to waste. I could live with it, but the blue-moon aspect of the situation, almost farcical in its far-fetched reality, followed me around. This was never going to happen again, and I’d be foolish to let it pass me by.

I needed closure. 

Before I knew it, I was standing second in line for a photo session with Nick, having spent over two thousand bucks for the assurance and the opportunity. All around me were people in costume. Talk about surreal: I was psyching myself up, telling myself that I was really doing this, in the presence of an inflatable velociraptor and the Winter Soldier and a Power Ranger and Prince Gumball and Jubilation Lee and BoJack Horseman. Cons are something else. 

What took place after has been playing and replaying on a loop in the back of my mind since that day, always happening, happening, happening in its own little Groundhog Day universe, so I’m going to write the next part in the present tense. 

The photo session starts fifteen minutes early. My first real glimpse of Nicholas Hoult arrives in the form of a silhouette, seen through the sheer black curtain of the makeshift booth. The ushers set the curtain aside to prepare for the oncoming chaos, and there he is. His eyes are blue even from where I’m standing, several feet away. I let out a “Holy shit” without realizing, and the chatty usherette guiding me goes, “Same!” and high-fives me. 

When it’s my turn, Nick gets into a faux fighting stance and motions me over, all silliness and charm. The first thing he does when I get to his side is literally pull me into a hug, romance novel clinch cover-style. (It’s at this point that my sanity and composure go out the window.) Note that I’m not allowed to touch him unless he touches me. His shirt feels very soft under my fingers—that much I will remember clearly. He untangles himself from me and says, “Hello, how are you?” 

And I swear I can’t answer for five seconds. 

I’m so far gone that the automatic “I’m doing well, how are you?” failed to initiate in my faulty system. “This is so surreal for me, I’m sorry,” I tell him when I remember how to speak. “I’ve loved you since Skins.” I rehearsed this moment probably a hundred times from the second I was made aware that it could happen. And here I am, fucking it up spectacularly. Still, he tilts his head, body language for I’m flattered, and says, “Aw, thank you so much.” From the delivery, I get the feeling that he means it, even though he’s probably used to it. 

I start to tell him that I loved his Happy, Sad, Confused podcast episode, to let him know I’m not messing around, but he cuts in and asks me what my name is. 

You have to understand. I decided early on not to bother saying my name unprompted, because it wouldn’t matter, anyway. No celebrity I’ve ever met, save for William Beckett, has ever asked me for my name, not even when signing autographs. And now Nicholas Hoult is looking at me, waiting to know what I’m called. It feels so, so nice.

“Fiel,” I croak. 

“Fiel,” he says back. 

We take the photo. Then another. The flash is disorienting. I thank him profusely. I have zero presence of mind. I think I mutter, “See you around.” Which is absolutely ridiculous. I’m never seeing him again. 

It’s over before I know it, of course. 

It will never be over, of course. 

The realizations and regrets hit me as soon as I walk out of the booth and claim my glossy picture. They come to me, at first in singular bursts, then all at once. Not enough eye contact—I’m the worst at it. I never got to ask him about his favorite book, or his favorite Salinger. I might have walked away too soon. The light glinted off my glasses unflatteringly in the photo, and I can’t ever re-do it or fix it. I was already forgetting details: what it was like to look into his eyes up close, the sound of his accent, how it felt to have his head resting in the crook of my neck. 

I was alone. I didn’t have this to look forward to anymore. I didn’t have any war buddies that knew exactly what I was feeling. I was empty, all too suddenly. 

I took the bus home and didn’t dare attempt to make any sense of it. 

*

When I got home from my first day on my first real job, I cried at the dinner table. 

“Why are you crying?” my mom asked, more out of amusement than anything. I had no answer, and to this day I still don’t. I think it had to do with the idea, plain as day, that my life was changing, and I couldn’t hold on to the comfortable constants I’d grown attached to. I couldn’t hide behind ignorance anymore. I was just overwhelmed and exhausted. But it also had to do with the fact that something huge and something wonderful had just happened, and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. All the overthinking and mixed feelings were getting to me. 

