SHE USED TO BE MINE

I don't feel very well tonight. I haven't felt well in a while and a half. It's been three weeks since Marcus and I kinda stopped talking. I say kinda, because sometime in between then and now, I was at work at the supermarket, and he bought something and we chatted for a bit, and it felt alright. I miss him, as a friend. I think we were actually good friends, we were on a similar wavelength, and he would respond to my Instastories about books, and capitalism and lord even knows what, but he doesn't, not anymore. Before the thing three weeks ago, I had a hectic weekend slaving away at the supermarket, and he asked if I wanted to take a break, and I felt so cared for. I think you know I have a very good memory, so I remember silly things like Marcus' cat having a hernia, and the things we wrote down on our slips of paper while playing The Game of Things, and how Marcus and I would always have answers that were adjacent to each other's. My heart gets very attached to moments, I have to tell my fingers to pry themselves apart, to let go, Sarah, it's okay to let go of the way things were, so they can be what they'll be.

At times like this, whenever I feel overwhelmed or heavy, my respite is always to come here and write. I don't know why, but the moment I express it, it lightens a load. I think it helps that I've been given feedback in the last six months, from multiple professors, telling me I write beautifully, that I have a wonderful and expressive writing voice. I know exactly what I want to say, and it comes out the way I intend it to, and it feels much better and with much more direction than my feelings know what to do. I think the neurons that work to store memories of men and romantic relationships in my brain lump them together, because tonight I think about asking Joey, to tell me about space. I think about how six years (six! years!!!) ago, I asked Joey what he enjoyed about work, and he told me he likes when kids come in with curious questions. I think about Ben and his cat Tux, and him planting and growing his own food. Every time I go through a thing with a man, one (1) singular man, all the memories of men (multiple) come flooding back, indiscriminately. What a strange thing for my brain to do. 

One time, Jeremy had his hands down my jeans while I was doing the dishes, and his brother Aidan unexpectedly came into the kitchen, so Jeremy pulled away from me and did something else, in record time. Jeremy doesn't remember this happening, but I still laugh about it because I knew something like that would happen one day. The man cannot keep his hands off me (but really, can you blame him?). The ADHD really affects his memory very weirdly. I don't understand it very well. Today, as the women's rep I got allocated my office in the students' union building, and I am looking forward to decorating it. I'm gonna have to move my things and set it up soon, because I'm leaving in a month-ish to Haida Gwaii for my summer job. I have two papers left to go, and I really don't have the energy to even care about them anymore. My brain is saturated with information, and my heart, with emotions.

A SOLDIER WHO’S RETURNINGHALF HER WEIGHT

The week before last, I had a pretty decent week. A lovely week, if that. Jaysen and his girlfriend Sofeah were here for a holiday, so he brought a bag of things my family had packed for me. They were foodstuff I either can’t get here or are priced exorbitantly, and they also packed a bottle for making roti kirai, which I’ve never made myself, so that’ll be an adventure. I went to Budgies Burritos with them for lunch, and they were going for a hike in the higher parts of British Columbia, so I took them to shop at MEC in Vancouver. I had never met Sofeah, so it was fun to meet her then. If you remember, I used to have a crush on Jaysen, so I thought it’d be awkward, but Sofeah is a lovely person. I’d have loved hanging with her in Singapore, I think we’d be friends. 

That night, I came back to the island, and I played board games with my friends from philosophy class. Marcus brought the oslo kringle he’d baked for me, which raised some eyebrows at the table, and we played board games at River’s apartment, where she has a ferret and kitten, so it was chaos and made for an absolutely lovely night. We made up inside jokes upon inside jokes for the answers to The Game of Things, and it was hilarious and I look forward to playing games with the same group again. The next day, Marcus and I went to the cat café in Nanaimo, because I’d said on Instagram that I missed Mochi. That was the second day in a row I was spending time with cats, but then the very next day, Hannah took me on an unplanned hike up Mount Benson, with the kitten she was catsitting for Jayne and Dave. It was three days in a row I was with cats! 

Last week, I had a little thing happen with Marcus. His life is not for me to comment, but I felt unsettled and overwhelmed. As it was, last week was out of the ordinary, because VIU was hosting the national basketball championships for the top 8 women’s basketball teams of Canada. I worked a pretty long shift at the gym, and got to meet more people at once than I’d met in a long time. I also messed up my schedule so I had to miss my therapy appointment. I then went to Vancouver to meet Jeremy, and came away feeling more terrible than I can recall in a long time. When I’m with Jeremy, the good moments are great but sometimes we’re tired, and we meet once every two or three weeks, and it culminates in a crescendo of chaos, and not the good kind. I find myself saying things that make him feel small, and I hate myself for those moments. It’s impossible to break up with someone you love, and I do love Jeremy. He’s a really good person, and I hate that I cannot live with the effects of his ADHD, and that his mess is a thing I cannot accept as part of my life. He tries his best, and I know he tries his best, but sometimes, it doesn’t feel enough. And yet love him, I do. 

We’ve spent maybe four months together, and I don’t want to give up the times we listen to songs and sing in the bathtub, or when we’re walking along and he sings absolutely ridiculous lyrics to Taylor Swift songs, and I don’t want to miss him being soft with me when I really need it. But then sometimes I make my way to Vancouver, and I’ve already travelled three hours and I wonder why he doesn’t have a driving licence so he can pick me up from the ferry terminal, and I wonder why he can’t make his room presentable for me, and I wonder so many things, and it’s impossible. Sometimes I feel like I may have the emotional range of a teaspoon, because everything overwhelms me.

PROLETARIAT PROFILES

I wrote a TV show pitch for my TV module, and I thoroughly appreciated my professor's feedback. He really knows his TV, which I suppose is a great criterion for a media professor to fill. I'm definitely curious about the TV shows he mentions and recommended.

This is a pitch for a reality TV show about working-class people, and it will be called Proletariat Profiles. In the simplest way to conceive it, Proletariat Profiles would be like the layperson’s version of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, minus the millions of dollars. It would first launch on YouTube, financed by the producer’s (my) own savings or funds crowdsourced from a platform such as Kickstarter or similar. If it gains enough traction, it might get signed to a network television company or Netflix, but that will not be the main aim. The budget needed for the initial production would not be a big one. Unlike Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Proletariat Profiles will revolve around regular people with regular, actually relatable lives, for the average Joe and Jill, and everyone in between. 

It will be filmed over the course of a year, so that the audience can follow the “characters”/participants of the show through as many important or significant seasons in an ordinary person’s life. For example, over the course of a year, we will feature the different participants going through holidays such as Christmas, New Years’ celebrations, their respective birthdays, tax seasons, Valentine’s Day, each individual’s observed religious festivities, and so on. We will then release the episodes in the following year, coinciding with the themes of the episodes. For example, events filmed on Valentine’s Day will be released on the next Valentine’s Day. The entire year will be filmed before being released the following year so that the show will not affect, influence nor interfere with the lives of our participants, in any way, shape, nor form.

There are two options we will utilise for filming and producing the show. We will equip each of them with an iPhone or any smartphone with a camera that’s good enough to be used for vlogging (video logging). Occasionally, we will have a basic crew to film each participant, in either an interview-style, or tailing them on any event they would want to highlight, with their permission. It will be as no-frills in terms of production value and kept as close to lived reality and down-to-earth as possible for an Internet series, with no glamorous lights or sound, and no intention of making it look polished, primed nor curated. 

There will be a rotation of several “characters” or participants as part of this show. We will try to cast people who traditionally struggle more in a capitalist system. For example, we may have people in the service industry, working as waitstaff, bus drivers, cashiers and bartenders, sewage workers and janitors. We would have a sales worker who doesn’t really care about the things they are selling. One of the participants could be a college student working two jobs to afford tuition, another one a single parent supporting their kid, someone with a mental or physical disability. We would also incorporate people of color, a homeless person, someone who’s recently been incarcerated, a person struggling with substance addiction. Someone who has to sacrifice their creative side and “sells out” by having a corporate job, because it’s the only way they can survive in the economy. 

