Category: Uncategorized

Reflections on Death and Grief

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing the Internet and looked up an article on National Public Radio about how to use my smartphone less. I found the Life Kit article very insightful, and because I am curious and tend to doomscroll a lot, I scrolled down and found a headline that stopped me dead in my tracks:

Michelle Trachtenberg, actress, dies at 39.

I was shocked. I don’t have Instagram or other social media, so I didn’t know what had happened to Michelle leading up to her sudden death, but all I knew was that I was, like so many other Millennial kids who grew up watching Michelle Trachtenberg in the 1990s and 2000s, was devastated to hear the news of her death. Like I usually do when an actor or musician I love passes away, I look up news stories, scour the Internet for articles with details about the cause of death, etc. But I had a moment of reflection and realized that the best thing I could do to deal with my grief at that moment, which was swallowing me whole as I sat alone and sad at my desk in the office, was to chant this Buddhist mantra called Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. As I chanted, it wasn’t like my grief disappeared. In fact, just a few minutes before writing this, I had to remove myself from the kitchen, where I was sautéing mushrooms for a pizza, and bawl my eyes out. I just let myself accept that I was in a lot of emotional pain after hearing about the death of Michelle because as a kid I really loved her in the movie Harriet the Spy. I cannot remember how many times I rented that movie from Blockbuster and watched it, but it was my favorite movie and book when I was younger, and I loved Michelle’s acting in that movie. I hadn’t seen Ice Princess, but I remember watching music videos by Aly and AJ for songs on the Ice Princess soundtrack, and I loved seeing Michelle’s beautiful smile and her childlike innocence. Unfortunately, I wasn’t familiar with most of her work, so I can’t say I was a die-hard Michelle Trachtenberg fan. I had only seen her in Harriet the Spy and the music video by Fall Out Boy for “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race” where she makes a cameo during the staged funeral for lead singer Pete Wentz. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my sister and aunt for a few episodes at some point in my adolescence, but I didn’t watch the entire Buffy show. I just remembered that Michelle Trachtenberg was in Buffy. They still have not come out with the autopsy results of Michelle’s death, and to be honest, I had to reflect on why I wanted to know so many personal details about her life. From what I read, sources say she was a pretty private person, and I never got to meet her unfortunately, so I didn’t know much about her personal life.

This definitely made me feel like I did when Aaron Carter, who was another key pop culture staple for Millennials, died at 34 in 2022. As a kid, you worship this person and their music, and you see them in music videos dancing and surrounded by all these preteen girls who are just beginning to experience those early stages of sexual awakening, screaming and holding up signs with “I Love You” and begging for autographs. And then when you get older and go through your own difficult issues, like every human being, you’re harshly judged for not staying, like a wax figure, into your permanent role as this cute, baby-faced kid who sang songs about beating Shaquille O’Neal at basketball and having a (non-alcoholic) party at your house. Even I was guilty of this. I thought I really knew Aaron Carter’s life and had a deep connection with him, but after doing a lot of reflecting, I realized that I only really had this image in my head of him being this super-cute kid. I feel bad for comparing him to Justin Bieber, but he really was the Justin Bieber of my generation growing up. When I was in elementary school, I always heard his songs on Radio Disney, and they were always fun bops that I jammed to in the car seat while my mom drove me to school.

I feel like something similar that happened to Michelle Trachtenberg in the last few years of her life. I was casually browsing the Internet a few months before her death because I was curious about what happened to her and so many other child stars that I grew up with, and there was an article about how people on Instagram criticized a photo of her that she posted. They said stuff like, “You look sick,” and that must have really hurt her. I remember she responded to the critics by saying she was older, and she wasn’t 14 anymore. I didn’t think much about it, but that stuck with me. Again, I don’t know the full story since I don’t have Instagram, but I think reflecting on Michelle and Aaron’s deaths remind me that, at the end of the day, the child stars I grew up with were dealing with issues outside of the spotlight, and most of them probably wanted their privacy respected. I thought about even writing a movie review of Harriet the Spy to remember Michelle Trachtenberg, and I might do that, but right now I am still processing the grief around her death. I also was kind of shocked when I found out about the actor Gene Hackman’s death, which I found out about just a day after finding out about Michelle Trachtenberg’s death. I didn’t grow up watching a lot of movies where Gene Hackman was acting in them. As a kid, I watched the trailer for a movie he was in called Welcome to Mooseport, but I was too young to watch the movie, so I never saw it (I wasn’t allowed to watch PG-13 films when I was a preteen). But it made me reflect on how I think about the deaths of actors and musicians I love, like Robin Williams and Amy Winehouse. When I read the writings of the late educator Daisaku Ikeda, he discusses the Buddhist perspective on life and death. Reading the Buddhist perspective on life and death helped me understand that at the end of the day, even with fame and success, actors and musicians are still human beings with their own personal struggles and worries.

I remember crying my eyes out when I found out that Aaron Carter died. I went to my Gohonzon, which is the Buddhist altar I chant to every day and chanted with tears running down my face. I told my mom about Aaron Carter’s death, and she encouraged me to keep chanting for his eternal happiness and told me that I can chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo for people who have passed away. At first, I felt silly for crying over the death of someone who I had never met in my life, someone I only knew through their music, but my mom understood and said that it is still sad when someone dies because they still touched you in some way through their music or film. I am going to continue chanting for Aaron Carter and Michelle Trachtenberg.

Movie Review: Anora

Contains spoilers

I cannot believe it, but next week is officially the Academy Awards, and I have been doing my best to watch as many movies as I can before next Sunday comes around. Some of the movies I won’t be able to stomach, like The Substance and Gladiator II, because I am not a fan of body horror and I saw the first Gladiator and the film score was incredibly beautiful and blew me away, but unfortunately I have a weak stomach and often flinched and closed my eyes during all of the battle scenes (being a wimp about movies with lots of blood and gore kind of ruined my experience watching the movie because well, it’s a movie about gladiators and killing people and buckets of blood was the form of entertainment back in that time, so I probably should have just listened to the soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and called it a day instead of forcing myself to watch it because it was a cinema classic. Even though Russell Crowe, Connie Nielsen and Joaquin Phoenix’s acting was fierce A.F., after the first battle scene in the arena, I wanted to throw up as I watched folks get decapitated, cut in half and killed in other bloody unpleasant ways. But alas, I digress.)

