Author: The Arts Are Life

I am a writer and musician. Lover of music, movies, books, art, and nature.

My favorite physical activities or exercises

“Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands.”

Elle Woods, Legally Blonde

I really love dancing. I’m not a professional dancer or anything. I just love jamming out to dance tunes while flailing my arms or doing whatever I consider dance. I also love to take nature walks. I took one today and it was really nice to be around in nature. I thought about buying something from the store, like candy or something, but I am trying to save money and I eat enough sugar as it is, so I just kept walking. It was so nice to see the fall colors outside, even though it was kind of lonely walking past people’s homes and not seeing many people outside. A lot of people were at work so it was understandable. I watched as squirrels climbed up trees and felt the orange maple leaves crunch under my feet. The mud squished under my shoes after the morning thunderstorm. I went to the park and swung on the swing set. It was really relaxing.

I also love to dance because it provides me another creative outlet through which I can express myself. I honestly need to make a daily schedule to fit exercise in because I noticed I feel a lot better when I move my body. Exercising helps me manage my mental health, and I’m realizing as I get older how connected my mental health is to my physical health. It also helps me handle stress when I work out. I don’t go to the gym much anymore, but I used to work out on the elliptical a lot and listen to music on my headphones or watch stand-up comedy. Today a friend shared with me a workout video from YouTube. I thought, I don’t need to work out, but honestly I needed that video because I felt a lot better after I exercised. A lot of times I think I don’t need to move my body, but then I end up enjoying it. A couple of weeks ago I watched an amazing choreography to Beyonce’s “ENERGY” from her recent album Renaissance, and I danced to it several times and just felt so much joy while moving my body. It releases a lot of pent-up tension in my body. I also love doing squats, and in 2020 while staying at home for long periods of time and working from home throughout the day, I took breaks to do squats. Normally I sit and read my book a lot, which I still do because I love reading for fun, but doing these squats was a great way to get some exercise in since I wasn’t going to the gym during this time.

If I ever need a reminder, I just need to remember the wise words of Elle Woods:

Book Review: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

A few days ago I finished a book called Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson. A friend recommended it to me and it is one of the most interesting books I have read (in a good way of course). It is about a young woman named Lillian who does a favor for someone who she reconnects with from high school, only this favor she does for her is pretty major. Lillian flashes back to when she was in high school; she didn’t fit in with the other students because she doesn’t come from financial means, while everyone else does. She befriends a young woman at the school named Madison, who, while she is rich like the other girls, doesn’t ostracize Lillian like they do. She is honest and upfront about her privilege and Lillian’s lack of privilege, but they remain on good terms. One night, Lillian’s family meets with Madison’s family over dinner, and Madison’s dad tells Lillian he and Madison need a huge favor from her. Madison did something that would have gotten her suspended from school, but they want Lillian to take the blame for what Madison did so that Madison can stay in school. Lillian is flabbergasted, but because she doesn’t want to damage her friendship with Madison, she goes along with it and gets suspended. At first, I was thinking, Welp, I guess that’s the end of that friendship. But, no, it’s not over. The book just got started after that.

Madison calls Lillian over to visit her home out of the blue, and even though they reconnect and catch up, that’s not all Madison called her over to do. Madison tells her that her husband’s first wife died of cancer and left him and Madison her two kids, who have a secret no one can know about: they catch on fire. Literally. At first, Lillian isn’t sure whether to go with this or not, and honestly when I first read this, I was like, Oh, no, girl you need to get out of there as fast as you can. But again, because Lillian doesn’t want to damage her friendship with Madison, she goes along with it and lets Madison give her the twins to take care of. When she first meets the twins, one of them severely injures Lillian on the eye (I can’t get into the description of the injuries here because they were pretty horrifying to read about) and pushes her into the pool. Carl, the chauffer, clearly knows that these twins are troublesome, but probably he is so used to Madison not taking responsibility for these kiddos and leaving it to him and Mary (the chef) to take care of them, he basically tells Lillian she needs to get it together, especially because she doesn’t have much experience caring for kids.

Madison does everything in her power and prestige to keep Lillian in her place, like “I am doing you a favor putting you in this toxic situation and I expect you to feel grateful for me, even though I don’t feel like I need to be grateful to you, even if you, not me, took care of these fire-catching kids.” However, as I learned more about the backstory of the kids, I felt a tinge of sympathy for them. Even though Madison tells Lillian their mother died of cancer, the twins one day find Lillian and Carl writing a list of things they can give the twins to keep them under control and not catch fire, and one of the things listed was sleeping pills. One of the twins finds out about the sleeping pills, and tells Carl and Lillian to not give her and her brother pills. She later tells Lillian that their mom committed suicide by taking sleeping pills and forced the twins to commit suicide by taking the pills, too. Lillian can empathize with the twins even though she doesn’t set on fire like they do, because she didn’t have an easy childhood either, and she understands what it’s like to not fit in or be accepted by others after her experience going to the prestigious school and not fitting in with the other students. The twins come to trust her when they realize she isn’t trying to change them, but is just genuinely trying to support them.

Movie Review: There Will Be Blood

I had found out first about this movie from watching the Academy Awards in 2007. Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated for the movie and the clip I saw him acting in was so powerful. And it’s funny because Paul Dano has such a cherubic face yet he plays this deep haunting role. I saw him in a couple of other movies. He played a writer in Ruby Sparks and a sadistic slave overseer named John Tibeats in 12 Years a Slave. In There Will Be Blood, Paul Dano plays Paul Sunday and Eli Sunday, who are brothers. Eli is a preacher at the local church and his role as the preacher was so powerful. I also love how the film uses nuances of silences and dialogues. And it also talks about the power of communication because H.W., Daniel’s son, is blown away when the oil rig explodes and loses his hearing in the blast. Daniel is pained that his son can no longer hear, and Daniel finds him a sign language teacher. H.W. ends up marrying Mary Sunday and she learns sign language and communicates with him in sign language when they get married. When H.W. meets with his dad, he brings his sign language interpreter. He tells Daniel he and Mary are moving to Mexico so that H.W. can start his own oil company. Instead of supporting him, Daniel sees this as a betrayal on H.W.’s part and calls him all sorts of names and derides his hearing loss. He disowns his son because he now feels that he has no one else to support him. H.W. supported his dad in his oil business pursuits when he was younger but when he lost his hearing it traumatized both him and his dad. Another powerful scene is when Daniel meets his long-lost brother, Henry, but then finds out that the guy who posed as Henry isn’t actually Henry, but Henry’s friend. Henry actually died of tuberculosis. When he hears this news that this guy isn’t actually his brother, Daniel is disillusioned and shoots this guy dead.