Every one of the participants would be working-class, with real bills to pay. Even while they work, they find themselves going further into debt. We will feature vulnerable moments such as having to wait for a bank transfer to go through before they can cash out their grocery purchases, among numerous other experiences most people would have gone through, yet each person feels cripplingly ashamed of. We will follow them as they take public transit, or struggle to keep up on car insurance payments. We can display the myriad of ways a capitalist system is violent toward many disenfranchised communities, who are trying their best but barely staying alive and dealing with issues such as food insecurity.

The message of this show is to directly contrast with the narrative that “if you work hard enough, you’ll make it” often used as propaganda for allowing status quo to continue. It will feature our participants working hard almost all of the time in their lives, but who still don’t make it, because the odds of capitalism are against many more people than they are for them succeeding. Proletariat Profiles aims to showcase the reality that most of us are closer to being homeless in any given year, than to becoming a millionaire or becoming rich enough to retire or live a life that’s not enslaved to capitalism. 

Traditional media (which is inherently capitalist) has not showcased people who are struggling because capitalists currently have control of society and want to maintain a facade or pretence that capitalism works well enough for everyone to prosper and make it, so as to maintain the control they have. Therefore, a subversive show like this is useful for showcasing that there are many who live below the poverty line, that those people then have nothing to be ashamed of, and that any failings that occur are inherently designed to happen within capitalism, and not somehow individual moral failings. 

While our participants are not to be blamed for individual failings, there are also not exactly any individual villains on the TV show. Throughout all our narratives and situations, a thread that connects all of them is that capitalism necessarily needs to monopolize on some people’s disadvantageous situations for anyone to come out on top. The enemy is not any single person, but the enemy is the system of capitalism itself. 

Another aim of the TV show is to highlight the humanity of our participants. Traditional media has by far shone a spotlight on the glamorous, unattainable lives of celebrities and people with “success stories” in life. People like waitstaff and janitors, cashiers and sales workers have never been portrayed as having personalities. They exist only to do their jobs of providing a service, and then suddenly they are no longer relevant in our lives. This show hopes that by featuring people in professions or communities that have been long ignored, we can bring them from an invisible sphere, into the visible. 

As an alternative to the bleakness of the plights of our participants, we will feature certain ways we can all start to back away from capitalism and form other ways of existing and being. For example, mutual aid is a way for sharing with the community so that the participants don’t rely on philanthropy, nor believe in any justification for people to be rich nor poor enough that philanthropy is required. We can also feature a few participants with more environmentally-friendly lifestyles, such as those who only make purchases in closed-loop economies or supply chains, promoting sustainability. 

The audience for this show would be people who are disillusioned or are starting to question capitalist society as it is, and who want to inspire change. To gather audiences, we would start from grassroots avenues, such as putting up posters in spaces that would support such a show. This includes socialist societies/groups in different provinces and countries, liberal arts colleges, working-class-populated bars, mom-and-pop stores, and locations frequented by people with such similar ideals. I believe the audience would be attracted to watch such a show if it were produced, for several reasons. 

First, it would be very different from any other show in production and circulation, and by virtue of novelty alone, it would be entertaining or enlightening. Secondly, as mentioned, our intended primary audience are people who are already disillusioned with capitalism, and therefore they would want to seek hope by watching similar people go through similar events in their lives, and relate more to them than anyone else they’ve ever seen on TV. Thirdly, the primary intended audience members may want to persuade their peers who don’t already hold such socialist beliefs, and having such a show in production and being broadcast, would greatly enhance the possibility of that happening, using real and unfiltered portrayals of working-class people trudging through life. 

To attract revenue, we would also appeal to the socially-involved natures of such audiences, and ask for a crowdsourcing of funds for the show to be perpetuated, such that it can reach wider circulations, and hopefully spread the message to bigger audiences. 

His feedback:

In many ways this show is exactly what you describe and would have a very hard time to get 'green lit', again for exactly the reasons you describe. Yet it is an important possibility to pursue along the lines that you outline toward the end. As far as a pitch goes, you need to reorganize a bit, particularly when it comes to the 'why' questions that you answer well toward the last page or so, but for the average person listening to this pitch - most are done orally first - there will be an immediate 'poverty porn' image that harkens back to 'Good Times' or 'Welcome Back Kotter' or 'Sanford and Sons' from the 60s and 70s, or even the 'Honeymooners' from the 50s. The alternative perspective from poverty porn positions it as a fresh take and for a defined audience who, though they aren't 'rich' or constantly consuming, are what many call 'the bottom billion' who are generally ignored and are yearning for something solid. 

The one thing that I think you did well was demonstrate and describe the class struggle focus. The one thing, from a North American perspective is the issues of race, gender, and geography, though I imagine a version of this occurs in many places along similar if different social divisions. This is important because the show seeks to address an imbalance but should be mindful of creating a new one; or worse, creating a new "Honey Boo Boo" who is a poor, rural girl from the Southern US who is both famous but seemingly unaware that her fame is because people are looking at her life from a classist-urban dismissive standpoint. That level of care is hard to balance when the subjects are needed but delicate. You should look up Norman Lear’s evaluation of the unintended impact of 'All in the Family' such as we discussed in class to help solidify this. Great idea, some room for a few more nuances. 80/100

BIG YEAR

I submitted this essay for my TV module and got a 78% for it. Apparently, I'm a solid 78% student across all my modules, so I'm trying to improve my writing to bring it to 91% (because Marcus got 91% for our philosophy paper, wtf, is he Socrates???). Anyway, I have been elected to be the women students' rep of the Students' Union, and my term starts in May. That's all, have a lovely week, I'm busy working to pay off my tuition, if you'd like to loan me a sum of money so I don't have to pay hundreds of dollars in interest to my Singapore bank monthly, I'd highly appreciate it, this is not a joke. 

    Thinking about this as a 'big year' for spending time with screens, make a list of your screen time attention - TV formatted 'shows' in particular (i.e. not quick YouTube experiences or one-off TikTok videos - but maybe recurring series, etc.). After thinking about your list, think about what it says about you ... if all viewing is, in a way 'connected' and 'productive;' what does your list say about you (both to you and to others who might read your list)?

Among the shows on my list, there are definitely certain ones that I would consider and call my absolute favorites. These are Avatar: The Last Airbender, Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act, Jeopardy, Queer Eye, Ted Lasso, and The Good Place. Everything else, I might have considered filler, to pass any free time I had while I was at home and having a meal, or just because there was nothing else interesting on Netflix. I will describe what each of my favorite series represents to me, and in this way, I will also aim to describe what it says about me.

When I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, it was because my sister had watched it and she had stickers and decals of the characters on her laptop, as well as her phone screensaver, etc. I’d also heard, in general, that many people liked it and that it was a well-made show. I started watching it to be in the know, and to fit in with my sister, and other people who liked the show. It turns out that I did enjoy it and liked it, as well. What I think it says about me, is that I have a fear of missing out, slightly, and that I do yearn for connection with other people.

Beyond this, Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a heroic protagonist who is literally the only person who can save the world from the “bad guys”. Additionally, he manages to make a friend in his foil and antihero, a person called Zuko. Zuko has a misguided-villain-to-semi-hero redemption arc, and what I’d like to think this says about me is: I have a hopeful streak, and I do hope that in this society we live in, some heroes (with no supernatural powers) might band together to save the world from climate disaster.

I watched Ted Lasso because one of my good friends recommended it to me, and I became so very fond of it. Ted Lasso is a show about a football coach who’s perhaps the opposite of or very far off from the stereotypical football coach one might think of. The show is written around strong men and women. The strong men have sessions in which they talk about their feelings, without making a big deal of it. There are characters that display streaks of toxic masculinity, but they are few and it’s also portrayed as leading to unhealthy relationships and self-esteem issues.

The strong women lift each other and have real and proper girl friendships, without any of the usual bitchiness or cattiness or superficiality (although they do sometimes talk to each other about men). This is definitely one of the shows that appeal to me because of my feminism, and strong personality. I enjoy that the show tries, and mostly succeeds, to defy gender norms and restrictions.

It also deals with mental health and therapy in a rather comprehensive manner, that maybe will show viewers that i) therapy is for everyone, ii) it is okay to be scared of therapy if you haven’t been or if you haven’t had good experience with it yet, and iii) that it’s still possible to overcome or work through it and use it for the better.