So, I won’t be able to watch some of the movies, but I have already seen a few of the nominees: A Real Pain, starring Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (who also directed the movie), The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones and directed by Brady Corbet, and just five minutes ago, I finished streaming Anora, which was directed by Sean Baker and stars Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn as the main characters. I had heard about Anora many times in the past few months and saw the trailer, which looked really good. However, I am squeamish about vomit scenes and pretty much all of the films I have seen that are directed by Sean Baker have a pretty gross vomit scene in them. In one of his movies, Tangerine, which is about trans sex workers, an Armenian cab driver (played by actor Karren Karagulian) is driving around Los Angeles on a normal day, and two drunk guys vomit in his cab. I know it sounds silly, but I have emetophobia, which is a weird and irrational fear of vomit. I don’t know how I ended up getting emetophobia in the first place, but it has haunted my life for 31 years and it’s the reason why I had to keep getting up and going to the restroom whenever my health class teachers showed the class Super-Size Me, because there is a really gross vomit scene, and it freaked me out and I almost got a panic attack. So long story short, I have to look up the parent’s guides on IMDB and go on Doesthedogdie.com to often look up whether movies that I watch have vomit scenes in them so I can be prepared to close my eyes (and sometimes ears) in case they do. Sure, I would be reading spoilers, but honestly, I would rather read a few important plot points than go into a panic attack when someone surprise-vomits in a movie scene. So, I did the same for his other movies, Red Rocket and Anora.

But honestly, my fear of vomit is not the most important part of this blog post, of course. It’s what I thought about the actual movie, Anora. As I write this, I am catching my breath (in a good way) because MY GOLLY GOSH, MIKEY MADISON CAN ACTTTTTTT. Seriously, I had chills while watching her performance. She is not a damsel in distress, even though she is a very dangerous situation. She is a tough-as-nails Brooklynite who takes no nonsense and swears like a sailor (I was going to say, “she swears like a born-and-bred-New Yorker”, but I am not from New York City and don’t want to offend those native New Yorkers who don’t cuss a lot.) I could tell she really worked very hard to prepare for her role as the title character, Anora, who goes by Ani. Ani is a sex worker living in Brooklyn who is struggling to make ends meet, and she works at a strip club called HQ Kony Gentlemen’s Club. Her life changes, however, when her boss assigns her to a young male client who speaks Russian. Because Ani speaks Russian, she is able to communicate with this young man, who she finds out is named Vanya (or Ivan). At first, she is just treating him like any old client, but he woos her and then wows her when she finds out that he is the son of this wealthy Russian oligarch. They end up developing an intense infatuation with one another. Ani at first doesn’t think he is serious about wanting to be with her, and when they spend the night together at his super lavish pad (which he doesn’t actually own. His parents do) she wakes up the next day and tells him she has to go back to work. However, he tells her that he will pay her a ridiculous amount of money for her to be his girlfriend for a week. He takes her to these lavish parties, showing her off as his girlfriend and making her feel like most important person in his life. He has maids that clean up the floor while he plays video games all day, and she does her work and dances for him. He is entertained and she thinks, “Well, I need to go back to work and my regular life,” but Vanya tells her that he is sad that he will have to go back to Russia to work for his father, and that the only way to get out of having to go back to Russia is to marry an American woman so that he can stay in New York City. Ani doesn’t think Vanya is serious, but when he actually proposes to her, she does so, and they get married in a chapel in Las Vegas.

Ani is living the dream, but the next day, her romantic fantasy is quickly crushed when some guys who work for Vanya’s father come barging into Vanya’s penthouse suite when they find out that Vanya married Ani in Las Vegas. Igor and Garnik, two henchmen who work for Vanya’s dad, come in and demand to see the marriage papers so that they can annul Vanya and Ani’s marriage. When Vanya and Ani don’t comply, Ani is tied up while Vanya escapes from the house. Ani screams bloody murder and attacks Igor and Garnik, while Toros, who works for Vanya’s dad, too, has to leave a baptism at an Armenian church because he has to now get involved with annulling Vanya’s marriage to Ani. Igor assaults and restrains Ani while she screams for them to let her go, and Toros finally arrives and tries to calm Ani down, but she continues to yell at them to let her go. Igor gags her and Toros calls Vanya on Ani’s phone, but Vanya doesn’t pick up. So Garnick, Igor, Ani and Toros have to drive all around New York City to find Vanya. After they spend hours looking for him, they find him at the HQ Kony Gentlemen’s Club in a private room where Diamond, Ani’s red-haired jealous competition, dances for Vanya while he cheerfully stuffs dollar bills in her thong, with Iggy Azalea’s banger hit “Sally Walker” thumping on the soundtrack, not knowing how much heartbreak and suffering he caused for Ani, Garnik, Igor, Toros and his parents in Russia. While he is intoxicated, Ani tries to convince him that she and him are going to stay married and get away from all this drama in their life, but Vanya laughs it off and doesn’t care. Ani and Diamond have a brutal fight with each other, which gets the attention of everyone at the gentlemen’s club, and Garnik, Igor and Toros grab Vanya and get him out of the club into the van so that they can take him over to the courthouse and get Vanya and Ani’s marriage annulled (and get them prepared for a serious vodka-infused ass-whooping from his parents, Nikolai and Galina, who DO NOT PLAY.) Ani tries to convince Vanya to take this entire matter seriously and tells him how worried sick she was when he escaped, but he acts like it was no big deal. They go to the courthouse and Ani, pissed as fuck, cusses out the judge and Toros and everyone who made her life a fucking nightmare (including the once-dreamy-Prince Charming-now-scumbag-Vanya), and the crazy part? The judge says they have to go to Las Vegas to sign the annulment papers because that is where Ani and Vanya got married. They can’t annul the marriage in New York. So, Vanya’s parents fly from Russia to the U.S., and even when Ani tries to gain Galina’s approval, Galina refuses to shake her hand and tells her coldly that Ani will never be part of Vanya’s family because of her reputation as a sex worker. At first, Ani refuses to get on the plane, but Galina tells her with an icy smile that if Ani refuses to fly with them to Las Vegas to get the annulment papers signed, she will lose everything. Ani finally gets on the plane, and they go to Las Vegas to sign the papers. Vanya and his parents go back to Russia, even after he tries to reason with them that what he did was no big deal, and Ani comes back to New York City with Igor, shattered, destroyed and heartbroken. Even though Igor violently restrained Ani at the beginning of the film, he ends up being the one to bring her some much-needed consolation in the end and seems to be the only one who is willing to sit with Ani in her pain and suffering. When the credits rolled, I was speechless. All I could think was, When they announce the nominations next Sunday evening, this movie HAS to win at least one Oscar. Seriously. It was another reason why Sean Baker is one of my favorite directors.

