Musing, PuncProsody

Art House Chat

Musing, Photo Reflections, Slice of Life

Above 20 degrees yesterday, it felt like the first proper day of summer, and so to take advantage of the good weather, I headed into Chinatown in order to meet up with my friend and fellow writer for a bit of an adventure.

Our first order of business was lunch at a panini restaurant tucked at the back of a building that had once been a coffee shop. According to the shop owners they had bought out the coffee shop’s space and were in the middle of renovations, which was why they were serving paninis out of the back door of their kitchen.

As we arrived, Sandstorm by Darude started playing over the speakers.

What a vibe lol.

We lined up and just before taking my order, they made the announcement that there were only 5 sandwiches left — we’d made it just in the nick of time! They make their bread fresh daily, so when they sell out, they just close up shop early for the day!

When we got our paninis, we were astonished to find that they were essentially the size of two regular-size sandwiches.

We sat on lawn furniture under the shade of a tree and chatted while we ate. We were discussing (among other things) how we want to enjoy aging, and find relative happiness (or at least fulfillment) at every new stage of life we attain. Growing old isn’t guaranteed for anyone. It’s a priviledge, and neither of us want to spend the latter half of our lives complaining about being one year older. Complaining about aches and pains? Of course! Grieving when we inevitably have a major change in mobility or life situation? Of course. But never complaining about getting to live a little longer, getting a bit more time to find moments of relative happiness within the life circumstances that we have on that day, for that moment. It’s not about forcing happiness or forcing undue, toxic levels of positivity. Never that. It’s about understanding that happiness looks different throughout your life, and that it’s something unique to you. A good life, or a good moment is defined differently for every person (though I think generally in great romantic relationships, partners generally agree on what a good life, and a moment of happiness feels like).

But I digress. The couple behind us had brought their tiny dog to the panini restaurant and the dog kept giving us the cutest little stares.

The next leg of our adventure featured a new vintage clothing store called The Last Unicorn which was run out of the back of an equally new place called Miam Miam General Store that sells vintage clothing along with home, grooming, and gourmet items made by local artisans.

I bought a cameo print fitted blazer with a skull and crossbones pin from The Last Unicorn, and I bought a see-through white linen dress with lace detail from Miam Mian General Store (it made me think of fairies, witch forest rituals, and 70s vampires so I had to have it).

Absolutely no way I can wear it out anywhere without some sort of slip underneath… and that made me love it even more. It’s the polar opposite of a black mesh and lace dress that I have!

Meanwhile, my friend bought two hand carved wooden vases, a handmade candle holder, and some locally roasted coffee beans… and pointed out an adorable candle in the shape of an open can of sardines that I think we were both tempted to get! Definitely a place we’d both like to go back to again.

Happy with our purchases, we then sought out a coffee shop we could relax in, opting for Art House Café, which neither of us had yet been to (surprisingly). The walls were filled with art absolutely everywhere, and each piece by a local artist was for sale; everywhere we turned, there was gorgeous art to look at. And the coffee was good too!

We talked excitedly about her upcoming first trip to Japan with her husband (which they have been eagerly planning and anticipating for years) and was so delighted by all the things they have booked to do (some michelin star restaurants, gourmet coffee tasting experiences, and a hidden speakeasy with coffee cocktails that she booked as a surprise for her husband lol!). I also gave her a few tips (use Seven Bank ATMs because they’re international card-friendly, go to Book Off, hunt down the cat museum in Nara, and go take a walk around Enoshima to spot some cats if you have a free afternoon you can’t decide how to fill)! We then spoke extensively about how much we love writing, but how gruelling editing and the subsequent querying and publishing process can be. She is going through it and I’ll be wading into those waters this year or the next. No matter how grueling parts of it can be, though, there was no question for either of us that the most important thing is being able to share our imagined worlds and characters with others through writing.

And if no one will give you a seat at their table, or if you realize that sitting at the table you’ve been invited to might not actually be best for you, you build your own.

While we both intended to leave a bit early to get some errands done (and for me to give Scout an early supper), once I’d walked her back to her car, we decided to sit in there and talk for “a few more minutes”… which ended up being nearly two hours.