I am a strong proponent of therapy and mental wellness, I go for free counselling in school as a student. I aim to publicise to as many people as possible that such resources are readily available to us. We as students should be taking advantage of it, because therapy and mental health facilities aren’t readily available in many places, and especially for free (although I think it should rightfully be free considering the exorbitant tuition I pay as an international student).

Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act has a special place in my heart because I’d been his fan for many years, since his first Netflix special, Homecoming King, in 2017. What I hope this says about me is that I’m loyal, what it might say about me is I could be a little obsessive. Patriot Act has been cancelled because he got into trouble with a few rich and powerful people (I think this was the reason), but it was a solid, informative, entertaining, and moving series. He would talk about important issues such as Black Lives Matter, unfair marijuana criminalization/profitization based on race, fast fashion, etc etc.

His points were hard-hitting, but somehow, Hasan Minhaj has a rare way of bringing emotion in without necessarily sensationalizing issues. Anyone can present facts and figures, but he did it in a way that resonated with you. At least, I might have felt more of it because he’s a person of color (still not a woman of color yet, but perhaps that’s for me to fill) introducing -or developing arguments about- issues to the world, on Netflix. All this to say, Hasan Minhaj to me is meaningful representation, and that’s something I stand strongly by, especially as I go to school in a predominantly white country and still see predominantly white faces in many classes.

Jeopardy is my absolute favorite game to watch and play. I grew up watching the late, great Alex Trebek, and always thought of him as the kindly white grandfather everyone should have. He was one of the people I wanted to meet in person (the others are Taylor Swift and Hasan Minhaj). What I want this show to say about me, or what I think it does, is that I’m always thirsty for knowledge, and I’m semi-autodidactic (if I were a complete autodidact I wouldn’t be in university).

If you haven’t seen a contestant called Austin Rogers, please watch the episodes with him. He’s one of the top winners of all time on Jeopardy, and he has one of the quirkiest personalities I’ve ever seen in anyone. I love how Jeopardy makes knowledge fun to attain, and when you watch these absolute shining personalities do well on the show, with their puns and snappy quips, it’s top-notch entertainment.

I don’t know what it says about me, but I think there’s a bit of predictability to my watching Jeopardy. When I was back home in Singapore, my six family members in the household knew I would always spend some time watching Jeopardy, before or after work, or on my off days from work. It felt safe to me, and perhaps it signified a certain safety to them, as well, that I am a creature of habit and I love my routine. I don’t know for sure. Sometimes, my sisters would also watch it with me, and I used it to bond with them a little, although I don’t think they ever really enjoyed the show as much as I did, because I never see them watching it if I’m not.

Of all the reality shows that exist, Queer Eye is one of the best, in my opinion. Again, what it says about me is possibly that I’m actually optimistic and romantic under all my cynicism. It’s nice to see people who are deserving receive a makeover that, more often than not, really improves their entire lives. I have a problem with the premise of Queer Eye, in that I am much too politically radical, to really actually buy into it. I think there are far more people in America that are struggling and that they cannot all be helped by Queer Eye, and it’s because the systems and infrastructures are making it that way. I think, to really help America, the country needs a systemic change, that doesn’t allow capitalism, racism, classism, nationalism and all the -isms to marginalise entire populations of people.

However, for that hour or so, it is nice to see that given the right amount of help (tens of thousands of dollars in the making), and the right kind of help, even people in the most dire of places can turn their lives around. Now, if only we could provide tens of thousands of dollars to everyone in America, by taking it from the ultra-rich. I would watch that show. Focusing on Queer Eye, though, I think it succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is to make a candidate feel good about themselves, and in turn, becomes a feel-good TV show for the audience.

The Good Place is my favorite TV show of all time. What I like about it is it introduces the viewers to the tiny, basic gists of philosophy and ethics, and that allows the audience to decide if they want to learn more. Generally, philosophy hasn’t been accessible to mass communities and has been gatekept by and for old, white men, so to see such information being included in an entertainment show, for anyone to watch, is heartening.

Even within the content of The Good Place, it acknowledges and contends with the fact that the world is extremely unjust and unbalanced, that results in it being impossible to judge anyone fairly. The ending of the show is a typically good and nicely-wrapped-up ending, and the two protagonists whom you’d naturally root for, end up together, for eternity. This, again, shows my romantic side. Apart from that, I do think what I’d like the show to say about me, is that I’m thoughtful, pensive, that I care about other people, and would like everyone to receive what they truly deserve.

ART SPIEGELMAN

Hi. It's been a while. Three weeks, to be precise. Those three weeks have been eventful. I've created posters, traipsed all over the VIU campus to put up said posters. I'm a BA student so I've usually only hung out in the liberal arts/linguistics buildings. When I was putting up the posters, it took me three entire hours to go through all the buildings and faculties. It was an adventure, knowing the actual vastness of courses offered at VIU. There are trades like fisheries and forestries, and hatcheries. It was eye-opening, but also very, very tiring. There are two things a VIU student talks about: the fact that VIU is on a hill and therefore how tiring it is to traverse all the stairs, and on good days, we talk about how amazing our view of the scenery is, also courtesy of the fact that we're located on a hill. 

Speaking of trades, I met with Alessia in the last two weeks, and as I'm running for the position of women students' rep in the students' union, she told me of an issue they're facing as nursing students. Apparently while trades like electricians and automotive mechanics get paid for their practicums, nursing students are not. Nor are hairdressing nor baking students. The only difference? That the former are male-dominated industries and the latter, women-populated industries. It was intriguing to have such a thing highlighted to me, I don't know what I can do, but awareness is the first step to improvement, I suppose.

In the last week, I also played board games with my friends from philosophy class. We went bowling for our first outing, then it was board games, which definitely did nothing for my competitive nature. We were playing at the student pub, where there was a karaoke session being held, so Marcus and I went up to sing Mr Brightside. After the board game session, Marcus also taught me to drive in his car. I did the first U-turn of my life, lololol. Transit here is a pain in the fucking ass, and the weather sucks, so I definitely need to learn to drive. Also, I really like my friends from philosophy. Especially Marcus. I think we hit it off very easily, and it's comfortable to banter with him. 

I've been working at the school gym and I've also got some friends there. We had a gym staff pickleball tournament, it was my first time playing pickleball and they absolutely thrashed me at it. I've never played a sport and my bodily coordination does not exist, so I was an embarrassment to myself. I had fun though, it was nice getting to know them outside of work, and going for drinks after. I don't drink very much, because it sets off my seasonal depression, but I had a Burt Reynolds shot and I loved it. It's possibly the best-tasting shot I've had. I've also started work at Buy-Low, which is a grocery store near my place. I've only had one shift, and another one later this afternoon, but the people are also nice. I have to do it for the money, because YOUR GIRL IS POOR and IT SUCKS TO BE POOR.

Two days ago, I spent time with Hannah and Mary. We baked cookies for my campaign at Hannah's place, and then we ordered Mexican food and chatted about life and family and all that heavy stuff that happens. I feel like I've found my clan of women I want to hang with, in them, and I'm super glad for it. Mary also has a dog, Moby, who is the best boi I've ever known. He's really the goodest boi, and I so enjoyed his company. Anyway, the cookies that we baked turned out to be quite a hit, so perhaps we'll start an anti-capitalist bakery? We'll see. 

I had a therapy session this morning. We chatted about my aversion to boredom, as well as my emotional outbursts once every two weeks, seemingly because I contain my feelings instead of feeling them, whenever I'm going through an experience. I told my therapist that I usually have an outburst or mental breakdown, when I'm speaking to Jeremy, or when I'm physically with him, and it may have to do with feeling safe around him. We're (my therapist and I) trying to get me to feel and express my daily emotions better to avoid the buildup that leads to anger outbursts, etc. 

Today we also talked about how I'm attracted to exciting things. I told my therapist (actually, his name is Art, so I will refer to him by his name) that I've never been good with long-term relationships. Whether it's influenced by having seen my parents' relationships unfold or otherwise, I've always been attracted to big moments and big sparks. I like dating men with racecars, because I like stuff like rollercoasters and skydiving, I like grand gestures, and I've never been good with weathering the stable, healthy moments when they come. 