What I really appreciate about Sean Baker is that he presents a very realistic portrayal of what life is like for sex workers in his movies. And I appreciate that Hollywood is gradually starting to portray sex workers as these human beings with regular lives rather than as these objects of men’s desires who don’t have a voice or a narrative of their own. Even when watching the 2005 film Hustle and Flow, because I had seen the film Zola, which is told from the perspective of a Black female sex worker, I couldn’t help but notice that the female characters in the movie don’t have much of a voice of their own. They are just supporting characters in helping a man further his hip-hop career. Don’t get me wrong, Taryn Manning and Taraji P. Henson were absolutely incredible in the movie, but I am glad I watched a movie like Zola that doesn’t exploit sex workers in the movie and gives them agency and a voice of their own. In Zola, Zola is a young Black woman who meets a white girl named Stefani while they are stripping in Detroit, Michigan. They become fast friends, until Stefani coerces Zola to go with her on what she thinks is going to be a fun trip to Florida where they get more clients but instead is actually a dangerous sex trafficking operation that Zola finds herself unable to get out of. Even though Colman Domingo’s character, a pimp named X, and Nicholas Braun’s character, Derrek (Stefani’s boyfriend) are key characters in the film, they are supporting characters in the movie. The film focuses on Stefani and Zola’s complicated friendship. Even though they bonded over being sex workers, at the end of the day, Stefani didn’t respect Zola and was just taking advantage of her, and the two of them fight throughout the film and are no longer having fun as friends. I watched the movie twice because it was so good, and the acting was incredible. I didn’t know anything about the original Twitter thread that Zola had published, but when I watched the movie, I started to read more about it and became more interested in the story because I am not a sex worker and don’t have much knowledge about sex work.

Anora was a really powerful movie, and even though it is a romance movie, it definitely defies the typical fairytale romance storyline. Today, I did a study presentation at my Buddhist center for a morning chanting session, and the study I did my PowerPoint on was from an article in the February 7, 2025 World Tribune (our weekly Buddhist newspaper) called “We Create Our Own Happiness.” In the article, the late Buddhist educator Daisaku Ikeda shares a quote by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, and the quote, to paraphrase, is that while wealth and property can be inherited, happiness cannot. People can possess lots of money and status and power, but those things bring a temporary form of happiness and doesn’t get rid of people’s problems. Of course, there are plenty of examples of people who use their wealth for good causes, to help other people and fund various charities and nonprofit organizations. However, what Buddhism has taught me is that happiness is a matter of what we feel inside, our inner state of life. Even though Ani married this young man who came from money and thought he could give her true love, he was actually just using her and didn’t truly love her at all. He inherited all this money and took her on all these lavish trips and parties, but he was still empty and miserable and so was she. Even though his parents let him stay in this luxurious penthouse suite, he does not have a very warm loving relationship with his parents at all. They are controlling, and even when Ani tells Vanya that he doesn’t have to listen to his parents, he can’t just leave his life because then that would mean giving up this lavish lifestyle that he has simply by virtue of being the son of a wealthy Russia oligarch. His parents, however, could never hand him happiness on a silver platter. They didn’t even care about his happiness. Even when Ani tried to make it work with her and Vanya, she could not. Their marriage was transactional, not real love. That is what Toros was trying to tell Ani even when she kept convincing him that her marriage to Vanya was true love and was going to make her happy. Toros told her over and over again that Vanya really didn’t love her and that she was not legally married to him, and that this fairytale idea of her and Vanya getting married was just that, a fairytale, not reality. Vanya was always going to treat Ani like she was disposable and was only going to see her as a prostitute who was just there in his life to give him a short-lived thrill before he moved on to someone else. Seriously, the final scene of the film where she cries after having sex with (and slapping) Igor as he cradles her in his arms really broke my heart. It made me think of when I fell in love with this guy and had all these delusional daydreams about us ending up married with children, living a blissful carefree life well into retirement. I fell in love with him because he thought I was attractive, and as a girl with terrible self-worth at the time, I assumed that the way he felt about me in college was the same way he felt about me at 27 when we reconnected. But by then, I quickly realized that he had moved on, he had changed, and he was in a happy soon-to-be marriage with someone else. It took years of therapy, Buddhist practice and self-care to finally get to a place where I could confront the reality that me and this guy were never going to be together, even though it was painful. My crush was my escape from the humdrum reality of my 9 to 5 office job. However, I think chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and studying The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin and Daisaku Ikeda’s writings reminded me that I had profound self-worth even if I wasn’t in a relationship with this guy. I also realized that this guy couldn’t ever give me the happiness that I wanted. I had to be responsible for my own happiness because I have my own problems to deal with, and he has his. It took a lot of deep digging and human revolution, but I have developed so much profound love for myself in the process and have developed what Buddhists call “absolute happiness,” which is a kind of happiness that can’t be destroyed by changing external circumstances because it is within our own lives, and we cultivate that happiness through our practice of Nichiren Buddhism. I really love looking at movies through the lens of Buddhism because it helps me understand both the good and dark sides of human nature.

I am sure that this what Ani went through is not just something that happens in fiction only. A lot of young women deal with heartbreak, and I am sure there are women who are coerced into these unhealthy marriages where they never find true happiness and are just being treated like a transaction instead of a flesh-and-blood human being with thoughts, feelings, needs, and wants. Sean Baker’s films have really opened my eyes to the tough reality and stigma that a lot of female sex workers (including trans sex workers of color) face on a daily basis. Of course, as someone who doesn’t work in the sex work industry, I don’t know if the film speaks for the reality of all sex workers, and I am sure plenty of sex workers have good and bad things to say about the movie just like they have various opinions about the movie Hustlers. But it was definitely empowering to see a young woman who works in sex work playing the main role as this bold protagonist who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone. I think after watching his other movie Red Rocket, which is about a washed-up 30-something male adult film star who falls in love with a 17-year-old cashier at a donut shop and tries to get her into the adult entertainment industry, watching a movie like Anora was a different experience. Red Rocket was a black/dark comedy that really left me disturbed and unsettled because of its subject matter. Simon Rex’s character, Mikey, wasn’t supposed to be likeable. He was a creepy middle-aged white guy who flirted with a teenager (even though in the movie he justifies that in Texas, he can flirt with her because she is 17 and that is the legal age of consent) and also took advantage of his ex-wife and her mother, as well as the people in his community.

I need to head to sleep, but I am just glad that I got all my thoughts about the movie out so that I can sleep at night.

Anora. 2024. 139 minutes. Distributed by Neon. Directed by Sean Baker. Rated R for strong sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language and drug use.

Rabbit (written on 4/29/21)

I wrote this poem during my lunch break at work one day, while lonely and crying in my car. I was feeling deeply hopeless and was in a dark place with my depression at the time, and so I chanted this Buddhist mantra that I chant every day called Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and it made me feel a lot better. As I chanted, I gained the life force to appreciate this beautiful little moment when I saw a rabbit and a squirrel outside of my car window, and it inspired me to write a poem about this precious brief moment. 