We covered a ton of topics, but the one that stuck out in my mind was about unconditional love. She was explaining how someone she knew asserted that unconditional love doesn’t exist because it was impossible to love someone forever no matter what happened. We both agreed that that wasn’t an accurate understanding of what unconditional love is, and it took us a while to figure out how to articulate how we each conceptualize the difference between conditional and unconditional love.

She pointed out that unconditional love happens in the present. You don’t consider the past or future when you give someone unconditional love. You love them as they are, in the moment. I agree with that. Logically, you can’t promise you’ll love someone forever. But you can honestly tell someone that you truly love them as they are in that moment, on that day. And you re-confirm your love for them every day, and in every moment. It’s not something fixed or restrictive, it’s a living, breathing emotion that ebbs and flows, and adapts throughout your life. You’re allowed to change and grow, and you can fall out of love… sometimes that happens naturally, and it’s sad, but it’s okay. But that’s exactly what makes staying in love so particular a state of being. You don’t make one rigid promise or make one rigid decision or realization. You make countless tiny decisions, countless tiny affirmations, countless tiny shows of affection, countless tiny promises, countless tiny shows of support… and you freely choose to give that person love over and over again. That’s far more meaningful than one grand declaration or promise.

I added that unconditional love and conditional love start in different ways. Unconditional love is freely given at the outset and encourages a person to be who they are — it is love for who a person IS. Conditional love requires that certain conditions be met at the outset and throughout a relationship in order for love to be given, and it is love for what a person DOES or provides. The love can be withheld as a bargaining chip, almost. Didn’t get straight As in school? Didn’t buy them expensive enough jewelery? You get no affection until you get better grades, buy them something expensive enough, etc.

Unconditional love ends when there is a hurt too great to be mended, or when too big a boundary is crossed. The love is never withheld, the relationship just ends.

The nuance is small, but important.

Then again, the concept of love itself is so deep and nuanced that our species will likely never stop examining it in art and conversation. How I understand and describe it now will undoubtedly change ten years from now, when I have even more life experience to drawn from.

Uncontitional love and the realistic romance of countless tiny choices, affirmations, and shows of support is what I aim for though. A love breathing, in flux.

We always talk each others’ ears off when we meet up, and this day was no different! But at last, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. I hope she has an incredible trip, and I imagine that, like me, she’ll just end up wanting to go back!

The Measure of a Month

Musing, Slice of Life

After many evenings of sitting by candlelight by my kitchen window to edit, I was finally able to complete my latest short story and submit it for consideration in an anthology (I’ll say which one after I get a response, either way!). I wrote the best horror piece I possibly could, incorporating locations and elements that were deeply meaningful to me, so I can only hope that the editor or slush reader connects with it. It certainly got under my skin as I was writing it. No matter the outcome, it feels good to put a piece forward and truly try again.

In a few days I’ll be sitting the N1 and while I have been studying, I’m not sure I’ll be able to pass the exam this time around. I set studying to the side a bit to finish the short story, and also because I felt too exhausted to really take in any of the new vocabulary I was trying to learn. I’m back to studying now that I’m in the home stretch, and even though I’m still not quite at the level to pass yet, hopefully sitting the exam will give me an idea of which things I should focus on before retaking the exam in the new year.

At least I’ll get to complete the build of this cool Gundam platic model (my first in years), no matter the outcome of the submission or the exam. I’m hopeful though.

Building a Gundam is certainly one way to relax, but this month I have also indulged in playing video games, going to cafés to read, dressing in favourite outfits, and eating a lavish meal at a favourite restaurant (table for one please!).

Much as I love luxuriating in a bath or a good face mask, that level of grooming and pampering is something I can only enjoy when I’m already feeling relaxed. Much like Scout, I enjoy baths, but I hate drying off afterwards haha.

I normally don’t read heavily when I’m writing, but I’ve been breaking that convention liberally these past two months. When I attended CAN*CON in October I bought a ton of physical books for the first time in a long time and have been working my way through them. Been reading a book by one of my fellow local writers (Treasure of the Tides), and I’ve also returned to reading センチメンタルワールズエンド in earnest after getting myself a physical copy. This is not to mention all the digital books I’ve bought recently… and the books borrowed from the library (currently listening to Pageboy by Elliot Page and feeling grateful that I get to hear such a candid memoir by a trans, queer artist whose work I have admired for many years — it’s heartening that he has reached a point in his life where he felt at home enough in his body that he could tell it).

