In this universal pursuit of looking for moments of authenticity, there is this not-yet-legitimate questioning that takes place when I encounter people who, out of all the things that they do, speak too well. Sure, being articulate is preferable at any given moment in a dialogue, but I suppose this ‘speaking too well’ doesn’t exactly refer to the kind of articulation I normally find pleasant. How this makes me question one’s authenticity, I’m not sure.
It’s probably because I had been brainwashed from the moment I decided to step into this world that there was no way of talking about Hollywood (or movies, for that matter) without the respectful mention of Vivien Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, Clark Gable and Elizabeth Taylor. “Elizabeth Taylor Dies at 79” reads so desolate against all my attempts not to be a mopey romantic.
I learned that Elizabeth Taylor was beautiful even before I saw her on screen. My mom would frequently mention the flawlessness of the actress and I was always all ears. Any form of flawlessness is alluring.
Even after a virtual end of career, she was around and I guess I unconsciously found comfort in the idea that the great phenomenon was somewhere exposed to the same world I was exposed to. I think it was something like feeling justified in being an unwarranted griper of all things post-90s Hollywood.
I don’t like that she’s gone now.
I’m trying to keep most, if not all, of my visual meanderings here.
The more fundamental problem lies less in the frequency of drinking coffee than it does in the frequency of making coffee. I love my daily dose of a well-balanced cup of the most traded agricultural commodity in the world, but the daily uptake is limited whereas the output isn’t.
There is a rift between the fondness of drinking a good cup of joe and making one, meaning, the desire to drink coffee isn’t always the impetus behind making coffee. Often it’s purely the desire to experiment with weird but convincing brewing techniques and tricks, to try dripping with a Chemex only to learn the lesson that too much control can bring about demise, to see if using the coffee drip kettle actually does enhance the flavor (I don’t think it does, at least not noticeably so, but that might be another control problem), and to find out if a cup of Kenya AA beans brewed in a particular manner does yield the experience of ‘lingering acidity.’
At the risk of some criticism of naivete, I’m saying that this particular motive behind making coffee is not much different from the motive behind a kid dabbling with Lego, but it becomes problematic when coffee is something to be consumed and not just looked at. This wouldn’t be a problem if I worked at a café, but when the number of people who want coffee doesn’t always match the amount of coffee I end up making, out of some misplaced self-exculpation I drink all the coffee I make.
Simply, somehow draining it down my throat feels more morally right than draining it down the sink. (And I don’t know why particularly morally.)
And that’s just one of many ways to the territory of caffeine overdose.
What hit me was that there exists a word that denotes a level of one’s commitment to one’s work and connotes a kind of cultural/collective mentality that legitimizes the existence of the word - a frequenter when it comes to describing Asians.
I’m referring to the verb ‘overachieve.’ It came to my attention in light of all the bout with Amy Chua and her article - a typical case of mutual incomprehension, where the two opposing parties accuse one another of not getting it all the while driveling on their respective positions in different languages, both literal and metaphorical.
Not only can I not think of a Korean equivalent for the verb, but I also realize that there just isn’t the requisite concept that would give birth to such a vocabulary in the first place. I realize that in Korea achieving is achieving. There’s no under and certainly no over. There isn’t an acceptable understanding of a point where achievement is ‘sufficient.’ To add the quantifying prefix is simply sense-less, an un-meaning. I just can’t imagine Korean middle school students having the mindset to use that word to describe a.. well, overachieving classmate.
Considering how guided and confined our thought processes are by different linguistic modalities, I doubt that David Brooks would ever get Amy Chua and vice versa. (See this.) And this just might be one of the core reasons why fanatic proponents of cosmopolitanism erroneously believe that they’ve somehow found a way through that sturdy barrier of cultural difference, when in fact the means by which they attempt to do so are precisely and inevitably grounded in the quintessential form of cultural difference that is language.
“It was after I got to Boston that I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Anybody who knows me knows this story. I’m constantly telling it. Anyway, in that silent room, I heard two sounds: one high, one low.
Afterward I asked the engineer in charge, why, if the room was so silent I had heard two sounds.
He said, describe them. I did.
He said the high one was your nervous system in operation, and the low one was your blood in circulation.”
- John Cage (from a video piece)
(If you have minimal to substantial answers to these, don’t be greedy. Share. It would do mankind a great deal of good.)
(1) Tumblr deleted all the comments on my posts. I have no idea what happened except that I logged on one day and the entire comments section disappeared. I tweaked the Disqus setting so I’m hoping there’s more stability now. But seriously, is this the best I get for switching over form Wordpress? I get sporadic urges to switch back, but I’m deterred only by my need to respond responsibly to my commitment issues. (Self-flagellation comes in a variety of forms.)
(2) Is Don Draper gaining weight, or is it just that his suits are getting tighter? (I suppose this is more of a question than an enigma.)