Eli Sunday’s character is also quite interesting. At the beginning of the film he seems innocent and sweet when Daniel first meets him, but then we actually see him in action as a preacher and that is a whole nother story. His first person whom he saves is an elderly woman who supposedly has the devil inside of her. Eli clutches the woman’s face and at first he whispers to get the ghosts out of her, and then he is breaking down and screaming bloody murder at the ghosts. It is a haunting scene but one that shows how Paul Dano really gave this role his all. In another scene, Eli runs into Daniel in the oil field and Daniel is angry at him so he runs Eli into the ground and smears his body and face with oil and slaps him repeatedly down. Later on, when Mr. William Bandy, the guy whose property Daniel wants to construct an oil pipeline through, and Daniel attend Eli’s church service, Daniel volunteers to go up there and Eli ends up doing the same thing Daniel did to him: slapping him across the face and screaming at him. He screams at Daniel to say that he is a sinner over and over again, and this performance was so haunting it gave me goosebumps. Eli has the guy helping with the service pour the holy water over Daniel, and Daniel feels a sort of spiritual release. Yet in the end he ends up telling Eli to say that he is a fake preacher and that God is a superstition. This goes against everything Eli taught people about faith and religion, and he says this over and over with Daniel goading him on to keep saying this.

It was interesting seeing the work that goes into producing oil. I take it for granted that I can just go to the gas station and fill up on gasoline, not knowing what kind of process goes into it. I learned about the big monopolies like Standard Oil in my U.S. history class, but it wasn’t until I saw this movie that I could really understand the process that goes into extracting the oil from the ground and also the potential injuries that could occur on the job (of course, there were probably no workers compensation suits back then). The music is pretty amazing, and I also like the lettering for the end credits. It gives the film its dark and serious drama nature. The film reminded me a little of The Lighthouse, a film from A24 starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. I don’t know how to describe it, but just the dynamic between Robert’s character and Willem’s character reminded me of the dynamic between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview. The Lighthouse, if you haven’t seen it, is about two lighthouse keepers stranded on an isolated island in New England and they both drive each other up the wall. Like There Will Be Blood, it is also quite intense.

Towards the end, in a very chilling scene, Eli tells Daniel he wants some of the land Daniel has acquired for oil drilling so he can make money because he is financially strained. However, Daniel tells him that all the oil in that land has been used up and that he can’t give Eli that land that he badly wants. He and Daniel are constantly competing for these resources. The music really added to the suspense. There is one scene where the music has a col legno sound (col legno is when you put the bow stick on the string of the instrument and hit the string with the bow stick) mixed with strings and some sort of percussive beat. It didn’t have a set key signature and the way the rhythms responded to each other conveyed the suspense of the scene, sort of like the famous score for Psycho. It is where the oil rig burns down. In another scene, H.W. sets fire to Henry and Daniel’s lodging after going into his father’s bag and reading his journal with all his notes. H.W. doesn’t get away though because his dad catches him.

I sort of thought about “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” while watching this movie. The music video for that song features children working in a diamond mine mining diamonds and it shows them in the trenches doing this kind of grueling work, and we see one of the children holding a diamond and a white person picking up the diamond from above the ground. Again, I take it for granted I don’t have to think about where oil comes from. Now that I think about it, I’m now thinking about the OPEC crisis and all of our issues with coal, oil and natural gas, and gasoline shortages at gas stations. It makes me think we take so much of our natural resources for granted. I just jump in my car and don’t think about the environmental impact.

Also I had wanted to see the film for a rather irreverent reason: the famous “I drink your milkshake” scene at the end of the film. I kept seeing clips on YouTube where people mashed the scene with Kelis’s song “Milkshake.” One time I watched an interview with Paul Dano where he talked about how people started ordering him milkshakes after the success of There Will Be Blood, but that he could never drink them because he was lactose-intolerant.

Review: Darkest Hour

Last night I finally finished watching Darkest Hour, a 2017 film from Focus Features starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill. Honestly I am glad I watched the TV show The Crown before seeing this film because Seasons 1 and 2 of The Crown give an extensive portrayal of Winston Churchill’s time as prime minister. Also, John Lithgow is an amazing actor. I remember as a kid watching him play the voice of Lord Farquaad in Shrek, and in The Crown he plays Churchill really well. Watching these biopics always reminds me how much work goes into playing the part of someone famous. And usually a lot of these biopics require the actors to wear prosthetics while playing the people they are portraying, so I have mad respect for everyone who works in the prosthetics and makeup departments for these kinds of movies. Also I was really happy because Lily James is in the movie (she plays Winston’s secretary) and I really loved her in Downton Abbey. In Downton Abbey she plays Rose, who is one of my favorite characters in the show. I also really loved Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Churchill in this movie. I don’t know much about Churchill other than what I read in World History class, so that’s why I really loved watching this movie. Even though of course, I have to keep in mind that while many of the events in biopics tend to be factual, the film is still a fictionalized portrayal of the person. I was never there when Churchill was alive; I can only know who he was from reading history books about him and watching this movie. Gary Oldman is such a great actor though; the few films I saw with him in it were Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (if you haven’t seen the movies, he plays a character named Sirius Black) and Mank, which is a film on Netflix about Herman Mankiewicz. I think I would have gained a deeper understanding of Mank, though, if I had seen Citizen Kane. I came into the film kind of cold and I wasn’t really following much of the plot because I hadn’t seen the movie Citizen Kane, and the film is about Herman Mankiewicz working on Citizen Kane. I understand Citizen Kane is a classic film, though, so that’s something I need to catch up on.