Whatever it was, I’m almost certain it was the same reasoning that prompted me to cry, once again at the dinner table, when I got home from meeting Nicholas Hoult. 

Sometimes I almost wish it never happened, that APCC never brought him here in the first place. If you had asked seventeen-year-old me to list things more likely to happen to twenty-one-year-old me than being within zero inches of Nick Hoult, she would have said things like going to the moon or winning the lottery, and she would have been convinced that she wasn’t lying. It was too real, too much, and it left me drained. 

It gets me thinking, now that I’m older, would it always be this way? What if I’m just setting myself up for disappointment every time? Every good thing is probably just escapism in disguise: thirty seconds of brilliance followed by a lifetime of disillusionment.

Then I snap out of it and tell myself: You’ve conversed with Nicholas Hoult! Nicholas Hoult knows your name! Then I snap out of that and tell myself: There’s an entire universe out there. 

I think it’s easy to read this piece and write it off as shallow and juvenile. I’m already doing it, myself. But I also think people shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the emotions experienced by anyone who’s ever loved something fanatically—it’s not being irrational, it’s being unflinchingly honest. Unrestrained. Real. And nobody should ever have to apologize for that, even if it does make us do some pretty screwed-up things.

Maybe I’ll never attain that level of “chill” that allows me to gush over my obsessions without being so emotionally vulnerable all the time. Maybe I’ll never learn to contain what I feel. Maybe next year I’ll be writing this exact same essay about someone else. Maybe I’ll never be too old for any of it, not really. And maybe I don’t really want to be. 

*

Before entering the booth for the photo session with Nick, I left the voice recorder app running on my phone and snuck it into my back pocket while the ushers reiterated that we weren’t allowed to bring anything in. 

I listened to it afterwards. He was so soft-spoken that his voice hardly registered. It makes me think of The Day the Dancers Came, and sometimes I imagine how I would lose the recording. I could accidentally delete it. I could lose track of where to listen so I’d understand what he was saying. I could stop caring altogether, and it wouldn’t matter what happened to it.

The audio is a mess of squealing fans, idle chatter, and white noise. The first time I heard it, I almost thought Nick wasn’t on it at all. But if I strain and really listen for his voice, I can just barely make out that nanosecond in which he spoke my name. 

No matter what I do, it comes and goes fast, and for a second I’m dazed and disappointed all over again. But for what it’s worth, I’ve come to appreciate it for what it is: a beautiful, imperfect, endless moment, now gone. 

photo diary #3

I've been thinking that I should get back to sharing actual concrete moments about my life, even the most minute, boring things, the way I used to when I first started Wonderless. five years ago. (Also, shit, five years?!) So, here's a summary of how I've been for the past few months, as told mostly through shitty phone pics. 

I finally started a real zine collection when I attended Lit UP 4 in June. It was a fundraiser for when the Faculty Center was destroyed by a fire in April, with a mini-bazaar held by independent presses and zine purveyors. There were performances by bands and spoken word poets, too, but once I got what I came for, I bolted out of there and waited for my dad at a McDonald's like a loser. (Double loser, because I saw people from school and pretended I was invisible.) Then I came all the way to Escolta for some zines by Sarah McNeil. Then in July I attended Local Loca's Kontrabando at Cubao X.

I'm obsessed with everything I've gotten so far—they're all so interesting and funny and well-written and intricate and creative. The illustrations and photographs are really good, too, of course. Some of my favorites are Strangers and さまよいます by Aga de los Santos, featuring film photographs taken in Japan; I've Gone Away by Alyssa Africa, a glossy, gorgeous collection of snapshots from her travels; and Feels;21 by Shin, which is full of drawings that convey existential dread, sadness, and dry humor.

Nothing much to say about this, really. I just love the lighting and I was pretty excited to have brought Annie out again, since I hadn't really used her since Singapore.