The rabbit
Brown fur
Soft large eyes
Cocks its right ear
Then its left
Sits up at attention
Wiggles its nose
Looks around
Monitors the premise
It races across the grass
I chant in appreciation
While looking out my car window
I chant in appreciation
To this rabbit
For helping me understand
That in life
When you are battling inner darkness
Depression and suicide
Facing death head on
When you're young and directionless
You need to appreciate the little moments in life
Facing life and death teaches you
To see the beauty in the everyday
I send daimoku
To the rabbit
As I appreciate their life
And how by their living
They taught me the value of life itself.
Tears run down my face
As I chant each Nam-myoho-renge-kyo
To my little friend
He has given me a reason to live.

I chant while watching 
The squirrel rummage and search for victuals
It finds food
Digs with its teeth in the grass
Nourishes itself
Then disappears.
The squirrel returns 5 mins later
Eats its meal
Relishes it
As it looks at me
It runs to another place in the grass
Forages
The bunny bounds, approaches the squirrel, -Hey friend.
The squirrel runs up a tree.
The bunny races from the squirrel
The squirrel poises, then jumps from the tree
It rummages, nibbles fast, eyes me, pauses, 
Twitches its tail
A blue jay flies away
The squirrel shifts around furiously 
With a vibrant life-force
An ichinen like no other 
It rummages with its black little nose
Through the mulch
Peers up at me
-What are you looking at? Leave me alone.
It stealthily bounds to the bushes
Oh ambushed by rabbit.
Rabbit runs 
The squirrel
From a distance
Nibbles at more food
Rummages everywhere
For a gold mine of food
It bounds around the curb's grassy sidewalk
I chant nammyohorengekyo
for my friend to find more food
It keeps digging
with its never give up spirit.
It emerges from the earth
Nut in its mouth
then digs and digs with its paws
So determined.
Its fellow squirrel across from it
on the other side
searches for more food
more buried treasure
Its tail curled around its body
It bounds away
So long friend

My friend
the rabbit
returns once again 
standing still
I chant
fusing my Buddha life energy
With its Buddha life energy, activating its life force
It stands rapt
Its hind legs bunched
It licks its fur
Wrinkles its nose
1 min left of lunch
I savor this art
This natural beauty 
my friend bounds away. goodbye.

Random paylist

I was going through all my old miscellaneous writings and saw a list of songs I must have listened to at some point in the past. I love listening to music and exploring new songs, so a lot of these songs are from various genres, such as alternative rock, R n B, international, and jazz. I must have listened to these songs while exploring Amazon Music or Pandora.

  • “The Way Things Are”: Fiona Apple
  • “Can’t Let Go”: Anthony Hamilton
  • “Do You Remember”: Jill Scott
  • “Dance for You”: Beyonce
  • “Found/ Tonight”: Ben Platt and Lin-Manuel Miranda
  • “Love”: Keyshia Cole
  • “Foolish”: Ashanti
  • “The Next Movement”: The Roots
  • “Watermelon Man”: Herbie Hancock
  • “Turn Your Love Around”: George Benson
  • “You and I”:Avant
  • “Mr. Blues”: Hank Crawford
  • “Untitled”: Sigur Ros
  • “Smile”: Lily Allen
  • :Tiny Dancer”: Elton John
  • “Ring of Fire”: Johnny Cash
  • “La-La-La”: Jay-Z
  • “Walnut Tree”: Keane (I am listening to this right now, and it is one of my favorite songs by them.)
  • “High by the Beach”: Lana del Rey
  • “The Essence”: Herbie Hancock
  • “Soon As I Get Home”: Babyface
  • Piano Trio No. 4 in E Minor (“Dumky trio”): Antonin Dvorak
  • “A Sky Full of Stars”: Coldplay
  • “Man in Black”: Johnny Cash
  • “Where Did Our Love Go?”: Babyface
  • “Fugue State”: Vulfpeck
  • “Ainvayi ainvayi”: Salim Merchant
  • “Dear Summer: Memphis Bleek

The playlist I was going to give to my orchestra director in high school but don’t remember if I did or not

I was going through my old journals and papers and found an old playlist I had written on notebook paper and torn out from a spiral notebook. I think I was planning on making a mix CD for my orchestra director, Mr. Goins, but I don’t remember if I ever gave him the mix CD or not. I probably did, I just forgot since it was years ago.

  • Parachutes: Pearl Jam
  • I Want to Take You Higher: Sly and the Family Stone
  • Take Your Time: Al Green feat. Corinne Bailey Rae
  • Remembrances (with Itzhak Perlman) from Schindler’s List
  • Day Too Soon: Sia
  • The Hardest Button to Button: The White Stripes
  • I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You): Aretha Franklin
  • Here Comes the Sun- The Beatles/ Abbey Road, 1969
  • Lean on Me: Bill Withers
  • Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song): Billy Joel
  • Past in Present: Feist
  • Orinoco Flow: Enya
  • I Want You Back: Jackson 5
  • La boheme, opera: Musetta’s waltz: Giacomo Puccini
  • False Alarm: KT Tunstall
  • Girl They Won’t Believe It: Joss Stone
  • White Flag: Dido
  • A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall: Bob Dylan
  • Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag: James Brown
  • Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire: J.S.Bach
  • Green Eyes: Coldplay
  • Finale: Presto: Haydn
  • Amsterdam: Coldplay
  • Music: Joss Stone
  • They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Ella Fitzgerald
  • Hypnotize: The White Stripes
  • Little Black Sandals: Sia
  • P.Y.T: Michael Jackson
  • Honey Honey: Feist
  • Cantaloupe Island: Herbie Hancock
  • Who Makes You Feel: Dido
  • A Thousand Beautiful Things: Annie Lennox
  • Daylight: Coldplay
  • Wie lieblich sind Deine Wohnungen: Johannes Brahms
  • I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For: U2
  • Suddenly I See: KT Tunstall
  • Ave Maria: Andrea Bocelli
  • Concerto pour harpe et orchestre en la majeur- Maurice Ravel
  • Dance to the Music: Sly and the Family Stone
  • Rhapsody in Blue for piano and jazz: George Gershwin

Movie Review: She Said (content warning: descriptions of sexual assault)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched She Said for the second time. If you haven’t seen it, it is based on the true story of this article that these two female journalists, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, published in 2017 called “She Said,” detailing the multiple allegations against media mogul Harvey Weinstein, who was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting several female actresses and assistants who worked for him. The movie reminded me of other movies I have seen about predatory behavior and sexual violence. There was a movie I saw a couple of years ago called The Assistant, and it is about a young woman who has aspiring dreams of being a film producer but works in a toxic environment at a film production company. No one at her workplace is willing to speak out against the guy who runs the company because they fear losing their jobs if they speak out. There was one scene in The Assistant that haunts me forever, and it is when Julia Garner’s character, the assistant, goes to Human Resources and tries to file a complaint of sexual harassment that she witnesses. The guy in human resources condescends to her and tells her basically that they can’t do anything about it because the guy harassing these women is a powerful man, and he fears for his own job at the company. It was extremely disturbing to watch this film because neither the assistant nor the people who worked under this powerful boss could file charges against him because the boss could fire them or threaten them, so they stayed silent while he continued preying on young women.