Jeremy and I have also talked about compatibility several times, I've never really thought about ADHD in another person, and I really dread messiness and a lack of organization, so it's still always coming up, again and again. We set each other off in unhealthy ways, sometimes, so I don't know. He is very sweet and stable, kind and patient, though. When I have my completely out-of-whack moments, in which two weeks of my life troubles boil and bubble over in a 45-minute rant about the transit and weather in Vancouver, he usually takes it as it comes and tells me it's okay that I have strong feelings stemming from unresolved trauma. What a good man.

Voting in the elections ends tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to see if I'll be engaged in meaningful work for the school, in that way. However, if I don't get the position, I can still look for other ways to be engaged in meaningful work, so. At the moment, I just hope someone can convince Putin to back off. Maybe the Russians who are against the invasion will convince him. Maybe not. I don't know. Life is tiring enough without war happening. 

NO DROUGHT

We've been reading the Communist Manifesto for Liberal Studies and I feel like there is no better time than now, and there is no more important document than this to be read by the entire world, especially as we are in late-stage capitalist society. Communism has gotten a bad rap from the Soviet Union and China, etc, but honestly Communist ideas, at the onset, from the manifesto, are truly what might save this world from impending climate collapse. 

I always thought the manifesto would be like thick binders' worth of information but it's only a forty-page document. I've included some of it here, things that I highlighted, because I'll be doing a presentation on this text for class, but of course, I do hope you read the entire thing. Again, it is only forty pages long, and there's much more crucial information that I haven't included here, and please, if anything in the following is confusing, go back to its context. 

The bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

*

It has resolved personal worth into exchange value…

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The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.

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The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

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In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out a social epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production.

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The former lower strata of the middle estate – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and rentiers, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

*

The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years. The organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.

*

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

*

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

*

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

*

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

*

But does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage labour for fresh exploitation.

*

Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

*

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, from the moment, you say, individuality vanishes. You must, therefore, confess that by ‘individual’ you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way. Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation. It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage labour when there is no longer any capital.

*

Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

*

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.

*

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

*

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to.

*

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, in forms of consciousness which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The Communist Manifesto is also readily available to be downloaded online, because that was the vision of Marx and Engels, and all communists who believe that there are enough resources if we all just stopped being selfish and just share. There truly is enough.  

WHY DON'T WE?

oh, baby, I can feel the rush of adrenaline 

I'm not scared to jump if you want to 

let's just fall in love for the hell of it
maybe, we'll just keep fallin'

I can feel the rush of adrenaline
I'm not scared to jump, 'cause I want you 

let's just fall in love for the hell of it 

maybe, we'll just keep fallin'

Today in 2022, the world has gotten hooked on a word game called Wordle. Almost every day, Jeremy and I send each other our Wordle guesses, and then we also do Taylordle, which is the Taylor Swift version of Wordle. I don't know why he does it, he doesn't even like her, doesn't listen to her songs, so his guesses are always far out and make no sense. The latest one we're doing is Worldle, which is where you guess countries based on their silhouettes and how far your guesses are from the answer country (distance-wise). I have a therapy session tomorrow, and I look forward to it. A lot of things have been and are happening in my life, and I need a space to breathe. 

OLD SPORT

One of the guys I dated in New York is Adam. I got reminded by Instagram today that it was three years ago. How time moves, I'll never know. Anyway, Adam is in a band called Carrier, and they released an album late last year, called When New York Is Drowning.

Thanks to the reminder from Instagram, I went down the rabbit hole and listened to the album today. I quite like the sound, my favorite is Little Fish, but of course most of the people I've dated don't have similar music tastes as I do. I have not had the good fortune of dating a Swiftie.

I don't know why I'm here, I have so much work to do. Okay okay I'm out.

HOMELAND

There is a man who’s been a regular part of my life. He is one of the two people I was talking to on the dating apps, that I mentioned a couple months ago. The other one was a friend of Dhu’s, but he wasn’t in a good place, to be dating, so we dropped it. The man who’s been part of my life, his name is Jeremy. The first date I had with him was lovely, we had sushi and he got me a rose, etc etc. It hasn’t been all smooth-sailing since then. He builds gundam kits and his room is a mess by my standards, so when I first started going over it would give me a literal headache, because if you’ve seen my living situation, you’d know I’m very particular and I’m the kind of person who makes my bed everyday, without fail. We lead quite different lifestyles, he plays video games on literally every platform you can think of and he doesn’t sleep at regular timings, he has ADHD so his attention flickers from one thing to another. However, when my sisters were here, he helped me coordinate their visit, and he brought us to the Capilano Bridge as well as the Christmas market on another day. His mom knitted me a scarf for Christmas, and he got me a new tattoo (my first in years!!) as my gift. One day when we were walking back from a party at Hannah’s place, he asked “is Joey in love with you?” which made me literally guffaw. I told him, “no, he doesn’t, but I do think he likes me back, at least.” It was interesting, I think we can talk about things and I don’t feel the need to shy away from it. When I was getting together with Lucas, it was very fast and at that point I still thought there was a “happily ever after”, so I thought, okay, I will marry Lucas. At this point of time, I think I’m trying to reconcile between my Malay-Muslim-female upbringing of wanting/almost-needing to get married, and my own eventually-revealing desire of taking things as they are, in the moment. I do want to get married sometime in my life, I think, but Jeremy and I are navigating things very slowly and tentatively. I don’t know if you know, it may not be apparent through my writing (or it might, who knows), I can get overwhelmed by emotion that I lose sight of what’s real, that I think I am my feelings. Last week, even though my inclination is usually to give in to the peak of my emotional outbursts, I went against the instinct and felt safe enough to tell him what I was feeling, despite it probably sounding irrational as fuck. He consoled me and told me it was okay, and then we went to sleep. We watched the entirety of The Good Place together ‘cos he’d never seen it before, and we have plans to see Hamilton live together because he also loves theatre, and sometimes we sing Spring Awakening, and at other times, he picks up his guitar and plays and sings Taylor Swift for me, and I forgive him even though all the lyrics are wrong. I don’t know where it’s going, but I do know I like his company, so we’ll see. Your guess is as good as mine.

1-877-KARS-4-KIDS

On the day my sisters arrived, we had shawarma and immediately upon being seated at a table to eat our food, they began telling me things and doing humor in Malay and I’d missed it so much I began laughing so hard I started tearing.

We went to Capilano Suspension Bridge. I’d told Aqilah that her Korean idols had been there because we’d watched an episode of a variety show together that featured the place but she didn’t believe me. It turns out, I was right and she found the episode and took the same photo they had. See, who says I don’t pay attention!!

Pre-Christmas, we went to the Christmas market. There was a lot of delicious food but as my sisters are Muslim, we were rather limited. We still had the best pretzels we had all ever had in our lives, though. It was so good, when my sister accidentally dropped some, we all felt bad and wanted to eat it. My youngest sister actually did eat the fallen piece, and she’s still alive.

We went to Grouse Mountain, where my sisters ice-skated and I watched them and looked after their things. I think we all wanted to try snowboarding or skiing but it would have been even more expensive on top of our entry tickets, and there are four of us, so we didn’t. It was still very fun, though. It’s a very pretty mountain.

Over the week, we did our usual things of cooking kimchi jjigae (that’s jei’s job) which tasted remarkably more inviting in the cold snowy weather. We watched Hamilton while making breakfast. We bickered and had drama and made fun of each other and it was a little bit stressful with a broken table, and an airbnb host who did not understand my sisters’ fear of dogs. But it was the family I grew up with, and I was so, so, so happy to have them close the year with me.

In the past week, I believe I may have caught Covid, or a particularly nasty cold that’s taken so long to shake off. I only had a bad fever and headache on the first day, but the congested lung passageway and nasal nasties have stayed the past six days. I’ve got two days to the start of the new semester, and have just completed a rewatch of The Good Place. I think this new year will be pretty good for me, watch as I attempt to be ever more communist and make it a better year for more than just myself alone. I wish you all the very best. May we all prosper so we start living our lives in the most wholesome ways for the world.

YOU ALMOST RAN THE RED'COS YOU WERE LOOKING OVER AT ME

I'm done with one semester in Canada! It has been the longest semester ever, what with all the adjustments I've had to make. During my Liberal Studies exam yesterday, Kaia came over to me and said, "Sarah Mei, double-space" because I'd forgotten to write in double-spacing on my exam booklet. Those are her final words to me this year, until I take the continuation to this module next semester. I took a bath with a really pretty bath bomb today, so life is currently really, really good. My sisters are coming over for a week next week! I'm excited, we'll be exploring Vancouver together, so if anyone has any recommendations, please let me know, thank you. I'll definitely take them to Granville Island market, I haven't even been there since my first time with Alessia. I had a job interview today, I hope I get it because it would be so convenient for me, although I would still need another job to pay for my tuition. I don't really have much to say, I would like to sleep a long, deep, sleep, while I still can before the next year and semester creep up on me.

