nANIMOv

One of my favorite smells is the smell of ironing starch. Smell, as I understand it, is a powerful thing and is a physical sense that is closely related to emotion. The smell of starch always reminds me of my childhood. We’d all get our clothes ironed out in the morning for a wedding, a party, or some other important event. But I don’t just like the memories associated with starch, I genuine love the smell, I just don’t know if that is due to the strong emotions attached to it. Is the smell the same for me as it is for others; does another person experience the olfactory sensation completely differently than me? Someone’s probably done a study on this or something.

I love superhero movies. I love being able to, for a time, suspend disbelief and be present in a world where anything can happen. That being said I do appreciate when they make an effort to make things seem at plausible based on real-world physics, and tKhere are somethings that happen in these types of movies that bother me. I still enjoy them, and these are not movie-ruining, I’m just nitpicking.

**Potential Shazam spoilers below**

For example I watched Shazam today with the family. There’s one of those classic scenes where some form of public transportation, in this case a bus, is in peril and our hero needs to save it and everyone on it. The bus is falling off of a bridge and Shazam is on the ground below and stops the fall with his body. Yay! But how is him catching the bus any different than it hitting the ground. Even if he was doing some special technique to act like a shock absorber (which it doesn’t seem like he was even trying to do), he still would be stopping this freefalling bus in a matter of seconds over 5.5-6 feet. If that fall was going to kill the people on the bus without him there it should have at the very least injured them with the “catch” but they all walked off the bus virtually unharmed. Then again it has been a while since I have taken physics and perhaps this specific peeve is completely baseless, which I would be happy to hear.

I am not as annoyed or upset with this as my tone may seem to suggest. And some say thinking about such things in a superhero movie is stupid and pointless because there’s a bajillion other things that defy physics/ science/ explanation. But what I love about these movies is the idea that it could be possible, but without some of consistency with the basics of our reality, it becomes detached from it. Rather than supernatural characters and events occuring in a natural world, we simply would have supernatural characters and events occuring in a supernatural world, which can also be a lot of fun (Looney Tunes comes to mind), but it’s just different.

You know when things get so crazy it gets your thoughts all trapped like in a bottle.

– Chazz Michael Michaels

I’ve always felt like I’m the type of person who is pretty good about dealing with their thoughts and emotions internally. My strategy is usually to handle less-than-optimal situations with patience and optimism. Just keep smiling and moving forward.

I gotta say though April has been a doozy. It’s not just because of the stress and emotional toll of med school applications, which I talked about a lot in some of my recent posts, but also because of other personal goings-ons. And while I kept doing my day jobs, and kept up with some of my most baseline routines, my personal time was spent less productively and I would retreat to low-stakes hobbies like video games.

That being said my hiatus has another layer to it in that these past few weeks have also been among the happiest I’ve had. I got to spend a lot of time with someone I love more than I could ever describe properly in words. But even so, that never prevented me from writing and I would never use that as an excuse for me not doing the things I love to do (because it’s actually the opposite).

Ultimately what it comes down to is me second guessing myself, and not having confidence in some of the things I’m doing. That, perhaps hidden behind me telling myself I am too busy, which was never the case.

So I would like to apologize to myself and more importantly to you dear readers (the few of you who are out there) for letting you down these past few weeks. You are important to me, more than you could ever know, and I am grateful for you taking a small part of your day to read my ramblings.

See you all tomorrow.

Much love,

NV

It’s all over

the place. Some under the bed and

behind the desk. Some if it will just have to stay

where is it for now.

I have to focus

on the ones that matter

so that no one

gets hurt.

I’ll do my best to contain it all

but I’m sorry if I miss

some pieces.

There is a comment that is famous in the reddit community and beyond that is in response to a user’s post that simply states “I just don’t care about myself.” The comment describes four rules for life:

1. No zero days, do something everyday that brings you closer to your goals
2. Give gratitude to and do favors for your past, present, and future self
3. Forgive yourself
4. Exercise and read books

I haven’t thought about this post in a while, but reflecting back I can definitely include this among things that have helped me get through tough times and shaped my perspective. Don’t have much commentary on it at the moment, just thought I’d share.

Today I went to my great-aunt’s 75th birthday party. I always know what to expect when going to family gatherings. The first 10 minutes are spent greeting all the relatives and a few strangers. We eat food (today’s menu consisted of short ribs, regular ribs, tacos, palabok, a giant burrito, lumpia, a salad, dinuguan, shrimp, and of course, rice [probably leaving some stuff out]). I get asked multiple times about the application process/ the future. I play with the kids. I rest and eat more food. Say hi to any late people coming from their game, rehearsal, audition, etc. My cousin Sam is jamming out on his guitar (follow him on Instagram), my other cousin’s are playing catch. Dad and my uncles are taking turns massaging each other on whatever soft flat surface they can find. One of my aunts is organizing party games and all the older titas eagerly gather to participate. And when the time comes my other aunt rallies everyone to start cleaning up.

It’s all very predictable and there’s other smaller details that I’ve kept out. Those details are just observations that I think add to the overall picture, but would take a long time to explain and give context too, and to abbreviate them would be both ineffectual or confusing. That predictability is not necessarily a bad thing though, I find comfort in it. It’s nice knowing that no matter what is going in my life some things never change. I can always depend on my family to be there like they always have, doing their thing.

Generic inquiries of personal wellbeing (“How’s it goin’?”) are often met with equally generic responses (see previous post regarding this), which may include an assurance of productivity (“Keepin’ busy”). I am guilty of using such responses even when I don’t mean them or they aren’t true. But regardless of the validity of it, that response doesn’t mean much at all. Just because you are busy doesn’t mean you are productive, and vice versa. I feel like the difference can be hard to describe but we all know it. We all hate “busy-work,” but if we are occupied with something we love or we think is meaningful we get a sense of fulfillment.

So if we find ourselves “keepin’ busy” it’s a good idea to check-in on exactly what that means.

I saw something recently talking about how “we are all human until: …race disconnected us…religion divided us…politics [blah/ etc].” There is a component of that which I think is true, especially in the times we live, but these are all things that also connect people, and are fundamentally human. Based on my understanding, Homo sapiens dominated over other species of humans because of our ability to connect, and much of that was due to our ability to create fictions, tell stories, and to believe in things beyond of reality (e.g. religion, money…). This ability allowed, and still does, to connect with total strangers, as long as we share a common belief.

The issue today is that there are so many different things to believe, some of which are impossible to prove through statistics and science. To say that race, religion, and politics is the root of a disconnected humanity is to ignore part of what makes us human in the first place. It’s not these ideas that disconnect us, but our attachment and our (perhaps reckless) loyalty to them, a quality that is also very human. Maybe we should stop trying to look for scapegoats and start working on solutions.

I saw another video on my timeline recently showing how small our planet is compared to different stuff. You know how they go, starting off comparing Earth to other things in the solar system, then the galaxy, then the universe. Then people make comments about how they feel so small and insignificant. But I think you could argue the exact opposite. Of all the planets in all the solar systems in all the galaxies that we can observe (granted that’s not relatively) we are on the only one that has any significant forms of life. That makes us kind of special I think. We have unique opportunity over most other collections of molecules throughout the universe to experience consciousness (what even is it anyway queue existential crisis) and we should take advantage of that. The best way to do that depends on the person, but I don’t necessarily think there’s a right way, though I do think there are wrong ways.