If you haven’t seen Darkest Hour, it takes place during World War II, specifically in the year 1940. Neville Chamberlain is being kicked out of his role as prime minister, and Parliament needs a replacement. Churchill ends up becoming the prime minister but people don’t really trust him at first to be good at what he does. He is stubborn, blunt and often blows up at his Cabinet members and in particular his staff. His wife thinks he is being too cantankerous sometimes, but Winston is determined to do what he can so that Britain won’t surrender to Germany in the war. He keeps sending more men, but the officials working with him think he is prolonging the war too long by sending more men and think he needs to cool out because too many men are getting killed in the war. However, Winston is still determined not to give in to surrender, and continues to lead the country through the war.

I really loved the way this movie was directed. First I really loved how the movie uses light and dark colors. Most of the colors throughout the film are dark or neutral colors, and I think this conveys the overall somber tone of the film. 1940 is a crucial time for Winston, and for England as well (and the rest of the world, too, but the movie focuses on how the war is impacting people in England). I really love the use of red whenever Winston gives an address to the nation about the state of the war because it gives the scene this ominous feel to it, and because I think of red as an emergency color (e.g. Red Cross, ambulance and fire truck sirens) it showed me how crucial each speech Winston made was. The scenes in the chambers of Parliament had interesting lighting. It was a dark room but the bright light was shining on the person talking. And the beginning scene I think that the fact that the room was so darkened heightened the serious nature of Chamberlain’s removal from office. At the beginning, most people are booing Chamberlain and shouting at him because they think he is an incompetent leader. I am sure I would have felt the same intensity had the room been well-lit but for some reason I liked that they kept the room dark while directing the lighting on certain people in the room because it showed how intense this moment was for people in that room, and especially it showed how intense and nerve-wracking it was for Chamberlain because he’s basically in the hot seat at this point and he doesn’t know how to respond to all the criticisms people in the house are throwing his way.

There are two particularly moving scenes at the beginning and toward the end of the film, where Winston is riding in his car through the city. At the beginning he sees people walking around on a sunny day, as everyday people heading to work, selling things on the street, and doing other every day things. He comments to his driver that he has never rode on the train. Later he sees, while riding in the safety of his car, some people trying to stay dry in the pouring rain with their umbrellas, other people not carrying umbrellas at all getting soaked. It is a pretty miserable-looking scene to Churchill because he sees how much the citizens are trying to survive during this time of anxiety and uncertainty. World War II affected people’s livelihoods in so many ways. It affected the economy, how people lived lives, and while there was great pride in these people going to war to serve their country, many were also killed and their loved ones often didn’t know whether they would come out alive. Seeing people walking in the rain while he rides comfortably in his car prompts him to jump out of the car and take the London Underground to Westminster. On the train everyone freaks out when they see Churchill, and all they can do is stare and then when he gets up, stand as a sign of respect. He doesn’t care about formalities though; he just wants to be with regular citizens and it’s his first time riding the tube. He asks them whether they think Britain should enter into a peace deal with Germany and everyone on the train responds with a hearty “No!” When he addresses Parliament he tells them that the people want to keep fighting Germany rather than surrender, and everyone breaks out in applause because they are so moved by his speech.

In another powerful scene, Ms. Layton (Churchill’s secretary) is typing up a message by Churchill, along the lines of “we’re not going to pull out of this war,” and Ms. Layton starts quietly crying and asks to be excused. Winston tells her that no, she cannot, and she expresses how pained she is that so many young men are being sent to die in this war and most people don’t know when these men will ever come back alive. At this point most of the British troops are about to be wiped out in battle. At first Winston doesn’t understand where she is coming from, but then she shows him a photo of her brother and tells him that he was killed during the war. It’s a moment where he reflects and realizes how it’s not just about military strategy, but also recognizing the trauma and grief that many civilians faced during this war because they lost their loved ones.

The music was also incredible! I think watching the TV show The Crown helped me appreciate the music because the score for Darkest Hour sounded like the score for The Crown. The score seems to use very serious somber keys like D minor. Honestly while watching the film I couldn’t help but move my body while the score was playing because the rhythms of the music are so vibrant and powerful. They convey the intensity of each scene because overall the movie is intense. The music also fits with the scenes because each day that passes is a moment of urgency for Churchill. He cannot relax, he cannot kick back and pretend like this time in his life isn’t crucial. The issue of whether to have peace talks with Germany, the issue of sending in more troops and withdrawing troops…all of it is enough to keep him awake until the late hours.

There are a few funny and tender moments though. Of course, the film was totally serious, but there is one scene where these reporters are approaching Churchill for questions, and he holds up his index and middle finger in a “V shape.” At first the newspapers think it means “victory,” so they put on the headline, next to the photo of Winston giving the “V” sign, “V for Victory.” However, we then see Ms. Layton and another secretary giggling hysterically while reading the paper. When Winston sees them giggling he asks them what is so funny, and Ms. Layton politely pulls him aside and tells him that the way he turned his hands to make the V-sign means something vulgar. He gave the sign with the back of his hand facing toward the recipient rather than with the palm of the hand facing outwards, the latter which actually does mean “victory” or a peace sign. Instead the way Winston signed “V” actually means “up your bum,” not “victory.” Winston then breaks out into laughter when he finds out that is what the sign he was making with his hands really means. I wouldn’t have known the difference between the “up your bum” V-sign and “victory” V-sign. In America I don’t know if we have an “up-your-bum” V-sign. We mostly just raise our middle finger if we want to say “F*ck you” to someone.