HAKOMI

I've had a pretty alright two weeks. This morning, it snowed for the first time since I've been here! I had a lot of fun playing in the snow and walking through it, on the way to school. Just recalling waking up to everything powdered in thick layers of snow, and seeing it through my window, is making me smile now. It's truly such a surreal magic moment. Last week, something unexpected happened, in which I found out the identity of someone I'd been suspecting for a while. It was reassuring, just to know that it wasn't any of the people whom I used to be best friends with, who was having mental health issues or some such thing. I had a counselling session with my therapist in school, a couple of days after that, and I didn't even mention the thing that happened, so I suppose it doesn't really affect me that much. I had a really good session, I'd been telling him (it's the first time I've got a male counsellor, and I'm glad I've got as much trust in him as I've had with my previous therapists in Singapore) about the worry that constantly plagues me, perhaps due to my studies and my general interests, and the fact that I cannot seem to allow myself to relax. He suggested a new form of therapy I'd never tried before. He asked me to tell him the line of thought that would pop up whenever I wanted or tried to relax, so I told him. I said, "sometimes I'm happy with my personal life and when I'm telling myself 'you can rest now', a thought pops up: 'the world is still fucked' and it prevents me from fully relaxing." He told me to think the thought "you can rest now" and to simulate the relief I feel in those moments to myself, while he voiced "the world is still fucked" right in front of me. We did it a few times, and I truly felt myself feeling the relief through those times, because he'd trained me to trace the feelings to their roots, and I also heard him saying "the world is still fucked." After those several rounds, I laughed because his voice really sounded like my voice in my head, he'd asked me to clarify it and he used the exact intonations I would use, and because he sounded like me in my own head, I found it absurd and was amused, but the relief I felt in my body didn't go away. My counsellor said we had a breakthrough, because we'd created a pathway for me to do something new, and to feel something new even while having a negative thought. He said, "both can be true." The world is fucked, and you can rest now, Sarah. I'm not sure why he caused me to feel so safe, but he did, and I think I've been a different person since then. In any case, he's married and older so I have no attraction or transference of feelings toward him, my true love still lies with Kaia, hehehe. I have two research papers and two exam papers left till the end of semester in 10 days, and then it's Christmas break for three weeks. :)

TURNKEY

I watched this TED talk in our feminist studies class, and I'm telling you, I'm not giving birth unless and until my partner legitimately pays me to do so, along with when I do the household chores and whatever else. I also am a big proponent of adoption, anyway, so perhaps I will never give birth in my life. I'm not sure, it's too early to tell. I am only 31, and in my first year of college. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My head has been wrapped up around billionaires and the redistribution of wealth for the past week. It may be because a lot of what I study invariably revolves around giving back and ensuring justice for marginalised communities. It might be because I've been veering toward such issues for the past couple of years. It might be the latter leading up to the former, and now I have a constant headache because the lack of light makes it really hard for me to stay up when I'm supposed to stay up, compounded by the fact that my brain never, never, never stops working, and sometimes my eyes glaze over when you're talking to me, because I'm thinking about something else, which is rude, and I'm sorry. I try very hard to be present and attentive, but I don't succeed at everything I do.

Joey says billionaires are like toddlers, because toddlers get what they ask for, and they don't take no for an answer. Actually, Joey spoke of specifically one billionaire, who is Elon Musk. It's interesting to have a tenuous connection to Elon Musk like this, it's a name I say often, and most people know who he is and have said his name. My school counsellor (I go to one because I thought I had adult ADHD but I haven't seen a nurse to get diagnosed, and I like just speaking to counsellors and getting therapy, anyway) said Elon Musk made a dick move, with the world hunger thing, and then I spoke to my favorite professor, my love and light, Kaia, and then she said Elon Musk is a dick, so basically Elon and dick get said in the same sentence pretty frequently.

It is strange to think of him as a person, through the eyes of someone who's worked with him and gone into the same building as he has for pretty much eight years (I think). I told Joey, when I was in LA in 2016, I'd asked him whether he thought Elon deserved what he had, and Joey had said Elon works hard. So this time, to hear him being slightly more critical of Elon, I said I was proud of him, but then Joey said, again, "he does work hard, he just refuses to take no for an answer."

There is a.... mismatch of worldviews here. As a person, perhaps the man Elon Musk works hard, yes, perhaps he stays long hours at SpaceX and Tesla and doesn't go off gallivanting on Saint-Tropez (although, does he? I do not know). Then there is the rest of the world, the proletariat who hold the factual view that you physically cannot and do not earn billions of dollars through sheer hard work, and he did not. People are working for him, and other people are creating his wealth, and people contributed to his wealth, long before he started working, so it is not only due to him that he's a billionaire.

And there's the issue of world hunger at stake. If you had not encountered it for some reason, Elon Musk offered money to help with world hunger if someone could come up with a provable viable solution. Then, someone from the UN came up with a plan! It remains to be seen whether he'll actually do it. 

The fact of the matter, though, is why did he offer in the first place? What was the point? What was he trying to do? The entire thing just screams dick move. Is he an actual toddler? Are there behavioural experts who have studied toddlers and can explain how we can get a toddler to cooperate if the toddler knew that they could alleviate the hunger of a portion of the world population?  

My head is aching all the time. I can go to school, day in and day out, talk about taxing the rich, or eating them, all the time, and then I can go home, shoot the breeze with Joey, but nothing is going to change, and the plight of the world weighs heavy, on the world. Sometimes I am paralysed from the lack of change. The system is going to have to be reformed, or we will be going through a revolution. So I sit at home, have my dinner, and think about why people are the way they are, and how we can coax them to think about other people.

SO CASUALLY CRUELIN THE NAME OF BEING HONEST

just between us

did the love affair 

maim you too?

I want to tell you about falling in love through mutual friends, by reading someone's Tweets. I want to tell you about waking up from a nap with someone else and his cat, and having him pack leftover food in your little tin container. I want to tell you about the clash of personalities and how love can sometimes not be enough to overcome differences in compatibility, in living spaces and in hobbies. I want to tell you about the resentment I feel when I have hyped someone up in my head and they tell you they're not in the right headspace. I want to tell you many things, but that would be casually cruel in the name of being honest. So I don't say anything. I spoke to Joey last night, it's amazing the things you can find out when you're too depressed to be naughty. He makes Mexican food?! What the fuck, the man has layers?? Yesterday was the first time he tried to draw a line between himself and billionaires, which I appreciated, even though he does work for Elon Musk, and if my calculations are correct, I think he's in the top 10% of the world in terms of wealth. Still, I appreciate his input on my incessant need to improve the world and come up with some viable solutions to world hunger. 

MONTEREY

I'm quite a socialist, and I believe in sharing resources. I also pay an exorbitant amount for my education, so to make things worth it, I like sharing everything I learn, on social media or on this here platform. I have the texts for my Liberal Studies course, whether in print or virtually, so if you'd like to read the texts, let me know. The range includes but isn't limited to The Epic of Gilgamesh, Vita Nuova, Symposium, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. We recently received the mid-term test papers back, so here were my essays. Again, if you read the texts themselves, all this information would make more sense. 

    In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes says that love is a wound and a want to be reunited with our other half, but Diotima says that "a lover does not seek the half or the whole, unless. . . it turns out to be good as well" (205e). Who is right? Why?

According to the speech that Aristophanes gives in Plato's Symposium, people who are in love are seeking to be rejoined with their perfectly-matched other half in order to heal a wound that was created when Zeus separated them from each other. In the stanza of 192C, Aristophanes proclaims, "And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment."

From Diotima's viewpoint, people in love seek only that which is good for themselves, or a person who would inspire them to create something which will attain a form of immortality, for they want what is good for them, and they want it to last, forever. From 208E, "I believe that anyone will do anything for the sake of immortal virtue and the glorious fame that follows; and the better the people, the more they will do, for they are all in love with immortality."

