“Doing absolutely nothing” is the best description of my state this week. The weird thing is, even though I genuinely enjoy this slightly bored, nothing-to-do mode, I can’t bring myself to enjoy it with a clear conscience. There’s always this feeling that I should be using the time for something, that I shouldn’t stop learning or improving. I keep ping-ponging between “just enjoy yourself for once” and “I haven’t done anything and now I regret it.”
The brain deceives. Words are pretty lies stitched together. Forgiveness, like love, is fleeting; nothing is eternal. I occasionally entertain these wicked thoughts. Mixed in with my anticipation for the new year is also fear — leaving a place behind, starting over somewhere new. I’m afraid of unfamiliar environments, afraid of running into people who aren’t so kind, afraid that life will slowly tip from the not-good-not-bad center of the scale toward the bad side.
I’m still pushing my way through The Story of a New Name: Neapolitan Novels 2. Even reading a novel, I’ll scroll into the comments and find people piling onto Lenù (one of the two female protagonists, and the narrator). It genuinely makes me furious — under a novel about the friendship between two women, the comments are stuffed with malice. I keep wondering why people are so eager to put other people’s hearts and behavior on trial, and in my view this judgmental impulse looks a lot like a controlling impulse. You can spot it in every corner of the internet.
👭 Eating and Catching Up
Monday evening I met friends for dinner and conversation, an early New Year’s celebration. That afternoon, the lazy sunlight was warm on my clothes and I felt like I was being wrapped in something soft. I finally walked down the road behind my place that I’d never once walked down. I have no idea what I was so busy with this past year — the area right around my home was a complete blur to me. That road is quiet and empty, a wide, lonely street where you can bike on half of the one-way lane. Walking forward there’s a long downhill stretch where you only have to steer — gravity does the rest. Biking that road to my usual movie theater cuts the time dramatically compared to before. A school sits at the end of it, and across from the school is an abandoned building — no one knows what happened to it, everyone just passes through.
For convenience and a bit of privacy, I put “Snoopy” as the name on all my deliveries and takeout orders. I walked the back road home to pick up a package, and when I had it in hand I stared at the three big characters on the bag — they’d misspelled it as “Snoopl-y” (史努力 instead of 史努比 — literally “Snoo-Effort”) — and lost myself in thought, then helplessly cracked up laughing. Sometimes a typo can deliver endless joy.
That evening I met up with friends for Korean BBQ and conversation, working our way from jobs to recent films, finally landing on the characters in Jin Yong’s wuxia novels. We got hilariously tangled up about who was related to whom, debated for ages, oscillating between clarity and total confusion. I laughed so hard I almost got a stitch. Eating and talking with friends who share your sense of humor and your laughter wavelength is always a delight. Lately I’ve been re-watching Hospital Playlist — I really hope that by the time I’m forty I’ll still have a group of friends I can eat, drink, and laugh with on the same frequency.
🐏 Jealousy Is Just an Emotion
I’m not sure why I feel this way — honestly, I’m not very tuned in to my own emotions. Sometimes I can’t even tell them apart. In most cases people stick an extremely negative label on the word “jealousy,” treating it as something evil, a sort of I-hope-you-do-well-but-not-too-well, quietly-competing kind of mindset.
Last month I happened to wander into a used bookstore and flipped through some children’s picture books. One of them was about feelings. The Emotion Family was made up of Happy, Sad, Scared, Jealous, Ashamed, Envious, Surprised, Angry, Disgusted, and Loving. And Jealousy in this picture book was described as a “Little Vinegar Bottle” — possibly because the taste is sour. So as long as it isn’t hurting anyone, jealousy is just an emotion like any other.
This is probably the Neapolitan Novels talking — through Lenù’s interiority, Ferrante writes huge stretches of Lenù’s silent comparisons with Lila, her jealous thoughts. But none of that changes my fondness for either of them. Human nature has too many complicated facets to slice it cleanly into good and bad — that kind of binary thinking is just too flat. Judge by what someone does, not by what’s in their heart.
😺 The “Lucky-Money Cat” Is Actually a Fish
Grocery shopping this week, I walked into the supermarket and made a detour past the ornamental fish section. I immediately spotted those two little white fish with heads shaped like duckbills. The yellow tag on the tank gave its nickname: Lucky-Money Cat (招财猫). Writing this now I’m thinking: maybe this year I’ll come into some money too. Looking it up on Wikipedia afterward, the scientific name turns out to be Redtail Catfish.
The supermarket was decorated even more festively for the Lunar New Year than last time I came. Once you grow up and stop receiving red-envelope money, there really isn’t much to look forward to about Spring Festival. You also have to brace for relatives prying into your salary, your dating life, all that. In a village the boundaries between people just dissolve all at once — enthusiastic greetings come braided together with prying questions. My feelings about it are complicated: on one hand I like the warmth, on the other hand I hate having my privacy probed. People should keep a certain distance from each other. Those boundaries absolutely have to exist.
I was writing along and suddenly got sleepy. I don’t want to keep writing. Reading the Neapolitan novels lately, I’ve been wanting to train my own writing. Ferrante’s prose is direct but also incredibly fine-grained, and it reads beautifully — I love that style. I really hope someday I can earn enough money to travel to Italy, to see her Naples with my own eyes, pilgrimage-style. Right, new year, suddenly I have a new goal.
🎨 Books, Film, Music
This week was mostly The Story of a New Name: Neapolitan Novels 2 and Hospital Playlist.
Everything else, I was sleeping. Ten hours a day. I’m dizzy.