(3) Is it possible to translate jokes? If so, I would like to know specifically how. If not, I think people should stop making jokes if they know it’s being translated. This is one part I dread when it comes to translating. I don’t know if there’s anything more culturally charged than jokes, and I’m left with only three options : 1) omit the joke part entirely, 2) turn the speaker into an idiot, or 3) be the buffer of my own awkwardness and failed joke. When jokes are told in isolated sentences, the first option is out of the question. You’re surrounded by uncomprehending stares ready to eat you up alive if you don’t tell them what just happened. I’m not quite the type—not quite the gutsy type—to just ignore the stares and tell the speaker to ‘move on.’ 2 and 3 often happen in tandem. It’s a fateful burden suffocating you during a span of 20-30 seconds.
(4) Shouldn’t calling a person an enigma be a compliment?
In my particular world of words, objects, places, things and ideas, unproductivity has acquired a special status that likens to that of a disease. By that I mean, it’s something I try to avoid solely for my personal well-being, let alone personal betterment. It’s easiest to blame it on my upbringing, but whatever the cause, it’s bordered on some kind of obsession, this concern with unproductivity (unproductiveness? nonproductiveness?), and the desperate need to stay away from it.
Of course, hating alone doesn’t keep you away from what you hate. Methodologies can vary, but I suppose the most common way to keep yourself out of harm’s way (with regards to unproductivity) would be to set up some regimens. The fact that it’s self-imposed is the tricky part of the whole deal, but it does serve as some kind of measurement as to how serious you are about this being-productive thing.
Now, some people are better at doing it. (Don’t say that everyone has to train oneself to become a consistently productive person. Yes, true, but only after this premise has been established: there are people who are naturally more inclined to be productive, i.e. manage time better.) I’m not. I am a LOT more prone to be unproductive..which might explain why I’m so terrified(?) of it.
This is why I give myself assignments all the time. (Assignments vary in scale and significance, and I must say they do keep me from drifting away into no man’s land, but the downside of it is that assignments themselves often trick me into thinking that i’m being productive.. you know, without actually implementing any of them.) I’m paranoid that I’ll never learn anything unless I’m on an assembly line of self-assigned work. (A colleague recently showed me a description of INFPs, and in Korean it said, “INFPs are people who never end up doing their laundry because they spend the day thinking about how to do it well.” It’s telling, but harrowing.)
ALL this is to make a slightly irrelevant point: I’ve recently fettered myself to a list of films I’m going to watch. I’ve been saying one too many I’ve-been-wanting-to-watch-that’s and this is my little project to lift that guilt off me.
Here I share a little parcel of what I’ll be watching for the next few weeks. I’m sure they’ll mostly be good or great, or some just a little less than good. Feel free to partake in the pleasures of the silver screen.
- Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) - it’s a shame I haven’t seen this still.
- Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953)
- The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
- Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)
- A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao Hsien, 1989)
- Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
- Salut Les Cubains (Agnes Varda, 1963)
- Tickets (Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, Ermanno Olmi, 2005)
“Ideas interest us either for their content—their new, striking, and correct function—or for thier origins, their history, thier circumstances, their multiple dispositions, their various application, their utility, their different formations. In this manner, a very trivial idea can allow itself to be manipulated in a quite interesting fashion…Here it is the method, the procedure, the process that is of interest and agreeable to us…That which is new interests us less, for one sees that so much can be made out of the old. In short, the more one has a feeling for the infinity of the particular, the more one loses one’s desire for variety. One learns how to do with one single instrument something for which others need hundreds, and one is altogether more interested in elaboration than in invention.”
-Novalis, Gesammelte Werke
It’s surprising to see how many shades of yellow Converse has for their Chucks. I almost want to say it’s ridiculous but I only realize that it’s a strategy precisely for people like me. People who need a mustard shade of yellow.
Someone explain to me this ridiculous urge to seek out a pair of mustard yellow Chuck Taylors at 3am in the morning. Out of all the (better) things that could possibly assuage my restless, sleepless nights, the desire to add that pair to my not so colorful (non-)collection of Chucks fixes my bloodshot eyes right back to the computer. I laugh at myself for having the kind of urge an authentic aficionado would have. Seriously, this came out of nowhere that I don’t even have a context in which I can at least pretend.
For some unexplainable train of thought (assuming that there was one..), I’m convinced that a pair of mustard Chucks would go well with most of my fall attire. I’m happy to layer up again, by the way. Summer fashion is one of the more challenging duties I have to attend to, and I’m glad that part’s almost over. I kinda’ don’t know what to do with myself when it comes to clothes that’s supposed to help me through the disgusting mugginess. You see, I’m not prone to sexy things, and less so to unintentional thus awkward sexy things. A nice body would make things easier, but I stopped wanting that 3 years ago. You would think coming to Korea would make you want to tone up. But I think you kinda’ stop when you realize that you would still be larger than the average girl in school even after you drop 30 pounds. I want to invest in things that are worth the strain. ‘Healthy’ is probably my limit.
So the mustard yellow chucks are apparently limited edition-ish. So many yellows but none of them right. I don’t even know why or how the idea of mustard yellow Chucks got planted in my head, but it’s probably a good thing I can’t find them at the moment. I’d probably get them, wear it a few times, wear out the gratification, then just wonder why I bought them. Like the royal blue Chucks I got back in college. I’m only lucky to have a brother who’s willing to wear them.
|#