This is the trailer for Darkest Hour:

Darkest Hour. 2017. 2 hr 4 min. Rated PG-13 for thematic material

The Suitcase

I boarded the flight on Friday morning. When my parents dropped me off, the airport was bustling. People were milling about, checking their luggage, flights were taking off and flight attendants were calling the numbers for departures. Mom and Dad and I went outside to get my luggage checked. The guy checking the luggage was a tall white guy with glasses and a buzzcut hairstyle. He placed my large 100-pound suitcase on the weight machine and frowned. “This will cost you an extra $50.” I looked upset. “Why?” “Because it’s too heavy.” I panicked. I only had fifteen minutes to make it through to my gate. My body gave off a fight-or-flight response and my heart started racing. Adrenaline pumped through my body. I begrudgingly took the suitcase and rolled it back to the parking lot, which was about ten minutes away walking distance. Fuck, fuck, fuck. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Dad said, tousling my chestnut-colored curly hair. “We can find another flight for you.” I sulked.

“I feel so disappointed in myself,” I muttered.

“Don’t be. It is what it is,” my mom said with a stony expression. She had put up with my whining and complaining long enough.

So I went over to the car when we reached it and one by one took all my belongings out of my suitcase. About fifty pairs of clothes: twenty pairs of pants, ten T-shirts, ten bras in different colors and ten pairs of high heels. Oh, and a pair of walking shoes. My mom, Kendra, and my dad, Alex, looked at me aghast.

“What the fuck, Lily?” my mom snapped.

Alex turned sharply to her. “Hey, don’t swear in front of our daughter.”

“I can swear any damn time I please,” she huffed.

I hurriedly took out stuff.

“You are only going for a week, dear, not a whole year. This is not study abroad.” “I know, I know.”

In fact, 28 year old me is writing this and wondering, Yo, like why the fuck would you bring that much shit with you? You are only going for seven fucking days, Lily. Are you going abroad? No.

I begrudgingly took out all the stuff from my suitcase and chose which ones I wanted to bring on the trip.

“Same goes for books,” my mom said as they just looked at me.

I rolled my eyes. Parents. They say the right stuff but at the same time it’s annoying how right they are sometimes. I had in fact packed a shit-ton of books. In fact, that’s why I got made fun of so much while in school because I was reading so much. It didn’t matter where I was. Café, cafeteria, library, hallway, even my classes. I was always reading. One day I was reading while Ms. Bruce was giving one of her super boring lectures. Bridget was doodling, Andrew was making disgusting spitballs and I, well, I was reading.

“Lily, what are you doing?”

I looked up, aghast. Why did she call on me and not on the other dumb kids in the class who fuck around and act goofy? Why me? I haven’t done anything wrong in Ms. Bruce’s class.

She motioned her hands to signal for me to give her the book. I begrudgingly gave her the book and she put it in her desk. The other kids started snickering. I scowled. You guys are no better than me, with your doodling, your gross spitballs. We’re all just immature seventh graders whose brains are not fully developed yet.

So yeah, I had about ten books I was going to pack. Most of them were Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events.

“Just think, you are going to be talking with other kids on the trip,” my mom said.

I took the one book. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. That should occupy me for the entire trip. Then I put a few shirts in the suitcase and a couple of pairs of pants. A pair of faded Gap jeans and a pair of nice black slack pants. A few T-shirts from Gap as well. Funny enough, I saw my math teacher the other day and she works at Gap now. Her name was Mrs. Doyle and she had wavy blonde hair and glasses.

“Ok, that should do it,” Dad said. “I am so proud of you, hon. That must have been a pain in the butt, but I am glad you did it.”

He gave me a hug. Mom impatiently looked at her watch.

“Well you missed your flight, kiddo,” she tapped her high-heeled foot impatiently.

“It’s okay, honey, we can find another flight…”

“Well, then let’s get a move-on. We don’t have all morning.”

We walked speedily through the traffic parked outside the airport, the cacophony of honking car horns and people alternately saying “I love you” and “Get out of the way” echoing through my ears. We hurried past the 38-year old woman carting two suitcases and a stroller with a four year old in it and revisited the buzzcut hairstyle guy again.

“Okay, we took stuff out.”

“Can I see your driver’s license?” he said, indifferent to our obvious plight.

Dad fishes out his wallet from his back pocket and shows Buzzcut Man his driver’s license. Buzzcut Man looks at it hurriedly and tells me I am all set to go.

“Have a nice day,” he says.

“You too,” Dad smiles, and we make our way to the terminal. But first we have to stop at the customer service desk because I missed my flight.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have anymore flights going out to Washington, D.C.,” the customer service agent says, not looking up from her computer.

“But I have to leave today, otherwise I am going to miss the orientation!” I squeal.

“Can we get another flight for her? Please?” my mom begs the agent.

The agent looks at us with a sharp glance, but then she sighs and says, “I will see what I can do. But it will take thirty minutes, I have other customers to attend to.”

“That’s fine; we can wait,” Dad said.

“Now let’s go get you a chocolate cream donut from Dunkin Donuts to celebrate you being so brave about unpacking that big heavy suitcase,” Mom giggles and we head over to Dunkin Donuts.

On Trichotillomania (content warning: mental illness)

Pluck, pluck, pluck. My fingers dry as can be, cracked shriveled skin. They move towards my eyes. My eyelashes, rough and short because I plucked so many of them out and they are not growing back the way I want them to. Damn it, I think, they are so short. I can’t pluck them. When I pluck, I feel tension, like someone is tugging at my eyelashes and then when the hair separates from the follicle in one fell swoop, I fell a weird release of tension, the same kind of tension one night release when they take a breath of fresh air. It is painful and my eyelashes are so short but I can’t stop no matter how hard I try. I pluck when I do anything: sitting, watching, television, eating Fritos, writing a blog post, catching zzzzs and failing. I wish there was some magic trich fairy that could make trichotillomania disappear.

My mom knocks on my door.

“Come in,” I yell as P!nk blasts through my stereos.

She walks in.

“Are you coming for dinner?”

I stare at the computer. The red beanie cap covers my newly plucked scalp. I mutter a laconic “mmmm-hmmm” and keep staring at the computer. Please don’t ask me about this dumb trich, I plead to God, Buddha, the Universe, or whoever is listening up there.

“Why are you wearing a hat?” she asks.

I quickly shake my head.

“Nothing.”

“No, it’s not nothing, Miranda.”

She walks closer. Then she removes my cap and gasps when she sees the plethora of hairs I have pulled from my scalp over the past couple of months.