Much as I love the atmosphere and mechanics of Elden Ring, I still suck at it and am too exhausted to be able to handle the constant failure right now in order to get better (lol), so for the moment I’ve switched to a JRPG called Tales of Arise (which I bought at BOOK OFF at the same time as Elden Ring) so that I can feel like I’m making progress. So far, I’m enjoying the mechanics and the storyline; it’s relaxing to go back and play a linear game once in a while — no branching choices, no open world.

I envision spending a good amount of time hibernating and gaming with Scout this winter… I brought him out in his backpack for his first snowfall the other day, come to think of it. He was mesmerized.

There were some incredibly good deals lately, so along with the latest tour Bluray and some goods, I also got lots of second hand ALICE NINE. merch, including band t-shirts, towels (for the bathroom!), and a huge stack of magazine clippings containing a bunch of articles I’d never seen before! Very excited to comb through it slowly in December, once the exam is over. I added a Discothèque-era Saga scorpion to my usual gin-tape bag charm. I attached my new ALICE NINE. lanyard to my work ID, and the Farewell Flowers artbook is easily one of my favourites… the photos are gorgeous (The ocean, the colour tone, the framing, Saga emphasizing his adam’s apple…♪), and the last page with its inscription and signatures was so heartfelt, I wanted to cry, remembering the last tour I got to attend. Thank you for existing, アリス九號.

Here’s my latest little sketch from the other day… writing that horror piece clearly influenced the tone of my drawing.

I haven’t done much in the way of cooking from scratch these past few weeks, but I did finally turn my yearly pumpkins into purée (with a pumpkin bread to follow in December, I hope), and I made a Japanese-style breakfast last weekend, as well as a few other tasty dishes when I had the energy. In terms of food, I am once again getting obsessed with soup because ’tis the season.

This month was difficult, in the sense that I had an anxiety attack at work, and that my chest pain got quite bad at points. But there’s been real improvement in my ribcage according to my doctor (finally!), and I took these last few days of the month off to study for the exam and decompress both physically and emotionally, so I hope to end the year on a good note, in less pain.

Last but not least, I’d like to emphasize that genocide is not an act of self-defense. There is a temporary, tenuous ceasefire over Gaza at present, but that by no means has stopped the ongoing violence and oppression towards the Palestinians caught in that open air prison. Many of whom are children. Many of whom are already sick or injured. Most deaths have been to noncombattants, residential areas obliterated. The ceasefire must be permanent to allow humanitarian aid to flow unimpeded into the region, to allow anyone to safely leave the warzone, and to allow hostages on both sides to be returned safely. It is egregious to use innocent human beings as scapegoats and as bargaining chips, just as it is egregious to imprison children and innocent adults without due process or due cause. If Hamas must be brought to account for their October attack, then the Israeli government must also be brought to account for their disproportionate violence and oppression before and after the fact. To weigh these actions against international law is logical and reasonable.

My heart goes out to everyone caught in the warzone — which is to say their homes — their loved ones, livelihoods, and everything around them being destroyed.

If you have the means and would like to help in the effort to bring humanitarian aid to the inncents, the noncombattants currently caught in the crossfire in Gaza, here are some donation resources:

A govenment’s and its military’s atrocious acts of violence against a civilian population does not justify any retaliatory acts of antisemitism elsewhere. Period. That government operates under an extremist sect of the religion (Zionism) and does not speak for or represent Judaism as a whole. Using that government’s violent conduct as an excuse to carry out antisemitic violence elsewhere is unacceptable and unconscionable. Just as it is unacceptable and unconscionable to carry out islamophobic acts of violence.

Break the cycle of violence.

Never again. For anyone.

A Cast for the Psyche

Musing

Taking the full dose of an SSRI for over a year was like putting my emotions in a mental full-body cast. I could no longer truly touch them: they were shielded from me and from the outside world, made stiff in order to let all of my metaphorical broken bones finally set and heal. Aside from truly unusual, heightened experiences of joy or of grief, I felt my life in a flat way, looking at it almost as though through a window.