She Said shows how two women stood up to a real-life bully through their work in investigative journalism, and after seeing the movie a second time, I have a much deeper appreciation for anyone who works in investigative journalism because it must be a tough job. In She Said, Jodi Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (played by Carey Mulligan) both work as journalists at The New York Times. The film opens with a haunting scene in Ireland in 1992. A young red-haired woman is walking on the beach, and she sees a film crew shooting a movie. Her face lights up, and the crew welcomes her as a new member of their team. She is hopeful that she can make it in the world of film production, and she is enjoying her time working with the team. However, in the next scene, she is running with tears streaming down her face, her heart racing fast, as she escapes from something/ someone terrifying. The movie cuts to New York City in 2016. Donald Trump has been elected as the 45th president of the United States and is under fire for making inappropriate comments about women and sexually harassing them. Megan Twohey is expecting her first child and is also investigating into the allegations against Donald Trump. She speaks with a woman who alleges Donald Trump abused her, but the woman says that the New York Times isn’t going to do anything to stop the harassment because she tried to speak out and no one did anything. Megan speaks to Donald Trump on the phone (James Austin Johnson from Saturday Night Live does the voice of Donald Trump in the film) about the allegations, and he cusses at her and threatens her. She later receives a phone call from someone who works for Trump, threatening to rape and kill her. Jodi Kantor, meanwhile, is a young Jewish woman who is happily married with two daughters, and she is doing an investigation into the film producer Harvey Weinstein, who co-founded the film company Miramax with his brother, Bob Weinstein. In 2020 Harvey was finally sentenced to prison, with eighty sexual assault allegations against him. Harvey allegedly raped several women who worked for him, and no one has taken him to trial for his crimes. Jodi reaches out to a woman named Rose McGowan, who Harvey raped when she was a young actress, and when Jodi asks her permission to do an investigation into her account of the assault allegations, Rose refuses to participate in the investigation because she tried to speak out against the allegations, but the media didn’t do anything about them. Jodi and Megan contact each woman who Weinstein assaulted, and while not all of the women are willing to come forward and talk about the trauma they experienced while working at Weinstein’s company Miramax, some women, including Ashley Judd, come forward to talk about their stories of the rape and the trauma that they experienced under Weinstein’s management. It was really hard hearing the audio of one of the experiences in the movie of Harvey coercing one of his female assistants into sex, and her telling him no over and over again, telling him to stop touching her, telling him she didn’t want to be alone in the room with him. The audio plays as the camera moves slowly through a dim hotel hallway with no one in the hallway. It was scary, but as someone who hasn’t gone through what these women went through, it was important for me to hear these real accounts so that I could understand that sexual assault is real, and a lot of women didn’t want to come forward because Harvey and Miramax forced them to sign non-disclosure agreements saying they wouldn’t tell anyone that he groomed and assaulted these women. The last experience about the young woman in Ireland was also hard to listen to because like so many young women working for Miramax, she was promised that she was going to launch her career by working with an influential powerful guy like Harvey, only to realize that Harvey cared nothing about her career or the careers of the women who worked for him. He used his influence to coerce and intimidate these young women and left them with a lot of shame and trauma, forcing them to deal with the silence and shame after the abuse on their own without telling anyone.

I still remember when I read about the allegations against another media figure, Bill Cosby, and at first, I was ignorant and didn’t understand how bad the allegations were. When I read more about the allegations, I asked my dad, “Why didn’t the women just say no? Why didn’t they speak up?” and my dad told me, “Because Bill Cosby threatened these women if they spoke up. He threatened to take away their jobs and careers if they spoke up, so they were scared.” It was tough at first because I wanted to believe it was as easy as pie to somehow speak out against sexual abuse, but after my dad explained why these women didn’t go forward with their accounts of Bill Cosby sexually assaulting them, I took a step back and thought, Damn, I need to be a better ally to victims of sexual assault. I need to educate myself more. In a college essay on sexual violence in 12 Years a Slave, I conflated the words “rape” and “sex,” and thought that the character Patsey wasn’t being “raped” but that her master was “having sex” with her. I’m glad my professors called me out a few times on me conflating rape and sex, but I finally didn’t get the message until I was on Facebook in 2017 and was reading posts by my friends and acquaintances from college about how rape is rape, not sex. I felt really stupid for conflating rape and sex, but it was a learning experience that I needed to learn from so that I wouldn’t continue to conflate rape and sex or minimize sexual assault allegations.

This movie, She Said, showed that fighting against injustice is challenging, but it is so worth it in the end because the women who Harvey assaulted didn’t have to have their trauma ignored because after the New York Times published the investigation into Weinstein’s sexual assault allegations, Weinstein was sent to prison and many women in other industries outside of Hollywood felt empowered to come forward with their own accounts of sexual violence. There was one scene that really stuck with me in the movie, and it occurs when Jodi, Megan and a member of the New York Times staff are out having drinks. They are talking about the investigation, when a young man comes up to Megan and starts flirting with her. Megan at first politely refuses, but the guy insists on getting her number. He finally proceeds to say something overtly sexual, like “I would bend you over…” to Megan, but before he can finish, she slams her hand on the table and shouts at the guy, “FUCK YOU! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” The guy leaves, and him and his friend call Megan a “frigid bitch” under their breath as they leave the bar. That scene showed me how much of an impact this investigation into the assault allegations against Weinstein are having on the women’s personal lives because maybe before the investigation, Megan wouldn’t have said anything, but after hearing experiences by the women who Weinstein assaulted, Megan realizes that she doesn’t have to take any kind of sexual harassment from any guy, even if the guy seems like he is joking around.

The movie She Said also made me think of another movie I saw called Women Talking. Women Talking is about an isolated Mennonite colony that has a long history of sexually abusing the women and girls in the colony. The women and girls meet in a private location where their husbands and sons can’t see them, and they discuss whether they are going to leave the colony or stay and fight the men who abused them. The movie is terrifying because while it shows scenes with the women making the plans to leave the colony, it shows each woman grappling with her trauma and having flashbacks to when the men of the colony sexually assaulted them. There is one good male figure in the movie who stands up for the women, and instead of mansplaining them, he listens and helps them leave the colony. He grew up with a female figure who raised him to see women as equals, so he has a different perspective on the women’s roles in the colony. He respects that they want to end years of sexual abuse in the colony and takes action to help them, even when not all of the women are receptive to him helping them out.