“Dr. Steinberg told you to not pull for at least a few months!”

“I know, I know…” I mutter. “But…”

“But what?”

“I can’t stop, Mom, okay? It’s just something that I have, ok? I cannot get rid of it, I have done everything.”

“So the Zoloft didn’t work wonders for you, eh?”

“No, the Zoloft was fine, Mom, I’m not saying that. It’s just…it will take me a while to recover from this habit, that’s all.”

She rolls her eyes towards the ceiling.

“Dear God, we have been through this so many times,” she mutters, her eyes closed.

She is clearly exasperated with me and I am starting to become exasperated with her. Unconsciously, my index finger and thumb make their way to my eyelashes…

My mom slaps my hand away from my eyes.

“Mom!”

She pauses.

“I’m sorry, but this has been going on for too long.” She sighs and shakes her head. Before she leaves my room, she calls, “Wash your hands for dinner.”

I pause, then take a shaky breath. It’s ok, don’t take it personally. You will overcome this, I think. I know I will. Just get me through these dumb stressful teenage years and it will just go away.

Tears form in my eyes and my bottom lip trembles. I cover my tear-stained face with my right hand and lower my head to my desk my body heaving each time I break down. I gasp for breath and choke out sobs. I feel like a total failure. Mom and Dad sent me to a therapist and the therapist gave me medication, and it worked, so why the hell am I still plucking?

The next day I go to school wearing the same beanie. A skinny young woman wearing a red flannel long-sleeved shirt, a black skirt and clunky Doc Martens walks down the hall, only something catches my eye. She is wearing a beanie, too, except it’s a navy blue one. And it looks like her eyelashes and eyebrows might have bald spots, too… I realize then: I’m not the only one with this problem.

The girl pauses to take a drink at the fountain. Madison Hart and her friends turn and look at the girl wearing the blue beanie and start giggling.

“Why is she wearing a hat inside?”

“Maybe she has lice.”

“Maybe she is bald.”

They all gasp and giggle at each other’s jokes. I am really sad that this girl is being teased. She continues to walk down the hall, quicker this time, and out of the corner of her eye I see a tear fall. I hope I get to see this girl at some point during the day. I wonder if she has friends.

Lunchtime comes, and I stand in the cafeteria line. The hot piping smell of fresh calzones and steamed broccoli wafts up to my nostrils. I hear the sizzling of canola oil as the greasy smell of French fries tantalizes my taste buds. I feel a tingle, then a twitch, then that impulse to pull gnaws at me as I anxiously look at the fifteen other students in line. I am too embarrassed and shy to speak to anyone. I close my eyes against the cacophony of high school freshmen chattering and someone at the table nearest the lunch line blasting Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” from their iPhone. I take a deep breath. Please don’t pull, please don’t pull….

Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Within milliseconds my fingers are fondling my eyelashes. Ugh, they are so ugly, I just need to pull them out so that when I look in the mirror I don’t have to look at how ugly these short eyelashes are. I don’t want to do this now, not with people watching. People are going to laugh at me if I do this.

My stomach lets out an impatient growl. Hurry up already, it screams. But the urge to get rid of this super-short eyelash is screaming even louder, drowning out the cries of my hunger. I make my way out of the lunch line, losing my place within 5 minutes of approaching the mecca of food. The cacophony glides behind me and then falls from a crescendo into a muddled whisper as I am now in the quiet of the girls’ bathroom stall. I dig out my compact mirror from my purse and wipe off the smudges on the surface. I take a good hard look at my eyes, putting the mirror closer to my eyelids so I could know which hairs needed to go. I found my right hand fumble towards my chin. Ugh, there is hair on that, too. There are bald spots where I pulled the hairs out from last week. They look dry, scaly and frankly unattractive. Long rivers of tears fall down my cheek and kiss each of these bald spots. I don’t want to pull that curly one, I know it will hurt, but it’s so damned crooked and it stands out. I sigh. I am losing this painful battle and it hurts to admit that I have done everything I could and am still doing this to myself. Don’t I want to be pretty? Don’t I want to have beautiful long curling eyelashes softer than the softest pillow? I give in to temptation, and tug at the lonely short crooked hair that belonged on my chin. It doesn’t give at first but I keep tugging it. Fuck it, I just want some release, just want to release the tension in my fingers, in my body, in my life.

The hair comes loose and I rub it around with my fingers and let it rest on my tongue. Then I don’t feel good about swallowing hair so I just flick it off my fingers and let it fall to the linoleum floor and land somewhere it can find peace.

I unlock the bathroom stall, feeling relieved, anxious, ashamed and alone. But my breath catches when I see no one other than the blue-beanie girl peering in the big long mirror plucking away at her eyebrows using nothing other than her long fingers. I stop dead in my tracks. She continues to pull, a lonely expression on her face.

“Hey…” I shyly say.

She doesn’t reply. She just continues to look in the mirror silently and with a pained expression on her face. She gathers her brown leather messenger bag and before leaving, give me a blank indifferent look and leaves the restroom, the cold metal red door slamming behind her. The dim lights flicker and a cockroach crawls from under the sink. It darts towards a crack in the wall and disappears. I stand all alone.

Downton Abbey, season 3, episode 1

The episode opens with Anna, the head lady’s maid of Downton, handling a huge leather briefcase on the cupboard. Gwen walks in and Anna asks what is in the briefcase. Gwen is at first ashamed to admit it, but then she shows Anna but asks that she keep it private. The thing in the briefcase happens to be a typewriter and Gwen confesses to Anna that she is taking shorthand and typewriting courses because she plans to leave service at Downton and become a secretary. Mrs. O’Brien walks in and tells them there is a task that needs to be done, but Anna and Gwen are standing in front of the typewriter so that Mrs. O’Brien cannot see it. Mrs. O’Brien tends to spill the beans on a lot of people at Downton Abbey, so she would of course tell everyone about the typewriter and that Gwen was leaving service. Meanwhile, Mary and Cora get word that Evelyn Napier is coming to Downton Abbey, and Cora is still trying to set up someone with Mary even if she doesn’t want Cora to pick a husband for her anymore. Mary is not interested in Matthew right now, so she is putting him off, but it’s hard for her to just make her own decision like that because Matthew Crawley is Robert Grantham’s cousin and heir to the estate at Downton. If Matthew marries Mary, then Cora would lose her inheritance.

