FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Recently, I bought myself a subscription to the Dropout channel on Youtube, because Dimension 20 and Make Some Noise were making up so much of my recommended clips on TikTok and Instagram. I suppose that was also why I was recommended the Last Meals episode that Brennan Lee Mulligan was on.

It was such a good episode. As it is, I love food so much and would love to have a pretend last meal for myself sometime, so I love the concept of Last Meals. I think one afternoon, when I have nothing to do (it will probably just be tomorrow on the bus to school or something), I'm gonna write out all the foods I'd want at my last meal, and there will be so many courses and cuisines. 

Brennan, as well as his Dropout co-star Zac Oyama, are two of whom I perceive to be the wholesomest men on Earth that I truly admire, so obviously this episode of Last Meals was just more of the same. Brennan talks about when he fell in love with his wife Izzy, and one of the courses was something that his wife would make, he talks about their child and his nerdy side, he talks about community and socialist ideas, the way he always does, and it was just an hour ish well spent, and I enjoyed it greatly. 

Speaking of my ideal man, I've been really thinking about men and my dating life, as I am inclined to do. I think I teeter-totter between thinking men are genuinely not good enough to date as opposed to myself being avoidant and having daddy issues, and therefore refusing to settle down. I do think most of the time it is the former that feels the most valid and real to me.

I think sometimes I feel like I'm at an impasse because I don't tend to find leftist men attractive, and the pool of leftist men in Nanaimo is a very tiny one to pick from in the first place. As I'm generally a reflective person, I've tried to really dissect my criteria and sit with it, and I honestly don't think anything can budge.

For one, yes I acknowledge it's superficial for me to only date men I think are attractive, but it would also be hypocritical if any man who wants to date me didn't admit to their own superficiality. I know they know I know I'm pretty. I have always been a regulation hottie, I did a tiny bit of modelling in Singapore, and like, yeah I was blessed with good genes, right? For one thing, I don't want to settle with a man whom I'm not attracted to, because I don't want a man to benefit or get more out of the relationship than I do. Like, let's be for real, I'm smart, I'm funny, I cook and clean, maybe due to having been an elder sister or just being a Type A person, I'm used to planning and being nurturing and doing emotional labour, and you're telling me I may also have to settle with dating a man I'm not even attracted to? Why? What do I get out of the relationship? No, thank you.

Beyond that, too, I like people for the same reason everyone likes other people and makes friends with them: they recognize parts of themselves in others that they enjoy and appreciate. If I find myself attractive (which I very much do, as you very well know), of course I'm going to be drawn to other men whom I think are attractive. But here's the thing, right, as much as I was blessed with good genes, and as much of a leftist as I am, I also know what works for me. I wear what I like, I go for regular hair appointments (by regular I mean once or twice a year), I wear contact lenses, I take supplements so I function optimally for my body, I love my skincare regime and stick to it regularly. And then you have the majority of men who don't even look like they're trying. Like, you want to date me, and you don't acknowledge that the first reason you want to do so, is because I have been conditioned by the patriarchy to put a lot of effort into the upkeep of my appearance, yet you don't look like you're doing the same? If you can recognize that you like me and are drawn to me because I wear fun clothes and am feeling myself, perhaps you could also embody those behaviours so women can be drawn to you.

I don't know, I think the meme that I'm brought to right now is just, what do you bring to the table? I'm bringing the entire table, what can you bring, babes???? Sometimes I'm sad that I have not found a lifelong partner, but sometimes, like now, I think I really am more comfortable and confident in myself and in what I want, that I do not want to ever settle for less than what I deserve and desire.

And now, to try and negate (impossible!) all that talk of men, I will talk about some new women friends I've made in the past couple of weeks. One of my newest friends is Teju. On our first hangout, we went into Windowseat Books (a really great independent local bookstore in downtown Nanaimo - they supported the Palestine Literature Festival that happened last month), Teju saw me looking through a BC-based baking book, Thyme For Dessert, and when I put it down and walked around the store, she bought the pretty hefty book for me. What a lovely gesture for our first meeting!

Last week, I met Teju again, and this time with new friends Nilou and Megan. We had dinner at Black Rabbit and Nilou was so funny I laughed till I cried. Mind you, that was their first impression of me! Whenever I spend time with women like that, which tends to be more and more often as I try to be more intentional as to how I'm spending my time, I really see less and less value in the company that a man can provide.