I was out grocery shopping with my parents at this place in Valenzuela and they had all these plastic cats and dinosaurs scattered throughout. I caught these cuties in a compromising position. I wasn't having the best night at the time but I really want to go back to that supermarket!

I saw the prettiest minimalist repurposed plastic dinosaur planters outside shoemaker and designer Maco Custodio's studio, which happens to be located right along Tandang Sora, very close to where I live. I was there to interview him. It amazed me, and we talked about this, how burgeoning creatives can be found right in the far north, in areas like Novaliches, among auto shops and everything. His studio, which is near his apartment, is in a really home-y compound. You never would have guessed. We were surrounded by his sketches and works in progress, listening to slightly outdated pop music on his radio, safe from hard rain. It was a really cool day for me.  

I got to do a behind-the-scenes/fly-on-the-wall feature on AlDub that I think turned out pretty well—I was never a fan but it was pretty cool witnessing all those raw moments and writing about them. I got to sit (well, stand) in while they filmed an episode of Real Talk and kind of felt like I was Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory. People said the whole Harvest Moon thread felt a little too convenient, but I swear that was the real deal! They also said they liked the piece, and it made our little "10k Club" with thirty thousand views (!), so I was really giddy about that, even if I did make a mistake that went viral thanks to an oversight when I was transcribing what they said during the interview. (I was mortified, of course.)

On July 30th, CNN Life partnered with Ayala Museum for its annual Inspire Every Day event, which doubled as the website's official launch. In the morning I attended a talk by Keiji Ashizawa about his project, Ishinomaki Laboratory, at the Met. Then I had lunch at Harrison Plaza's Village Square, which has an indoor koi pond surrounded by benches and bisected by a tiny bridge under a skylight. I loved that it was practically deserted, and, again, how it feels frozen in time. I wish I could've stayed longer, but I was on a pretty tight schedule.

I arrived at Ayala Museum a few minutes before my afternoon shift and visited the exhibits before clocking in, so to speak. I helped give away free totes at our interactive booth (more of a box, really). It was three hours of standing and speaking to all kinds of people, but I surprisingly had a really great time and I'd do it all over again, no questions asked. Near the end, I got to meet the other girls manning the booth with me and, honestly, it was just so nice hanging around with and speaking to them. They helped me rearrange the huge 3D Life logo to form my name; easily one the day's highlights. Then I took the P2P (a double decker!) on the way home and discovered the magic of Wendy's chicken nuggets. Really.

So, about those darn MSTs. Despite being saddled with regular priority for preenlistment, I actually got the three I needed. "You're lucky," the really kind woman who printed my Form 5 told me. And I guess I am—but more than that, I was someone who spent two days lining up for those slots in the middle of the night. I spent the first night with Cheska and the second alone with Saturday Night Live and two kind night guards.

I learned that hard work pays off, but there's a lot of luck involved, indeed. I learned that I love any kind of endless night in general, no matter who I'm with or where I am or what I'm doing, because I kind of had the time of my life. Also, dawn's favorite habit is sneaking up on you.

This little guy can be found near the bike racks outside the Math building! He is quite the big ball of fluff. I should visit sometime.

I love how matchy-matchy the colors are! The photo on the left is the cover of an academic study published by SUNY that I found in Booksale. The photo on the right features a pair of adorable tiny snails I hung out with while waiting for a jeep in the rain. The waiting shed was (slowly) crawling with them.

I wanted to replace Enid Coleslaw on my sidebar with actual-me. And I wanted to give myself the reverse coloring book treatment for a change. I just wish I could fill in the lace details on my top! I have to say, though, that it turned out to be a nice little exercise in self-actualization. I'm not usually big on self-portraiture or anything like that. (Unless you count all the confessional me-me-me writing, ha!) 

This is a screencap from when I watched The Nice Guys last month and really liked it. I thought the subtitles were a nice touch. And, well, yep. Me too, bud.