Meanwhile, downstairs, Carson and the other staff members are looking at Gwen’s typewriter, which either Carson or someone managed to steal from Gwen. Gwen comes down and is upset because someone took her typewriter and showed everyone downstairs without her permission. Carson asks her why she is keeping a typewriter, and Gwen responds that she loves her job at Downton but she is planning to leave service to become a secretary, and that is why she has been taking a bunch of classes and keeping the typewriter. Carson asks her if there is anything wrong with working in service, and Gwen says no there isn’t, but she doesn’t picture herself working in service forever and wants a better-paying opportunity. People are divided about her decision to leave, and even during dinner, the Grantham family talks about it. Lord Grantham and Cora just want to make sure everyone is happy working at Downton, but Isobel thinks that if Gwen wants to find work elsewhere, she should. Sybil, one of the Grantham sisters, is one of the few who actually fully supports Gwen in her decision to leave (besides Anna, who is cool with Gwen ‘s decision to leave service since they are close friends) and after she overhears Carson telling her father that Gwen wants to be a secretary, she actually shows Gwen an ad in the papers for an open position as secretary in Thirsk. Gwen is doubtful that she will get it and thinks she should stay in service, but Sybil never gives up on her and explains to her that the reason she supports Gwen’s decision to find a new job as a secretary is because times are changing and women are demanding more equality and Sybil supports this reform and women’s rights.

The part with Gwen reminded me of this documentary that I saw about personal finance on Netflix called Get Smart with Money. There was a young woman in the documentary who worked a couple of jobs in the service industry and was struggling to make ends meet, and in addition she also had these amazing skills with making art and wanted to become a freelance artist but wasn’t sure how to market her art and make money from it full-time. She sat with a financial adviser who encouraged her to start a side hustle to bring in extra income because she had these incredible skills that she could offer to people. I also thought about how in the recent years of the job market more people are learning new skills and going back to school so they can learn new skills because it’s not enough to get a degree from college anymore. It’s a competitive job market and the demand for different skills is always evolving and I’ve noticed that a lot of the jobs that are high-paying are typically jobs in software and technology. I remember in 2017 working in food service and was paying off student debt but my loved ones encouraged me to learn some new skills so that I could get a new job with higher pay, and the most in-demand skill I learned about was in coding. So I took a programming course and it was expensive and I ended up taking more than a year to finish it, and there were times it was hard to learn the material at first and I wanted to give up so many times, but learning this skill gave me something new to learn and work on. I didn’t end up getting a job as a developer or in the technology field but it was useful to have this skill because I also learned to commit to something challenging and stick with it for a long period of time. I also remember when working in food service, I was stuck on having these big dreams of moving to a huge metropolitan area for my music career and becoming famous and making money from it, and I was so impatient to leave the job because I wanted to achieve my dreams. However, I also learned to treasure the connections with people I met working in the job I had and on my last day I ended up crying in appreciation because I ended up developing a lot of great connections with people at the job. When I had the job I also took on a side hustle (a short project for a website someone was doing) and even though I didn’t yet know how to apply advanced knowledge I gained from the course to the project I had the basic skills needed to complete it. It was so nice getting the paycheck from that project. Honestly looking back I could have thought, Gee wouldn’t it be nice if I just had a side hustle? But at the time I was so focused on paying off my student loans and working full-time that taking on a side hustle seemed too much for me to take on. However, after watching the documentary on Netflix it makes sense why I would need to market my skills at some point so that I can gain extra income and don’t need to rely on one income for all my needs.

Meanwhile, while Gwen is figuring out how to leave service and get the job as secretary, Mary goes riding horses with Evelyn Napier and a bunch of men. Evelyn brought Kemal Pamuk, who is an ambassador for Turkey and is visiting England. At first Mary thinks Mr. Pamuk is going to be unattractive and uninteresting but she sees him and finds out he is quite fine-looking. She ends up ditching the guy who was supposed to ride with her, Lynch, and rides with Mr. Pamuk instead. The two feel an instant chemistry for one another and Mary ends up having a great time with Mr. Pamuk. They come back to Downton to change their clothes for the evening, and Thomas Barrow, who is gay, finds Mr. Pamuk quite attractive and is secretly excited that he is going to be Mr. Pamuk’s assistant during his stay. Thomas is seduced by Mr. Pamuk’s good looks and hits on him but Mr. Pamuk is disgusted by Thomas’s advances and tells him he won’t tell anyone Thomas hit on him if he lets him into Mary’s room so they can have sex. During dinner, Evelyn and Matthew see Mary and Kemal giggling and enjoying each other’s company at dinner and feel jealous that Mary likes him more than she likes them. Kemal ends up taking Mary away from the party to a private space and starts to kiss and fondle her, but she is appalled because she understands that she is an unmarried woman and that this kind of interaction with Kemal isn’t appropriate and tells him that neither of them is to speak of the kissing with anyone. However, Kemal ends up having Thomas lead him and Mary into Mary’s bedroom. (At this point, after watching it a few times I was wondering whether this was consensual sex or rape. Some said it was sex, others said it was rape, so I wanted to make sure I understood correctly since at times I have tended to unfortunately conflate the two. Thankfully people have called me out on it) Kemal coerces Mary into having sex with him and then shortly after dies. Mary grabs Anna and has her and Mary’s mom, Cora, drag Mr. Pamuk’s dead body out of Mary’s bedroom. Cora of course is pissed and asks Mary what happened, and Mary is in tears because of Mr. Pamuk’s sudden death, and Cora tells her she must never let this news get out that Mr. Pamuk was in Mary’s room because the family would freak out. I thought they could just stealthily sneak Mr. Pamuk’s body out of Mary’s room, but as I soon found out after watching the entire show, nothing is private at Downton Abbey and there is always someone watching. In this case, it was Daisy. Daisy was getting some laundry done late at night and went down the hall only to find Mary, Anna and Cora farther down the hall dragging Mr. Pamuk’s corpse away from Mary’s room. Of course, this scares the shit out of Daisy and continues to haunt her for the next episode.