I veer more toward the stance that Diotima is right. Whilst there are people in love who are definitely always in search of their "one true soulmate", more often than not, this ideal creates unrealistic expectations for a person to have. A romantic relationship is unhealthy when the two parties involved do not want to leave each other's sides and have no sense of independence — this is what is currently known as enmeshment, which is when a relationship has a lack of boundaries. Additionally, with the idea that there is a "one true love" or "better half" in the world, it can lead to two things. First, people already in relationships constantly question if they have found the "right partner", instead of trying to build on the foundation of the relationship they are in. Secondly, it leads to people without romantic partners feeling a sense of lacking in themselves, when they could very well be fulfilled as a single person. 

In contrast, Diotima's idea of love is a healthier and more fulfilling one, so in that sense, I believe she is more "right" than Aristophanes is. From 211B and 211C: "it is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always in one form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when these others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change... This is what it is to go aright, or be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty. . . he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful."

Correspondingly, I believe people in love do pursue love for the sake of beauty, and for the sake of creation. Love causes an attraction toward the things that a person deems as good, and if a person loves the good in another, they would love the Good in every and all others, without discrimination. At least, I do believe that should be the standard in society, that everyone adopts an agape love, which treats everyone equally, regardless of whether they are your partner or not.

    — Nicely argued. Very clear summaries of their positions at the beginning.

 

    The Renaissance pop star Dante might agree with the contemporary pop star Dua Lipa that "Love is Religion." Explain using details from Dante's text.

Dante might agree with Dua Lipa that "Love is Religion" for several reasons. Followers of a religion are dedicated and steadfast in their rituals. Dante spent all his time in pursuit of Beatrice and in thinking of her. He also spent all his time writing, so he was religious about Beatrice and about writing, whether independently of each other or not. Followers of a religion may also be obedient without skepticism, and we see this in the following examples. In Chapter II, Dante writes, "Here is a god stronger than I, who shall come to rule over me" and in Chapter III, he writes "Love said 'I am your master.'" Both times, Dante simply submits without even questioning this force of Love. Dante is so fervent that he frequently makes supplications such as when he says "Love, help your faithful one" in Chapter XII. 

To Dante, love is also transformative, just like how religion is supposed to help one grow and be a better person. Chapter XVI: "I grieved when my memory excited my imagination to think of the transformations that Love worked in me" and "Love, many times without warning, attacked me so violently that no part of me remained alive." In his pursuit of Beatrice, his love also transforms as he moves his bliss from pursuit of her greeting to that of praising her. His writing also transforms at the same time as it moves from one movement to another with different writing styles, from the Provençal to dolce stil novo, until he feels in the last movement that he has transcended even all extant writing styles and successfully made his own. Thus, it shows that in both writing and his subject of Beatrice, he was both steadfast and allowed love to be transformative, as with a religion.

    — Very nice description of Dante's transformation and commitment to love/poetry.

GENDERBREAD

I received my grade for the first essay I wrote for the Love and Friendship module, and received kinda positive feedback from the professor I'm absolutely in love with, so I'm pretty much floating on a cloud right now. The disclaimer I would like to make is, my writing does not necessarily reflect my views, I have been called stubborn and inflexible on more than one occasion. But one can always learn and grow, I guess? :)

The dynamic between Creon and the titular character, Antigone, in Sophocles’ play is an ideal representation of the question “what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” In the play, the answers are: death and destruction. This is why I posit, based on an investigation of Creon’s and Antigone’s characters in the text, that wisdom is embodied in flexibility, a trait that neither protagonist possesses, until it is too late for both of them.  

Antigone’s singular action, of disobeying Creon’s explicit orders and going on to bury her brother Polyneices, is the driving force for why the play takes place, so we begin by examining Antigone’s character and her interactions. When she first confides in Ismene about her plans, and asks Ismene for help, Antigone poses the question “Are you true to your birth? Or a coward?” (38), therefore betraying the first instance in which she thinks in terms of binaries. Antigone thinks Ismene is true to her birth only if she assists with the burial, anything else would brand Ismene as a coward and nothing more in Antigone’s eyes. 

At the outset of the play, Ismene literally advises Antigone to “think carefully, my sister” (49) and in the following lines (50-67), Ismene proceeds to enumerate the great calamities that have befallen their family, following the Oedipal curse. However, Antigone ignores her sister’s laments and retaliates with “I wouldn’t even let you help if you had a change of heart” (69). Much later in the play, Antigone proclaims “I won’t accept a friend who’s only friends in words” (543). She does not want to divide the burden with Ismene, and Antigone has been stubborn through the entire text.

Despite the fact that Ismene has outlined her valid apprehension, Antigone provokes her with “Go on, make excuses. I am on my way” (80). This depicts the fact that Antigone is so unaccommodating, not only does she want to do the burial, she does not consider her sister’s legitimate fear and concerns, and calls them excuses.

Toward the end of this first dialogue, Antigone professes to Ismene, “You’ll be more enemy to me / If you are silent. Proclaim it to the world!” (86) and “When you say this, you set yourself against me” (93). Antigone sees the world in black and white, Ismene is either with her or against her, there is no space to negotiate anything in between. 

Even when Ismene tries to console Antigone and accompany her in a crucial, frightening moment, when the antihero is headed toward certain death, Antigone rejects her in line 546, with: “Don’t say you did it. You wouldn’t even touch it. Now leave my death alone!” Antigone is the picture-perfect definition of being an immovable object.

While we have scrutinized Antigone to her literal death, as a foil to her character, Ismene maintains: “But I gave you reasons not to make that choice” (556). Ismene has considered the minute details of the situation and was flexible enough not to think in binaries, thereby displaying wisdom in that she has not courted her own death.

We first examine Creon through the lines “...if anyone tries to run a city on the basis of bad policies… That man is terrible / So I have always thought” (176) and “I will never hold my tongue about what I see. I will never call a man my friend / If he is hostile to this land” (185). Here we see that Creon also subscribes to potentially false dichotomies, he uses the words always and never, peppering them frequently through his speeches, without considering the in-betweens of life. In the same tirade, Creon asserts, “They are the ones, I’m absolutely sure who used bribes / To lead our watchmen astray” (290), declaring statements that have no factual justification, yet with conviction of their veracity.


In lines 485-487, “...if she’s not punished… Then I am not a man… I don’t care if she is my sister’s child,” Creon believes it would reflect well on him that he would treat even his niece, to whom his own son is betrothed, with cold objectivity, but it further isolates him as being obstinate and unfeeling.


In his intense back-and-forth dialogue with Haemon, Creon utters the lines, “So you think the people should tell me what orders to give?” (734) as well as “So I should rule this country for someone other than myself?” (736). He is purposefully being provocative and inflammatory, although Haemon has been cautiously trying to advise him. This culminates in Creon accusing Haemon of a threat. Haemon then asks, “What threat? All I’m saying is, you haven’t thought this through” (752), followed by Creon’s retort of “I’ll make you wish you’d never had a thought in your empty head!” (754). 

While Ismene is the foil to her sister Antigone, Haemon acts in much the same way for his father Creon. Haemon contends, beginning in line 688, “My natural duty’s to look out for you, spot any risk… The common man, you see, lives in terror of your frown; He’ll never dare to speak up in broad daylight… But I’m the one who hears what’s said at night… This sort of talk moves against you, quietly, at night.” Through this little monologue, we see that Haemon possesses the flexibility to respect Creon yet is also privy to the real opinions of Thebes’ common folk, and this provides Haemon the wisdom of knowing what is really happening. Conversely, because Creon has ruled through fear, he has never had the wisdom of knowing what people really believe about him.

While Creon is bitterly embattled against Tiresias, he complains, “...you people keep shooting arrows at me…/ Like marksmen at a target” (1035). Instead of realising that the many approaches of advice for him indicates a necessity for reflection on what he could be doing better, Creon feels attacked and does not benefit from any counsel.

Once Tiresias has revealed Haemon’s impending death, Creon protests “It’s so painful to pull back; it goes against my heart” (1105). If Creon had been flexible, it would not have been so painful for him to pull back, before the last minute. It is only for Creon and Antigone, whose identities revolved around their stubbornness, that it would be excruciatingly painful to change a stance, because they held their beliefs so close, so dear, and so important to themselves. For people whom such stances are fluid, these decisions would not weigh so heavy on their hearts.