On Friday, I met another new friend for the first time. Her name is Stephanie and she's from Montana in the US. While talking about Montana, she said that Yellowstone was filmed there, and because she was from a small town, she heard that whenever the Yellowstone crew would order sandwiches or catering from the local eateries, they would not tip. This appalled me because do you know how big Yellowstone (the TV show) is???? The first episode alone had three helicopter scenes! I've now made up my mind not to watch it.

Anyway, Stephanie asked me if I wanted to see a ballet with Indigenous dancers that night, so I said yes. Before we went in to the theatre, we found out we'd both seen the episode of Last Meals with Brennan, and the episode had just dropped the day before, so I knew instantly that she probably had similar values as I do, to be recommended the same kind of media content. The ballet was called Pisuwin, and it was put on by the Atlantic Ballet Company in Canada. The producer came out, and as he was Indigenous, he spoke about how his mother had said, she recalled once upon a time, when people like them weren't allowed in spaces like the theatre. The performance itself was extremely moving, but I kept thinking about his words, how he was the first of his bloodline to be involved in the ballet, and how I was pretty much the first of my bloodline to watch a ballet with Indigenous dancers.

Oftentimes, the world is dark and dreary, but the women around me do such warm things, like buy me books or take me to the ballet, knowing how broke I still am as an international student. I am grateful, grateful, grateful, to be alive yet.

IN THIS ESSAY, I WILL...

So, I don't know, I just felt like rambling in long-form again and that Instagram wasn't gonna give me enough space so I'm back here. Are we back?? We're so back?? This is a joke, I'm just joking. Last weekend, I went on another very enjoyable date, with a completely different person. This time, this man took me to see the World Series baseball game at a bar, which I did not care about because I generally do not care about sports, but it was the finals (or whatever the final game is called), between the Toronto Blue Jays and the LA Dodgers.

There hadn't been a Canadian team to make it so close to winning in ages, so pretty much all of average Canada was watching it and rooting for the Blue Jays. I didn't understand any of it, I had to keep asking what inning it was at, where in the inning we were at, etc, but he explained it gently, and also in between bites of my quesadilla and me pretending to be interested, he would kiss me and it was enjoyable, so I let him be.

This man works in a science lab, doing cancer research, which is fascinating, and I've always loved dating people who work in the scientific field, because I guess I'm more philosophical and arts-inclined. Whenever I meet someone who works in a field I know nothing about, I get to learn more and it's more interesting to me. He says he'll try to take me to his lab one day on a weekend so I get to see the work he does, and thus I will not be able to say where he works, because he might get into trouble. Do you think it's hilarious how many workplaces I've been sneaked into just by dating men in different careers? I think it's hilarious. One time I got sneaked into a nurses' lounge because my date was a doctor on night shift. The number of people I could get fired is astounding, tbh.

This week, by virtue of being chronically online and following the right people (ie. all the best people) online, I was treated to some major positive and encouraging news re: the US, which was so needed because the US is a miserably failing empire that's crumbling in on itself (this week they cut SNAP benefits?? what in actual fuck???) but again! This week there was massive hopeful news!

Zohran Mamdani became the mayor of New York City, where the mayoral race hit two million votes for the first time since 1969. This happened despite Cuomo being backed by hugely influential figures (but all of whom are berserk) and big money, making Mamdani's win even more historic. Gun safety won in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, became the first female governor of Virginia. In Cincinnati, JD Vance's half-brother, Cory Bowman, suffered a resounding loss to the Democrats. Every county in Virginia shifted blue. Ghazala Hashmi is Virginia's lieutenant governor, and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office in US history. Maine (!!!) killed voter restriction and supported gun restriction. Mary Sheffield is the first woman mayor in Detroit and she's a Black woman, and Johnny DuPree, a Black Democrat is elected to Mississippi Senate, flipping it from Republican.

All of that is of course very superficial and surface-level news, Democrats aren't even quite the progressives they think they are, and are fully capable of being incompetent and reprehensible, and we have to wait and see what all the aforementioned candidates do with their platforms, etc, but I think it bears celebrating some significance that Americans are fed up (to put it mildly) with the current administration, and they want change. 