Also, I loved the music in She Said. Nicholas Britell is one of my favorite composers. He composed music for Moonlight, Vice, If Beale Street Could Talk and the TV show Succession. I loved the cellist’s solo parts on the score as well. The score was intense and haunting, which was fitting because the movie was intense and haunting. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to handle watching She Said a second time. But the acting by Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan (and Andre Braugher, RIP) is incredible, and left me sitting on the edge of my seat. My parents watched the movie with me and thought it was really powerful. As I watched Carey Mulligan playing Megan Twohey in the movie She Said, I thought about another movie I really liked her in called Promising Young Woman, which has similar themes. Even though She Said is a true story, Promising Young Woman, even though it’s a dark comedy, raises awareness about the topic of sexual assault, which is very real, and gives it a vengeance twist in which a young woman gets revenge on the people who were involved in some way, either directly or indirectly, with the sexual assault of her friend from medical school. Cassie’s friend, Nina, was sexually assaulted in public and committed suicide after she was raped, leaving Cassie grappling with grief at losing her friend. Cassie drops out of school and lives with her parents, but she doesn’t want to feel powerless. She wants to avenge her friend, so she goes to bars, pretends to be drunk, lets a guy pick her up from the bar and take her back to his place. She pretends to be unconscious, and the guy proceeds to assault her while she is unconscious and drunk, but she fools them into thinking she is going to let them do that to her and confronts each of these men with a knife in hand and a look that says “Don’t fuck with me. Literally. Because I will kill you, motherfucker.” And it’s not just men she is getting revenge on, but also a female classmate and the dean of the university who didn’t speak out when Nina was raped in public. Cassie gets revenge on them, too. I didn’t really like the way the movie ended (I won’t spoil it, I promise) but I had to remember that it’s a dark comedy and dark comedies are usually grim and uncomfortable to watch because these movies get you to think about serious issues using very twisted humor. I don’t resonate with all of the dark comedies I watch, and frankly some comedies are too dark (or gross) for me to watch, like Triangle of Sadness (don’t look it up if you don’t know what that movie is about. I have a fear of vomiting and to this day have flashbacks to when I saw a promo for the movie trailer). But I really liked Promising Young Woman because it was clever, and Carey Mulligan’s role was epic. I really liked her in She Said, too. I have only seen Zoe Kazan in a couple of films: The Big Sick, in which she plays Emily Gordon, the real-life wife of comedian Kumail Nanjiani, and Ruby Sparks, in which she plays a character written by her real-life husband (and fellow actor), Paul Dano. I really also loved Andre Braugher’s role in She Said. He plays a member of The New York Times staff named Dean who calmly calls Harvey out every time Harvey threatens him and the staff if they publish the investigation into the allegations against him. Seeing him in his last movie role was really bittersweet because he plays Captain Raymond Holt in this TV show I loved called Brooklyn 99. Andre Braugher passed away quite recently, and when I heard the news, I was really sad and cried a lot. He played the role of Dean brilliantly, and to this day I still really miss Andre Braugher. I also recognized an actor in the movie named Peter Friedman, who plays a representative of Weinstein in the movie. Peter Friedman was in this show I love called Succession, and he played Frank, who was one of the people who worked at Logan Roy’s company Waystar Royco and is Logan’s confidant. He is a really good actor in the show, so when I saw him in the movie She Said, I was like, Oh my God, that’s the actor who played Frank Vernon in Succession! The show Succession is pretty dark, a dark comedy, a satire of the wealthy, but the acting is phenomenal, and I watched it mainly because Sarah Snook won an award for it, and one of my family members told me the show was really good, so I watched the entire thing in two months.

The movie, She Said, also gave me mad appreciation for people who go into investigative journalism. I don’t work as a journalist, so seeing the work that Jodi and Megan put into the investigation of the Weinstein allegations looks like it was serious work that required a lot of dedication. Jodi and Megan really cared about the women being able to come forward with their stories so that men like Harvey Weinstein don’t get away with predatory behavior in the future. I didn’t know much about investigative journalism other than watching a few shows or movies in the past about it. Even though the New York Times article, “She Said” gave me goosebumps when it came out and haunted me, I kind of just moved on afterwards. Then, the allegations against other powerful figures in the entertainment industry, namely the rapper and businessman Sean “Diddy” Combs, were released, and so watching the movie She Said reminded me that the allegations against Harvey Weinstein were not isolated incidents, and that there are multiple Harvey Weinsteins out there not just in the media and entertainment, but also in food and retail service, hospitality, the legal field, politics and other industries, so we need to keep talking about the topic of sexual assault even though it is uncomfortable to discuss because this all boils down to human rights and respecting the dignity of people’s lives and speaking out against anyone who tramples on the dignity of people’s lives. There was a movie similar to She Said that came out called Bombshell. I saw it a long time ago, so I can’t remember all of the plot, but it stars Margot Robbie, Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, and it is based on the real-life sexual harassment allegations that female employees at Fox News made against the late Roger Ailes. It was a really good movie and brought to light an important issue that is very real: the sexual harassment allegations against powerful men in the media.

Overall, I really recommend you watch She Said. It is a powerful movie, and the acting is incredible.

She Said. Directed by Maria Schrader. 2022. Rated R for language and descriptions of sexual assault.

Movie Review: The Peanut Butter Falcon

A few weeks ago, I finished watching The Peanut Butter Falcon. It’s starring Shia LaBeouf, Dakota Johnson and Zack Gottsagen. I went to the library to take back a bunch of movies I had checked out, and I thought, ok, I’ll leave the library once I take these movies back, but then I ended up exploring the DVDs section for almost an hour and checked out twenty more DVDs. The Peanut Butter Falcon was one of the movies I checked out. It is a really wonderful film.

The film is about a young man with Down Syndrome named Zak who grew up without family to support him, so he has to stay at a state-run care facility. After trying to escape the facility many times, especially because he is being poorly treated there, an older man named Carl finally helps Zak escape in the middle of the night when all the staff are asleep. Zak has a dream to become a professional wrestler, and he watches an old videotape of this wrestler named The Saltwater Redneck many times and talks to Eleanor and Carl about his dreams of becoming a professional wrestler. Meanwhile, Tyler is a fisherman who is on the run from two men who want to hurt him. Zak hides in Tyler’s fishing boat, and Tyler finds Zak after he escapes the two men who are after him. At first, Tyler wants nothing to do with Zak, but Zak has no family and no one else he can trust, so Tyler lets him go with him. Zak and Tyler develop a beautiful friendship, and Eleanor, who at first is trying to get Zak to come back to the care facility under orders from her boss, ends up developing a romantic relationship with Tyler and re-evaluating the way she has treated Zak.