Safe, distressed sometimes at how distant it felt.

I used to fear medicating my mental illnesses, because I imagined it being akin to having my personality changed, to having vital parts of myself suppressed, and now I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that it’s not been like that at all. I wish I could go back and tell my parents, too, that they should have gotten me into therapy and on medication right away when they first witnessed me isolating, falling apart, and having emotional outbursts, when I eventually told them a boy in the neighbourhood had been abusing me, that they should not have told me to simply think positively, that they should not have been frustrated when I chose to stay home in my room, on the internet, where it seemed marginally safer than Out There.

I’d been living my life for years by pushing through the pain of doing everything while having broken emotional bones, while being blamed as a child as a teenager as a young adult for having been broken by others in the first place, the fractures multiplying through to adulthood with the wear and tear of everyday stresses, compounding with each additional mental blow, each new trauma I experienced.

I survived… I survived.

Here I am, alive.

The medication did not change the core of who I was, and it was not a puny bandaid over a bullet wound. It was a cocoon beneath which I was able to experience a sort of mental stillness that I hadn’t had since I’d been a very small child. I no longer experienced constant anxiety, near-daily panic, disturbing dreams, or intrusive thoughts of suicide and worse.

It was like again telling my chronically-panicked brain,

See: we are not irreparably broken, so suicide should not be an option — it is counterintuitive to even consider. You don’t need to always force us to imagine the worst possibilities. It’s going to be okay.

…and having my brain finally start to believe it.

The obsessive, viciously intrusive thoughts lessened to become bearable. The chronic anxiety and frequent panicking lessened to a degree I truly hadn’t believed possible. I had been living with it so long, I couldn’t remember what it had felt like to not be afraid of some ever-present, menacing, and undefinable quality of reality. I assumed these were normal states of mind. It was a shocking, life-altering experience.

I finally understood the combined gravity of the mental illnesses I had been living with for so many years, and began to see more clearly all the ways that they had impacted and impeded on my life and intruded in the lives of all those around me — those still in my life, and those that have passed through it and left.

I have been able to reduce my dose to half and regain a bit more tone to my emotional state, feel less like I am viewing my own life through the thick, sturdy glass of a porthole.

I told my counsellor that with the reduced dose, it felt like I was wearing the mental equivalent of a light, durable brace, like the ones my third cousin wears on her legs, no longer in a restrictive cast. Maybe I’ll wear this emotional brace for the rest of my life, or maybe I’ll be able to dispense with medication altogether, with time. Maybe I would have achieved the same result of calming the suffocating, chronic anxiety I used to experience some other way eventually. The important thing is that my quality of life has completely changed with this.

The important thing is that, you deserve to live, not merely to survive.

You deserve an emotional life that is not flat, that is not vicious in its highs and lows — but that has a rich shade, and full tone, and delectable nuance.

I deserve that too.

Gradients of Belief

Musing

I think that a love good for the soul should be harboured in two dimensions at once: it should float in a space larger-than-life, while also being moored in the minutia of everyday reality. It is possible to have a down-to-earth, entirely real love with another person, and together, to make of it something spiritual, destined, and beautiful. You can embrace a story of being fated lovers while also making the choice, over and over again, to put in the work of maintaining a realistic, enduring relationship. Making a partnership all one or the other can cause it to suffer, in my experience.

If you don’t together believe that what you have is a special or particular connection, why put in effort to protect and nurture one another and the connection you share, especially when you go through patches of boredom or difficulty?

I’ve only been in monogamous relationships, so I can’t speak for the dynamics of polyamorous ones, though I imagine the above could apply just as well to those.

Holding both the reality and the spiritual idea of the relationship in balance is difficult, though, when one or both have suffered interpersonal trauma. You start off not connecting as yourselves, but rather connecting through one or more layers of survival behaviours and traits–it’s not always necessary or feasible to heal or dispense with them all, but if and when you do, sometimes the connection fades.

It depends on whether or not you choose to connect from a deep, vital part of yourselves from the outset, through some avenue that makes up the core of who you are: something steadfast, that you couldn’t change even if you tried. That you wouldn’t want to change.