As we approach the play’s conclusion, Creon’s expressions take the forms of “You were expelled from life / By my bad judgment, never yours” (1265), “Why don’t you kill me now? / My misery is so huge” (1309), and “I killed you, poor child…/ I’m worth less than a nobody” (1319). We have now seen Creon lose everyone who was dear to him, and suffer much pain that could have been narrowly avoided, if he had simply acted sooner. Having seen Antigone lose her life, and Creon lose everything of value in his life, both due to their extreme tunnel vision and single-mindedness, we can infer that flexibility is indeed a form of wisdom, which you would do poorly to lack in life.

This was her feedback:

Sarah Mei,

You have a wonderful, expressive writing voice, and there is excellent use of evidence in this essay. A couple of things that would improve a future draft: clarifying the thesis to be more specific and following from your particular analysis of the play. For example, perhaps something about how thinking in binaries/dichotomies leads the characters to adopt an all-or-nothing rigidity. Having a specified thesis would then help to organize your body paragraphs into micro theses that support this over-arching claim. 

Another key thing is to be sure to begin new paragraphs with a claim or a micro-thesis that tells the reader how the evidence that follows is building toward the main thesis. With these two edits, this would become an outstanding paper.  78/B+

(I have made in-text notes on docx file)

BUY AN UMBRELLA, YOU CHEAP BITCH

I've had an enlightening, enjoyable and lovely weekend. Alessia and I took the ferry to Vancouver, and it was my first time going into the city proper, because prior to this, I'd only done a short transit at the Vancouver airport to fly into the island. Alessia's family lives in Vancouver so I was doing a sleepover at her family's house. Her mom picked us up in the drive over from the ferry terminal to their house, and I had a sort-of field trip on the way over. Alessia's brother had just returned from his birthday trip to Whistler with his girlfriend, and they're twenty years old, so her mom was telling us about the trip, and everything was just so chill. In Singapore, if you're from my community, when you go on a trip with your romantic partner, you'd have to lie to your parents about the people you're going with, pretend it's a group trip with your friends, etc. I learned about the issue with snow in Vancouver, and the fact that they recently had a salt shortage during a snow-in, and had to get salt delivered in trucks from other provinces. A salt shortage! To deal with snow!!!! What an interesting issue. 

We got to their house, and they had prepared the guest room for me. Alessia has a dog (fuck I'd asked for the breed, but now I've forgotten, I know there's a poodle part in the mix) called Korra, who is the gentlest furriest bear of a doggo, and she was so friendly, I loved giving her belly rubs. Alessia then drove me to Stanley Park, which was a lovely gradient of yellows and oranges and reds, and we found out that Stanley Park is bigger than Central Park in terms of land area! We then went to Granville Island, which is like a cross between Grand Central Market in LA and... I think, the Meatpacking District in New York? It has an entire market of fresh, delicious, diverse variations of cuisines, and also lots of cool, crafty, indie items on sale. I know when I was in New York, Adam took me to a sort-of reclaimed warehouse, that sold soy candles and eco-conscious items, I don't remember where it was at the moment, but for some reason the term Meatpacking District means something to me? Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, Granville Island is currently my favorite place in Vancouver, and I definitely look forward to another full-day visit sometime. This time, I had a lox bagel sandwich, and the salmon tasted so fresh, I know now what they mean that seafood is super fresh in this city. We also bought fudge, and I had some of mine, and kept the rest to snack on during long and heavy classes. I freshened up at Alessia's home, then left for my date. My date(s?) and I have a running joke, I was supposed to be going on two different dates on the weekend, because I'd matched with them on the dating apps (hilariously enough, I matched them on different apps - one was on Bumble and the other on Hinge) and found myself getting along with them at the same time. 

However, one of them had a busy weekend, and so I met only one of them on Saturday. He brought a rose, because I apparently am now on The Bachelorette, and I will have to make my pick between the two of them. We had a lovely date, he brought me for bingsoo, as well as sushi. We got sushi at Davies St, which is the LGBT district of Vancouver, and the sushi was so fucking good! It wasn't even expensive, but it was delicious, so I suppose I will be eating much more sushi here than in Singapore. Even though the weather was hideously rainy (not something I enjoy, y'all know I love and thrive on the sun), I had a very enjoyable date. He also bought me "Canadian snacks" - most of which I'll probably snack on during my film studies classes, so basically all the people I'm hanging out with are being the best tour guides, and I’m so grateful.

Having mentioned one date, another curious thing is the other person I'd matched with, he and I have a mutual friend, a thing that has never happened in all my years and regions of being on dating apps. If you're observant, you'll know who our mutual friend is, because I only have one Singaporean friend who lives in Vancouver. She knows about us and our match, she had only nice things to say about him, and so, in my book, this increases his credibility by 319218. I'm looking forward to seeing him. On one of our video calls, he showed me his relatively new tattoos, and one of them was a character I recognised immediately, because I'd also been enamoured by her on the Netflix food documentary she was featured on. It struck me as wonderful that he'd chosen such a person for a tattoo. 

On my date on Saturday, I found out that he and I had a very enjoyable time, emotionally and physically, you may make of that what you will. It's always nice to know that someone you can connect with, also fits with you physically, so that's great. Now I will have to see the other person, and see if there is also a spark in real life. If there is, then I'm either fucked, or it's time to explore polyamory (I KID, I KID). I like both people, or what I know of them. They are both humorous, work with sound, are very aware of their own... personal stuff, as well as socially aware of all the shit that goes on in society, and I'm fond of them. I think they like and appreciate different things in media, though, so it is interesting to see how dating each of them will turn out. 

At the moment, I just learned about interactive movie screenings of The Room and Rocky Horror Picture Show, both of which the audience can participate in and do call backs to the dialogue/scenes (for example when Janet uses a newspaper to shelter herself from the rain, someone will yell "buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch"), or throw items like rice, or toast, or spoons, at the screen, at different points of the movie. This seems so fucking fun and I cannot wait to experience it for the first time in my life. Somebody needs to tell The Projector in Singapore to do this, I'm sure they know of such screenings happening, but I wonder why they don't conduct such viewings. 

I am.... happy. I am feeling a lot of love, and I hope you feel it too, in some way, shape or form. Thank you, Canadians, for making my experience of Canada feel so wholesome.

ANOMALISA

you call me again drunk in your Benz
driving home under the influence

you scared me to death
but I'm wasting my breath
'cos you only listen to your fucking friends

I don't relate to you
I don't relate to you, no
'cos I'd never treat me this shitty
you make me hate this city
and I don't talk shit about you on the Internet
never told anyone anything bad

'cos that shit's embarrassing
you were my everything

and all that you did was make me fucking sad
so don't waste the time I don't have

don't try to make me feel bad

I would like to make a disclaimer that I am simply linking this song because it's been in my head since I first heard it at the Friendsgiving dinner I went to on Sunday evening. I think it's a good song, and I love the contrast between how calm and serene it sounds before it turns into an absolutely ragey rant, and it still works so well together. It's one of those songs I think will stay in my mind for years to come. I absolutely did not expect this.

This has been a lovely week for me. Kass invited me to a Friendsgiving dinner, where I had my first sweet potato pie that was topped with marshmallows. North Americans eat the weirdest food, but it works, so. I had my first mid-term test this week, I have consumed a lot of media for school and have written a lot over the course of the past seven days, so I don't quite have much more in the way of words.

I shared a password to a media platform with someone who has been in my life for a literal week, and he shared his password to another media platform that I don't have a subscription to, and I don't quite know why, but this feels so intimate. I am possibly ascribing more meaning to something than it inherently has, but that's me, as you well know. People have been very nice to me, and I am smiling, and laughing so much, and even though it is way too early to tell and I will never know why, I think I know which direction I am leaning toward. What do I mean? Who knows? We'll see. 