The film shows the discrimination that people with intellectual disabilities often face. As someone who doesn’t have Down Syndrome and has only met a few people who have Down Syndrome, I can’t speak for people who have Down Syndrome. But the movie showed me that Zak had to overcome a lot of prejudice from others who thought he wouldn’t be able to achieve his dreams just because he has an intellectual disability. It also showed how hurtful slurs used against people with intellectual disabilities are, in particular the r- word (I don’t like saying it anymore, so I would just Google “the r-word” if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Growing up, I often heard the r-word used in casual conversation by able-bodied people like me, and they would often use the r-word to describe each other, themselves, or inanimate objects. I even used the r-word many times in casual conversation just because everyone else around me used it and I thought it was harmless to call my binder the r-word or even when I made a mistake, instead of calling myself “stupid” I would call myself the r-word.

However, I didn’t understand how hurtful and outdated slurs like the r-word actually were until I got to college and was doing research in the archives at the library. In the archives, there were some articles that students with intellectual disabilities had done calling out the r-word and other slurs used against people with intellectual disabilities, and it was also my first time learning about ableism, which is discrimination against people who have disabilities. I grew up in a conservative Texas town, so there wasn’t much information about ableism, but when I got to college on the East Coast, I started learning more about other forms of discrimination besides racism, sexism and homophobia. I learned about sizeism, which is discrimination of people based on their body size, and ageism, which is discrimination of people based on their age. Of course, I probably shouldn’t generalize because there are people in Texas who are aware that this kind of discrimination isn’t ok and are speaking up about it, just as there are people in Massachusetts who don’t know about ableism, sizeism or ageism. I, too, as I mentioned above, was very ignorant about ableism and would use often ableist language growing up because I grew up with people saying it like it was no big deal, so I assumed it was no big deal. In high school, we had students who were in special education, and I often had pre-conceived ideas and assumptions about people with intellectual disabilities.

But watching this movie made me reflect on these biased ideas I had in my head about people with intellectual disabilities. There is a scene where Tyler, Eleanor and Zak are on a raft in the water, and they end up having a conversation involving the R-word. Eleanor doesn’t think Zak is capable of doing a lot of things without supervision. Tyler thinks that Eleanor is presuming that Zak is the r-word and he has Zack hold his breath under water so that he doesn’t hear Tyler use the r-word. Tyler tells her that when Eleanor thinks Zak is the r-word, she is saying that he isn’t capable of doing things. Eleanor gets upset and tells Tyler she never called Zak the r-word, but Tyler tells her that she is treating Zak as if he was the r-word. There is an earlier scene where Tyler tells Zak that he can’t come with him on his journey to escape from the guys he owes money to, and Zak stays behind. Tyler comes back to find a kid shouting at Zak to jump into a lake even though Zak doesn’t want to, and the kid calls Zak the r-word. Tyler shouts at the kid to leave Zak alone and punches the kid. Tyler doesn’t think he can help Zak, especially since he is dealing with his own issues, but Zak places his trust in Tyler since Tyler doesn’t abandon him like everyone else did. Tyler also doesn’t condescend to Zak or make him feel like he needs to be babied or treated differently just because he has Down syndrome. Tyler doesn’t have any friends or family he can depend upon, and his brother died, so he is grappling with a lot of grief and loneliness. He doesn’t have anyone he can trust, so at first, it’s hard for him to open up to Zak about himself, even his name and where he is from. But Zak doesn’t try to pry into Tyler’s private life; he also doesn’t have any friends, so he and Tyler pretty much only have each other. Tyler teaches Zak how to be resilient and become physically stronger. Along the way, he teaches Zak how to fish, how to shoot a rifle and other survival skills that no one at the care facility could have taught him. When Zak tells him that he wants to meet the Saltwater Redneck, a pro-wrestler who he admires, Tyler doesn’t know who the Saltwater Redneck is, but he promises to take Zak to meet him. Even with all the challenges they face, Zak also shows Tyler and Eleanor that he is capable even with his disability and that he doesn’t need people to condescend to him or feel sorry for him.

The music for the film is incredible, though. I love old Motown music, and lately I have been enjoying listening to The Staple Singers. I don’t know their entire song catalog, so listening to “Freedom Highway” was a new one for me. The song plays when Zak is trying to escape from the care facility he is staying at and ends up getting caught, and the song continues to play while Tyler is out on the river fishing and gets chased by two guys who are after him. The song was perfect for the opening because it is an old song with gospel rhythms, and the film takes place in the southern United States. I couldn’t stop listening to the song after hearing it in the movie.

January 9, 2025: grits, Jimmy Carter’s funeral and my irrational fear of bugs

I left my alarm clock off this morning because I didn’t have work today. The roads were icy and there was snow, so they advised folks to stay home. I don’t think there was enough snow for me to make a snow man, and frankly, I didn’t want to freeze my ass off, so I stayed indoors. Thankfully, my power and heat stayed on, which is a huge blessing because in 2021 we had a horrible winter storm called Uri and it knocked pretty much everyone’s power out here in Texas. I have to count my blessings every day, which is what I did when I woke up. I have had a rather rough time because I’m not sure if I’m experiencing panic attacks, anxiety attacks or just a general feeling of unease that comes with being a human being in a world full of chaos. But I found myself ruminating about what happened the day before at work, and what I didn’t accomplish. I had a crazy workload yesterday, and I felt overwhelmed, like I didn’t get as much done as I wanted, so I was pretty dang hard on myself. I tend to ruminate about a lot of negative stuff, so when I wake up in the morning, if I am too worried to get out of bed (and too snuggled under the covers to confront the challenges of daily living) I read something. From a physical book. Lately, I’ve been reading Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and also reading a darkly comic memoir by Jenny Lawson called Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, which has a taxidermized mouse wearing a Shakespearian costume on the cover against a gray background. I also love reading The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, which is a compilation of letters that a Japanese Buddhist reformer named Nichiren Daishonin wrote in the 1200s. When I feel too scared about the state of the world, reading these letters encourages me to persevere. So, I woke up and read for a little bit, then figured I needed to get my morning routine going with some breakfast. I grabbed my little orange bottles of Zoloft and Buspar and headed over to the kitchen to make some breakfast. I dug out some bread from the freezer and made myself some toast. I pulled open the bottom drawer and took out the container of Quaker old-fashioned grits. Since I didn’t have work today, I figured it would be the best time for me to make grits. I filled up a saucepan with water and threw a little bit of salt into the water. My toast popped up, and I gave it a nice spread of peanut butter. I popped open the pill bottles and took my medications with my peanut butter toast. As I waited for the water to boil, I decided to recite my morning Buddhist prayers. I got in front of my family’s wooden altar and got out my prayer book and beads. Every morning and evening, as part of my daily Buddhist practice, I recite excerpts from the 2nd and 16th chapters of this Buddhist scripture called The Lotus Sutra, which teaches that everyone has an inherent life condition called Buddhahood, which is characterized by wisdom, compassion and courage. As I chanted, I remembered the passage I read this morning in a letter called “On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime,” and in the passage Nichiren is telling the person he is addressing the letter to that in order to free themselves from the sufferings of birth and death, the person needs to understand that their life is the law of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, which we chant over and over again in order to bring out this life condition of Buddhahood from within our lives. As I chanted to the scroll in my Buddhist altar, called the Gohonzon (the fundamental object of devotion that embodies the law of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo) I reaffirmed that my life was the law of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and that I was absolutely and inherently worthy of respect.