I’m certain that many would disagree with me, but I think holding a certain element of magical realism together is essential for a love-filled, longstanding relationship. Human beings have imagination for a reason. My body craves down-to-earth touch and shared glances filled with meaning just as much as my imagination craves the extraordinary, the wondrous, the irreplaceable.

I believe in cause and effect so minute, so intricate, so beautifully complex that it seems like fate–but outside of imaginative art pieces, I don’t believe in destiny as a concept. I hold true to the notion of having free will. Intricate chains of (outside) cause and effect do affect free will, of course. Free will means being able to make a choice between one or more options, not that everything is possible. Some paths are not open to you due to exertions of the collective free will of the universe(s). Moreover, we’re all humans with corporeal bodies, and thus have limitations. We manage to invent ways to get around those limits all the time, though–a testament to how incredible the human imagination and the ingenuity that results from it is.

You wouldn’t be wrong to think of what I called the “universe’s collective free will” as being the will or plan of God(dess), or as the influence from a pantheon of deities. Each of us, at birth, are given a set of life circumstances to begin with that we truly have no control over. As we grow and age, we are able to make choices and find ways around whatever limits we were born into or come into as we live, but there are always things that we cannot in the moment and may never be able to control. There is still a lot of magic and mystery left on Earth (not to mention the universe as a whole) that science has not yet managed to explain, let alone control.

I became a cynic out of necessity, but that is not who I was by nature.

Morning Musing

Music, Musing

It’s a given (that is, researchers have proven) that music is not a human language, does not have communicative structures in the way that the many thousands of human languages have and have had. Qualitatively, they are not the same, even though they both allow for written forms, and have been standardized while still maintaining an incredible fluidity in expression, permitting innovation and improvisation on the part of any speaker, signer, or musician.

Language exists to make possible conversation — that is, there is always a person conveying a message and a person decoding the message according to some agreed-upon meaning. Music absent of any accompanying words (that is, mutually-intelligible language) does not exist to engender conversation. It doesn’t convey information but rather atmosphere and emotion in all the nuance that standard dictionary definitions and poetry can’t quite manage; as such, it also has less precision and interpretation is far more open-ended.

The open-ended nature of its interpretation of meaning is something that many humans don’t enjoy, preferring music to be accompanied by words in a language they can understand (lyrics) or that music be in the background of a scene of some kind (like in movies, or in a play).

Listening to or feeling music by itself, unaccompanied by precise, mutually-intelligible words or a scene of some kind is an act of deep reflection or a journey into memory. What does the arrangement of sound make you feel? What do you imagine from the music alone? What do you think the composer might have been feeling or imagining as they crafted or improvised the piece? What do you think the musician who played the piece was thinking or imagining as they played it?

These questions are far more readily answered when words or scenes are included; it becomes a conversation, a set of signposts to guide you.

Without these, music is music.

A living memorial to feeling, to atmosphere, to thought, to impression, just as open to individual interpretation and imagination as its structure can be replicated by other skilled musicians. But its structure being replicable does not mean that its originally intended meaning can be fully divined by the one doing the replication (or interpretation).

Furthermore, a great deal of theory and structure underlies the creating (or playing) of music, but listening to it, even reproducing it without any knowledge of this, is possible. Paradoxically.

Like repeating a word or a phrase that you like the sound, the feel of, in a language you have no knowledge of. You repeat the word or the phrase finding it beautiful or meaningful in some way, without knowing its agreed-upon significance to another person or group.

Music by itself is like a perpetually foreign language, an atmosphere, a feel to be enjoyed and appreciated without needing to understand it in a concrete way.

Poetry can offer the same pleasure (or discomfort, depending upon the individual), eschewing sometimes the conventional in order to play with words in an idiosyncratic way, one that might not allow for easy understanding between the poet and the admirer. But that absence of immediate, standardized understanding is what makes it and music an art form. They require time, thought, feeling — and a willingness to engage both in introspection and in extending empathy toward the other party.

Should poetry written in gibberish, then, be considered in the same vein as wordless music?

I woke up before sunrise today, and this (possibly incoherent line of questioning) was what was on my mind.