Random stories in my old 9th grade notebook

Chapter one

The train lurched through the bleak outskirts of the lonely city. I explored the scenery through the frosted window. I heard the invisible sounds of an olive-skinned man and a chocolate-skinned woman performing a melancholy winter ballad on saxophone and keyboard, respectively. I glimpsed una nina wrapped in a large lavender parka, the mangled ends of her chestnut braids blowing in the wind. I stared into the face of a beautiful female teacher, and consumed the exquisite image of the fiery pomegranate red lips, the wavy black tresses that spilled on her sloping shoulders, the mammoth leather purse that nudged against her breasts as she adjusted it on her shoulder.

At that romantic moment, I felt a craving. A potent craving to sketch average-day homosapiens. My right side practically burned for an urge to spin the lead graphite tip on the perforated paper, to form an oval that would form a face, matchsticks that would form a much more complex body. How funny–a fifteen year old Leonardo sketching a contemporary anatomy, that of a handsome man spread out on beige paper like a snow angel, but a person residing in Illinois.

“Your current stop is Sulfur,” the concise masculine voice announced from the front of the train. I hoisted my messenger bag over my shoulder, pressing the front of the bag to protect it. My hometown waited for me twenty blocks away.

Chapter 2

I was fourteen-and-one-quarters when I was expelled from school. I had no desire to leave but the darn administrators forced me to. It was a windy March morning in sixth period art class. My cranium overflowed with equations and mathematical concepts from third period, and it was near explosion. My hands ached with the arduous task of writing a three-page essay on the current oil embargo and its effect on global nations. In fourth period social studies, my blood curdled and I nearly passed out at the formaldehyde-laden, expired seafood-smelling meadow-frog that the first period science class was forced to dissect (I asked the teacher if I could evade such a repugnant task. I lost that ephemeral jury.) A myriad of Shakespearean verses and lines from notable O. Henry stories spun like sugar plums in my head. After English class, I sped to Room 411, a classroom with a relaxed, good-natured atmosphere. I stole a seat next to the window from which the restaurants, hair salons and factories stood erected, and wrestled my 8×11 sketchbook from underneath the purple binder that held my math and social studies papers, the two-thousand ton science textbook that nearly broke the table I sat at, and a paperback copy of Invisible Man.

The bell echoed through the halls as students mingled in their cliques and gabbed loquaciously. Mr. Lasovitch pushed back his swivel chair and stood, resembling a five-foot eight inch tree in crimson lo-tops and a plaid long-sleeved shirt.

“Okay, guys, listen up…all eyes on me…”

Fifty pairs of multicolored eyes stared up at our art instructor.

“You lot are going to finish your charcoal drawings, under the circumstances…that you close your eyes while sketching. It is not difficult; just imagine some object or person in your head, and start doodling. Any questions?”

A cricket-chirp-worthy silence swept through the room.

“Okay, then. Let’s commence.”

I sat in my chair while twenty-four other middle-school students milled about the room, looking for those formerly new ebony pieces of smudge and fresh-smelling sooty dust. I heard the phone ring.

“Desmond Lasovitch. Yeah, I’ll send her down. Bye.”

The phone landed in its cradle with athud.

“Lilliane, the administrator wants to see you.”

I nodded, closed my sketchbook and gathered my items. I looked back in the distance at the bored teenagers who spun the charcoal sticks between their fingers and rolled their eyes in agony at the thought of drawing. My recycled sneaker squeaked like timid mice and my stomach lurched as I headed past the auditorium into Principal Dellafield’s office. I knocked on the door and walked in. Principal Dellafield sat on her throne, her ballpoint pen racing with vivacity across a lined piece of paper.

“Principal Dellafield?” I asked.

She looked up, her icy blue pupils washing me like a cascade, taking me in.

“Mr. Lasovitch said you wanted to see me.”

“Ah, yes, dear, come. Sit and let’s talk. And set your books and whatnot on the sofa next to my shelf.”

The couch looked comfortable with its velvet texture and lush green pigment. It felt as if I was disrespecting the property by setting a pile of binders on it, but I obeyed.

I pulled the chair from out in front of her desk. The chair swallowed me as I attempted to relax.

“Miss Pendant, yesterday at approximately three in the afternoon, a fellow student of Benisota Secondary School found a drawing of a woman, a drawing which the student considered quite blasphemous.”

The drawer inserted in her desk opened with a roll, and she obtained the paper. She held it up for me to get a decent view of.

Rendered speechless inside, I feigned indifference.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, my eyebrows sloping into two negative quadratic arches.

“It’s crude, Miss Pendant! At Benisota, all students are forbidden to wear or display anything that may be deemed offensive, such as nudity, for example. Now why did you draw such a person?”

I took in the naked woman that I animated. She seemed quite passionate and vivacious, her pixie haircut fading in the wind, her arms akimbo, commanding the entire globe to consume her ravishing beauty like a steaming rack of tender lamb…

“Miss Pendant?”

I snapped back to attention.

“Please answer me. Why did you draw what you drew?”

“Well,” I laughed nervously. “You see, my friend bought an entertainment magazine to school. I asked her politely–”

I coughed.

“—If I could borrow it to draw in. She shrugged and obliged. So I flipped through the magazine, and found a celebrity at the Academy Awards. I was going to draw her in a dress, I really was, but I guess my mind got carried away…”

I shrugged.

She sat back, astonished.

“Well, Miss Pendant, this is quite a shocker. Judging from your mature, ambassadorial behavior…I’d never suspect you would do such a thing.”

My face fell in complete chagrin.

“I would hate to say this, but…due to the action you committed, I must suspend you from this school.”

I felt a whip crack on my cringing body. I gaped in horror.

“But Principal,” I stammered. “You cannot–I–I cannot quit school! What about my degree–I can’t just throw it out the window like this—I have to finish school!”