*

Something else that Instagram has seen, but I haven't quite rambled about over here just yet, is my growing disdain for Taylor Swift. Buckle up, because away we go (oh also, another thing that my date did last weekend was he listened to me rant all about Taylor Swift, and then he asked to watch one of the TikTok academics that I had been raving about as one of my sources, too). I have consumed so much TikTok about Taylor and particularly about her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, since October 3, and I believe I have become disillusioned (yes, I know most of you are like, “fucking finally???”). I could curate a playlist of all the TikTok videos that have analyzed it in much more comprehensive and eloquent ways than I do here, so if you'd like the playlist, let me know and I'll share it with you.

So, firstly, she released at least ten different variants of the Showgirl album, to encourage diehard Swifties to consume and purchase more units of her product. She also then released extremely shoddy, embarrassing voice memos of herself recording the album with her producers Martin and Shellback, and she sold these (mind you, she never needs another dime in her life and could have released them for free). Some of the songs on the album have been deemed problematic, and whilst the TikTok videos have talked about them at length, I will only mention the ones that I feel surely about. Olivia Rodrigo was pressured to share credits and royalties for her song Deja Vu, because it apparently was inspired by Taylor, and you can tell it wasn't a pleasant situation because Olivia used to be a very big and expressive Swiftie, but she's gone quiet since the credits (and royalties) thing happened. On the other hand, Swift's songs, Actually Romantic sounds exactly like Where Is My Mind by Pixies, and Wood absolutely samples The Jackson 5. Neither of those mention the original song credits on her album.

Still song-related, the track Actually Romantic also disses Charli XCX and calls her out for having a coke addiction problem, which is apparently in retaliation to Charli's song, Sympathy is a Knife. I've seen this analyzed threefold. One, Charli herself lives in her truth of using coke, and it's all over her own album, Brat. You can't embarrass someone who owns their truth. Two, it's ridiculous that Taylor is making an actual diss track about Charli, who only just got her deserved limelight with Brat after many years of not quite making it big big. Taylor is a billionaire, and she's punching down at another woman artist who's finally getting her flowers? Get the fuck out of here. Three, Sympathy is a Knife is not even a diss track about Taylor, it's about Charli's own insecurities, which she's being vulnerable about. Ms Ma’am Taylor Swift, for someone who claims to be our English teacher, you need your degree checked. Oh that's right, she doesn't have a real one.

Then there's the song Cancelled. In it, she sings “good thing I like my friends cancelled”, and she honestly has been sticking around people who have been involved in scandals, or basically the MAGA crowd, and definite Trump supporters. Those people don't hold themselves accountable, and therefore nor does Swift for herself. Also, there is The Fate of Ophelia. In the lead-up to the album launch, Swift said on the podcast that she was teaching Kelce about Shakespeare, because it's like an inside joke that he's a jock who doesn't get her references and all, right. Well, her lyrics in The Fate of Ophelia have been dissected by my current favourite TikToker (@kaicfox), who is an actual Shakespearean academic. Ophelia was written by Shakespeare to symbolize how women had absolutely zero agency except for what the men in their lives decided for them. It's insinuated (in Shakespeare's drama, Hamlet) that Ophelia kills herself because she recognizes this, after the rebukes by her father, her brother, and in conversations with Hamlet. Her act of suicide can be interpreted as possibly her one real act of agency. Swift then sings about being saved by a man (obviously Kelce), and therefore escaping “the fate of Ophelia”, which is exactly not what the character was about. And it would be one thing if Swift herself had said, oh I like the name Ophelia, I wanted to take my own creative liberties with it and write a romance, but no, she heavily suggested that she understood the play and the character, and was then trying to be smart about it in her song, which it wasn't.

Then, when she got wind that her album was being disliked on TikTok, she appeared on a Zane Lowe (for Apple Music) interview, and said “the rule of show business is if it's the first week of my album release and if you're saying either my name or my album title, you're helping,” which, what???? She'd never struck us (the Swifties, I mean) as being this person who's just cold and calculative and only in it for the business? All I can say is, yuckkkkkkkkkk.