As always, I wish you the best weekends and the best lives. :)

TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB

It has been a long day, but a very good one. This morning I gave my presentation on Dante’s Vita Nuova, I was proud of my slides and the snarky words I’d chosen to highlight Dante’s sheer audacity. That was at the start of the class, and my professor said after that, that it was such a high bar for the rest of the class to match up to in their weekly presentations, and that my professor herself didn’t want to follow after me, to conduct the class. She was being very sweet and kind to me, but I felt so relieved and appreciated for the work I had put in. I really like this professor, I want to be friends with her and her co-lecturer, who is such an interesting and fascinating character, with the most wondrous collection of knowledge. My presentation lasted five minutes, so we had one hour and twenty-five minutes left in the class. It is the liberal studies class, where we discuss important texts about love and friendship, and two of my classmates engaged in an organic debate about the parallels between Dante and Diotima (from completely different texts) and they got so involved, one of them began visualising an entire new premise of his own, and drew it in the form of a graph on the blackboard. We mathematically and graphically tried to represent philosophy, and spoke of asymptotes (I’ll give you what the axes represent if you ask me, it’s a long, 2000-year-old story). I felt like I was being treated to the first, unrevised versions of my classmates’ respective future TED talks, if TED talks are a thing that will continue way into the future. Sometimes I worry about money, I wonder how I will afford to pay for all of my tuition, because my loan doesn’t cover all of it, but in that moment, I gave myself leave to enjoy education and knowledge, for the sake of the education and knowledge I was receiving. My heart was full of love and joy. It was a moment that will live in my memory for very, very long, and I cherish it. I wish education were affordable and accessible to everyone who wants it, and not done for the sake of capitalism and earning higher wages. 

I did some work in between, until DnD started at 5pm. Every week, I get more terms added to my lexicon, I learn how to say “nat twenty” for a natural 20 on the die, “soft twenty”, which is when your die adds up with your character bonuses to give you twenty, and today I learned “dice jail”, which is the funniest and most endearing thing I learned about the superstitions of my fellow players, who are otherwise pretty darn intelligent and rational. We were well into our session when one of them said he wanted sushi. I haven’t had sushi in Nanaimo, it’s supposed to be really fresh and good and cheap here, because we’re right by the sea, so I said we should order sushi. Then the girl next to me said she should probably eat because she hadn’t eaten for the day and she had gotten started on a new medication for ADHD, today itself. We took forever to order because all the nearby sushi places that delivered were closed for the day, etc etc, but we got into some pretty whackass hilarious conversations over the phone, as a group. In the end, we couldn’t get sushi but I insisted that we order pizza, for the sake of the girl who hadn’t eaten. It was pretty alright pizza, incomparable to sushi – a food I would marry if I could, but at the end of it, she sent me a personal message on Discord thanking me for being kind, and again, I felt the same love I’d felt with my professor in the morning. I have strong protective instincts, it comes with having many younger siblings. I’m not the best elder sister, but I know the people who hurt my younger siblings, I would be down to… do something to them in return. I also have strong protective instincts because there are a lot of people in my life who have always fought to protect me, because I suppose I’ve had lots of bumps in my life and I didn’t grow up the same way they did, so I learn from these strong protective forces in my life, all the time. Alternatively, I also don’t like it when people don’t have their meals on time, because I know sometimes when you’re not mentally all there, when you’re just too preoccupied with life, it just takes you more spoons to make sure your body is equipped with the basics it needs. Self-care can be impossible for the people who need it most, so I needed to make sure this girl fed herself.

I’ve been quite homesick, there are many things I miss about being home. I feel like I would sound ungrateful if I voiced it, so I don’t, but I know everything I know, everything I love is back there. I love Canada, I love the part of Canada I’m in, every day has been such a joy but I’ve been trying to be honest with all the conflicting feelings I’m having. Today, today I felt at ease, and joyful, and loving and loved, and I was proud of today. Today someone was kind to me and I was able to pass that kindness on.

EXIT PLAN

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” 

― Theodore Roosevelt

STUFF WE DID

A thing that I'm getting used to while I'm here, is how comfortable some people can be about themselves, by themselves. They text when they want to text, they don't text if they don't want to text. They say what they really mean, and mean what they say. I think it's a little bit of a culture shock. I don't know if it's particularly my gender or Malay-Muslim community or the fact that I was in fact a woman and grew up in the Malay-Muslim community, but I suppose a lot of my identity in Singapore had to do with how I relate to others, how good of a friend I am, how much of a big sister I can be to my younger peers at work, how I interact with my family members. A lot of who I am hinges upon what I can be or do in service of other people. It is the first time I am living on my own, properly and for the long-term, and I have all the freedom in the world, within reasonable boundaries. I would like to explore the sliding-scale of my personality, and find out who I am, and how much of who I am is what I thought other people wanted me to be. I have spoken to Joey more and more, and I think he is trying to make me have some sense of the person he really is, so I don't live in my head or portray an ideal of him in my head. In a way, I've always known the person he really is, of course, I just didn't want to contend with it. However, I find that this might work just as well, if I'm to really find peace and move along. I've been playing catch-up on my schoolwork, I think it's going as well as can be hoped for. I don't have much to say about school, I feel like it takes up a lot of my brain juice so I don't have much energy to think about anything else. DnD has been fun, I am at the babiest of steps of creating my character, and I have about 99% more information to absorb about the entire realm, so that's yet another information overload I'm constantly engaging in. MJ gave me some very significant advice yesterday, and I do hope that if a romance unfolds here, it will be like the one I had with him at work (not that it was a romance), but I hope it's a dynamic in which I make a friend, and we grow to know and trust each other, and I hope if I fall for the person here, they fall back for me. I miss MJ, he's so much more mature than he portrays himself to be. 

RAVEN

In Love and Friendship this morning, we further discussed Plato’s Symposium. Diotima says love should be a love in the abstract, a general love for the general, whereas Alcibiades makes it very, very personal and asserts that for love to be love, there must be one particular object to direct your love to. In it, there is a speech made by Alcibiades, he proclaims his love for Socrates and it is a speech I very much identify with. There is a kind of desperation to his tangent, I like the speech very much, as I can be relied on to admire most ideals of love. I think the kind of love I know how to do is the kind that feels both possible and impossible at the same time, the kind that makes you feel there’s no love that’s not laced with hate. Contrary to what people may believe or want to believe about me, there are far fewer people I love and care for, than the ones that I do. It takes me a lot to actually love someone, I think, of course there are prerequisites that must be fulfilled, the foundational level has to be ticked, before you go up another level, and then another, and then eventually, you reach the point of love. I find that I have been compartmentalising much more than I thought I was, there is an entire box of things, in my brain, that exists without my contributing to it. It’s a box with wardrobes and shelves, it knows without ever expressing: the RX8 is his car, this is the model of bike he rides, that’s the truck, these are the Vans he wore, that’s what he drinks as a meal replacement, what series did we watch together way back when, what school did they do their Master’s at, what colors does he mix up from color blindness, this is how he laughs, that’s the kind of joke I already expect him to make, he likes dulce de leche ice cream, this is what he can benchpress, what time and what day will he respond, what product does he use in his hair, how do I make his bed because I’ve never had a flat sheet for mine, who am I thinking about when it comes right down to it? Who is it? It infuriates me because I keep this box pretty well-sealed but somehow it seeps through and the feelings I get from it are stronger, they are more vivid by the time they reach my senses, they make me question everything and nothing — and I, I am currently a scholar of at least one philosophy module but the more I learn, the more I learn that I don’t know anything.

VETTEL TAKES A STROLL

I feel like this week is the week that has made me feel like this is now my real life. It has been such a week, and it’s only Thursday. I wore the wrong top to school yesterday, and it was suddenly windy when I walked home, so I was pretty sure I was going to get hypothermia. I’ve begun to feel the little inklings of stress that comes with being in school. The worry from the night before an assignment is due: should I stay up now to complete it or will I be able to work better if I sleep and do it early in the morning? Will I wake up in time to do my assignment or will I miss my alarm? Yesterday when I got home I was completely out of energy from the cold (and from my nine hours in school) and I was too lazy to cook, so I heated up a can of soup, soup that probably had minimal amounts of nutrition and also tasted terrible. My only respite was Money Heist. When I watch Money Heist I feel like the Spanish in my brain that I learned from Duolingo, it comes alive, but then I go out into real life, and I forget everything. Yesterday I was outside a classroom where I could hear a level 100 class of Spanish being held. It was cute. Two years from now a handful of them will only be able to order off a Spanish menu and that will be pretty much it. That’s as conversational as it gets.