If you were to come into the office this exact moment, you would see a formerly calm girl who, when she heard this news, was on the verge of exploding into smithereens.

It’s been a week….

I don’t know why I didn’t write on this blog for a while. I guess I was just afraid of saying imperfect stuff. Which is why I started looking up more books about embracing imperfection and uncovering the roots of perfectionism because I am starting to wonder if my perfectionist tendencies are actually even healthy or just maladaptive. Today I bought a book for my Kindle called The Anxious Perfectionist: How to Manage Perfectionism-Driven Anxiety Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Clarissa W. Ong, Ph.D. and Michael P. Twohig, Ph.D. and I am just taking it in. Even though I haven’t yet done the exercises at the beginning of the book, there was one exercise where I had to list three self-critical labels or stories I believe to be true about myself and pick the label I grappled with the longest and reflect on the earliest memory of having this self-critical label or story I believed about myself. I have been chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (it’s a Buddhist practice I do every morning and evening) for clarity about my life, and as I have been on my journey with mental health and therapy, I have been reflecting on a pretty huge narrative I have told myself throughout my life: “I am worthless.” This self-critical label has been the story I have carried with me for a long time, and it is connected very much to my struggles with perfectionism, depression and lack of self-confidence. I was really young when I first had this thought of being worthless. I had always been a sensitive person and a creative person, and I had gone to public school for the first time when I was in fifth grade, and it was a huge adjustment for me. I felt like I just was falling so far behind the other students in class, and there was a program for gifted and talented kids but I wasn’t part of that program and I began to think that somehow I wasn’t smart. I would often fall behind in my schoolwork and started to think that somehow every mistake or failure I made was a character flaw. I have always been an introvert, and when my math teacher told me I had to stay inside instead of going to recess like the other kids, I just shrugged and said I was fine with staying behind to complete my schoolwork. If three-year-old me can treat time out like it’s the best time in the world to catch up on some reading, then clearly ten-year-old me can treat time away from recess to catch up on some schoolwork. However, this rubbed the teacher the wrong way and she ended up pulling me aside for a good thirty minutes to an hour talking about how it wasn’t okay for me to have a nonchalant attitude about missing recess to finish my homework. Looking back I can understand she just wanted me to have fun at recess and not make this a habit of missing homework deadlines, but at the time because I was so sensitive I started to think that maybe something was wrong with me for having a carefree attitude about missing recess.

I also started to wonder if maybe being sensitive was too much as well. I remember being in the lunch line and saying “hi” to one of my classmates, and she asked me why I said “hi” to everyone. I thought it was perfectly normal to say “hi” to everyone, but apparently not in this new environment. I started comparing myself to the other kids, thinking that they couldn’t possibly be going through the same battles of dwindling self-confidence I was going through. Of course, now that I am older and have read more and gone through more life experiences, I have realized in retrospect that those kids I thought were confident on the outside may not have been so confident on the inside. Then again, I wouldn’t know because at the time I didn’t have the language to talk about self-love and self-worth in a healthy, life-affirming way, but I’m pretty sure those kids weren’t immune to dealing with problems in their daily lives. I mean, come on, we’re fifth graders. Our brains haven’t fully developed yet, and we’re all battling our own insecurities (this was back in the early 2000s; I’m sure pretty similar challenges with self-esteem still happen today even if we have more spaces to discuss it). I remember always struggling with math and science and feeling like I wasn’t cut out for those subjects, and instead of just joking about it, it really hurt me that I wasn’t making progress in those subjects. At the time I was doing Kumon math and doing Kumon helped me gain a lot of self-confidence in my math skills, but when I tried to bring that same self-confidence about math to my 5th grade math class, I pretty much fell flat. I thankfully patched things up with my teacher a couple years after that, but every time I talk about perfectionism and failure I think getting at the root of why I continued this behavior pattern was pretty important. I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, so I can’t really diagnose myself, but I just think a lot about how I still battle negative self-talk and I decided to just go back to my past when I actually started saying a lot of those negative things about myself (e.g. “I’m worthless”, “I’m ugly”, “I’m stupid”, “I’m fat”, etc.)

I guess this is why have hobbies and interests outside of my studies during that time helped. When I was struggling with low self-esteem I had an outlet: art. I loved art, painting, drawing, doodling, you name it. Even when I wasn’t supposed to be doodling in class I drew Powerpuff Girls cartoons and other stuff. However, I think I lost a lot of confidence in my art at some point and wondered if it was even the right avenue for me. Teachers are a pretty key influence on a kid’s mind, and so I’m glad I had a cool teacher in middle school who encouraged me to keep making art. He encouraged me to enter my art in a contest and I think I won (I got a bag of Fritos as my prize, and as a dedicated follower of The Holy Church of Fritos, I was in heaven.) He was a mentor to me during that time, and looking back I really appreciate how he shaped my perspective on why I make art. When I got to advanced placement (AP) art I felt like a total imposter. I was so used to drawing images from magazines and free-drawing cartoons that when the art teacher told us we could not sketch images from copyrighted images that scared the living shit out of me. God, I really am an imposter, I thought, so I met with my counselor, told her I was having second thoughts about being good enough for AP art, and high-tailed my ass out of that class. My parents had bought me all these hell-expensive art supplies and I felt terrible that they had pretty much gone to waste. I still have those paints from the class; I sadly threw out the canvas board because I just didn’t know where else to put it. I hope I can gain the courage to keep making art even if it’s just for an inner sense of fulfillment. I guess that is why joining orchestra and Whiz Quiz my first year of middle school helped, because I was sensitive and had drawn into myself because of those deep insecurities I had felt about my personality. Doing hobbies helped me build my self-confidence back up again.

Oh, gosh, I am tired and it is midnight. But I couldn’t wait the next day to write this. I just felt like something was missing when I realized how much I missed writing even if just to feel an inner sense of fulfillment. I hope to be more consistent with writing. I thought I would need to wait until I had completed editing my review of The Crown series that I’m watching, but something in me was like, Just write.