In the past month, even Taylor's longtime friend, Hayley Williams, performed a song from her new album on a late night talk show, and the track she performed was about racism in the US. Billie Eilish donated $11.5 million, and when Taylor did a late night appearance, she described Kelce's job (playing football) as putting his life on the line, whilst there are literal genocides happening in the world, at this moment. It's just now striking me as god-awful how asinine she is, because she's a billionaire (meaning she obviously has a level of success backed by legions of fans), and how she will still say “people hate me because it's cool and popular to hate me.” No, we don't? People hate you because we live in a society with massive and growing wealth divides and you're a billionaire who refuses to redistribute your wealth or use your platform for good. Taylor Swift is tone deaf and out of touch with reality.

I've done a lot in support of Taylor Swift, you know. I don't want to hate her. I loved her earlier songs, I've gone to three of her concerts (one 1989 and two Eras Tour shows), but I honestly cannot in good conscience ever stomach any more of this woman.

*
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the Jonathan Safran Foer quote: You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. I've liked it for a long time, and I wonder if I've actually mentioned it here before, though I can't be fucked to look for it. I think I quite embody the quote, in a way that I allow myself to be very sad and vulnerable, but I also have extremely happy and meaningful moments, and I think they're all real and authentic. However, I think the society I live in, mostly do not.

I think a lot of people around me are comfortable and also very scared of ever bursting the bubble wrap that surrounds them. I think they're scared of having uncomfortable conversations, and they're always chasing the next high, and nothing about their lives seems to be as particularly important nor meaningful nor authentic. Of course, I understand and am not calling out people who may not go to therapy because they're financially strapped, or I'm not even talking about people who do go to therapy but keep it on the down low. No, I know who I mean, and it's many, many people, who would never ever face up to the reality of their lives (therapy or not), because then your entire worldview might come crashing down on you.

It's the same people who'll say, yeah, there's racism and colonialism and imperialism, and they think that just saying it and saying it all happened in the past, and that they would never engage in such a thing, makes it all okay, makes the past all go away. Babe, every single thing that's happened in history has led us to this moment, to this eternal rat race that I have to run to prove my worth while you coast through life, and you think it's enough for you to say “it's over now”? No, babe, I need more anti-racism, I need you to help me dismantle the structures that have been built by undeserving old rich/white men, because I do not want the next generations to have to go through the same goddamn struggles that I did and am still going through. And you know, I say babe, and I don't know if you (whoever you are that's reading this) will think I mean this personally, but I don't. If you feel called out, trust me, it's only because it is a majority of you in this society who do these same things. You are all part of a club, and you need to let the rest of us in.

*

It's the beginning of my fifth winter in Canada, or basically the fifth winter in my life. I think, by virtue of it being my fifth winter, I've kinda become more accustomed to the ups and downs, and the highs and lulls of seasonal life (because Singapore was a tropical country year-round). I think my first two, three years here were marked by big changes, and big emotional upheavals and to my regulatory systems. I mean, of course the world is seeing more and more unprecedented times and that affects me, but overall, I think I've done a pretty alright job of creating a life for myself here. 

There've been so many monumental changes that you couldn't understand unless you were also a migrant from Singapore to Canada. For example, Singapore isn't a union-inclined society at all, there isn't talk of unions nor collective agreements, nor worker rights and things like that. When I came over and I started working for the students' union, a lot of the language was utterly new to me, I had to reshape my brain and language and understand the inner workings of work culture here, and I think I did it pretty well. I think I also assimilated to “Canadian” culture pretty well, I understand how people do things here and I absorb and rehash the little Canadian utterances, the “ehs” and “shooting the shit”, yet I don't think I ever do it in a way to increase my proximity to Whiteness. Today Sydney said “Sarah Mei can’t be pocketed” because we were talking about my meeting with the interim VIU president tomorrow, and I take that to heart as a high compliment. Sarah Mei cannot be pocketed???? Excuse you, in a world where everything can be bought for a price, I think I can be proud of myself for not being cowed by wanting to stay within party lines or impress the right people and things like that. Fuck that, I live by my morals and I think that is what will keep me happy and my life meaningful. It reminds me of maybe a decade ago, I and my best friend at the time, Han, we said something like we would rather be good people, and not nice people, and I believe I still live by the same maxim. 

Perhaps I should get myself a cake to celebrate my fifth winter in Canada/life. I think I shall.