I finished my prayers and went to check on the water. Little bubbles emerged from the depths of the saucepan to boil up to the surface, and so I measured out a cup of grits with a measuring cup and put the grits into the saucepan of boiling water. I turned the stove onto a lower heat and turned the kitchen timer on for twenty minutes. I got out my laptop and prepared to work on my writing project. But then I checked YouTube because it’s my go-to source for entertainment, and I found in my video feed that they were live-streaming the state funeral of Jimmy Carter from Washington, D.C. I decided to watch it, especially since I didn’t have to go to work today. I watched as members of the military guard carried his casket, draped with the United States flag. The members marched in place, and took step by step, halting with each step they took as they brought Jimmy Carter’s casket into the giant cathedral before the service began. The kitchen timer went off and I checked on my grits. They were thick and ready to eat. I opened the fridge and took out the vegan butter and maple syrup. I love a little sweetness in my grits, so I poured a little syrup over the grits and stirred them together in my ceramic bowl and then topped it off with some pecans. I dug in while I watched the funeral on YouTube. The grits were delicious and had a nice Southern-style sweetness to them. I polished off the entire pot of grits, which was enough for four servings. The guard was still bringing in the casket, and then a commercial interrupted the proceeding. I sighed and decided to watch the funeral on the television in our living room. I grabbed a knitting project that I am working on and with my belly full of Southern-style grits, I waddled over to the television room and sat down on the sofa as if I was pregnant with a food baby and didn’t want the baby to accidentally come out of me. I flipped through the channels, and came to CBS, where they were showing the state funeral for Jimmy Carter. I grabbed my knitting needles and knitted away. Knit 1, purl 1, knit 1, purl 1…my fingers crisscrossed the needles with each stitch and loop of acrylic blue yarn over the needles. I saw Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, Donald Trump and Melania Trump, and George W. Bush and Barbara Bush seated together.

Suddenly, I heard a loud scratching noise, and then a buzz. Oh, shit. We have had a serious bug problem with these large wasp-like beetles coming into our house unannounced. I understand they needed a warm place away from the cold, but all I could think was, OH NO IT’S A BIG-ASS BUG AND IT’S GOING TO COME AFTER ME!!! I screamed the minute I saw the big flying black bug buzzing against the wall and ran out of the room. My parents heard me, and I grabbed the spray bottle of rubbing alcohol. My mom sleepily walked over to the garage, fresh from a deep sleep until I woke her up with my blood-curdling scream, and she grabbed the broom. I sprayed at the bug and retreated as he raced in my direction. I yelped and ran off, and came back, fearful. He was dancing around the lights and trying to escape the poisonous spray of the isopropyl alcohol. I sprayed him again, and he danced his final waltz in the air before collapsing to the ground. With the little ounce of life that he had left in him, he tried to combat the fumes of the alcohol, but he was no match. I squished him with the magazine I had on hand, and he was gone. I thought I had taken out the last of these critters, but as I was about to enjoy some Yoga with Adriene, another big black bug touched my shoulder and buzzed past me, greeting me with an innocent, “Hey girl! You missed me?” as if the bug I killed reincarnated itself so that it was never really dead. I screamed bloody murder again and ran out of the room. I quivered and called my parents for help, and my dad looked around the room to see if Mr. Big-Ass Flying Black Beetle was really in my room. He could not find him, and so I decided to take my laptop into the living room and do my yoga there. After doing a few downward dogs and cat-cow yoga poses, my mind was still ruminating on how big and scary that bug was, and how thirsty he was to avenge the earlier death of his brother by coming after me. I remembered that my floor had quite a few dust bunnies and hairballs, and that in general my room was still very messy and cluttered, so I decided to put my worries to rest by doing some cleaning around the house. I grabbed some Trader Joe’s peppermint castile soap and mixed it in a silver bowl with some water from the tap. I scrubbed down the countertop, the kitchen cupboards and the baseboards with the soap-water mixture as Giveon’s crooned from my laptop speakers a beautiful song called “Like I Want You.” My golden hoop earrings dangled from my earlobes as I got on my knees to scrub those baseboards. I feel like such a badass bitch wearing these new hoop earrings. I feel so much sexier for some reason. I finished and dusted the floor with the Swiffer mop and cringed as I collected loads of dust and little stray hairballs left from many a natural-hair braiding session I have had in my bedroom. I wiped down my headboard and the baseboards, and I found Mr. Big Black Flying Bug clinging for dear life to my orange box of yarn and knitting needles. He didn’t want to die. I get that. If I were living a bug’s life, too, I probably wouldn’t want to get squished. But seriously, the bug was scaring the shit out of me, so I decided to put it out of its misery and kill it. The moment I saw it, I let out a war whoop (which was actually just another blood-curdling scream) and squished the little guy with my Swiffer pad. That ought to finish him, I thought. But again, little guy didn’t want me to kill him, so he flapped his wings and continued to traverse along the edge of the knitting box. I squealed like a little girl while my mom asked me where the bug was, thinking the bug was going to exact his vengeance on me right then and there. When he tried to get away, crawling on the floor, I finally stomped him out with my woolen blue slipper, saying, “Ha! You’re dead!” I felt bad, but I knew that if I woke up screaming in the middle of the night because the bug touched me again, I wouldn’t get any sleep and would also keep my parents up for the umpteenth time with my screams. I laugh because I’m in my 30s and have had this irrational fear of bugs since I was really young, and it hasn’t gone away. I think I need to keep going to therapy.

Movie Review: La Vie En Rose (2007)

When I was in middle school, I was watching the Academy Awards, and the nominees for Best Actress in a Leading Role came on. They show the clips from the films for each nominee, and the French actress Marion Cotillard was nominated for her movie, La Vie En Rose, a biopic about the late French singer Edith Piaf. When I saw the clip the first time, it blew me away. And Marion Cotillard won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role that evening.

Fast forward to 10 pm tonight, and I just finished watching La Vie En Rose. I can now see why Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for her portrayal of Edith Piaf. I had seen Marion Cotillard in one film when I was younger. She played Josephine, Edward Bloom’s pregnant wife in the movie Big Fish, but in that movie, she is not the main character. She is a supporting character. When I watched La Vie En Rose, I got to see Marion Cotillard playing in a leading role. To be quite honest, I didn’t know anything about Edith Piaf, and I had only listened to a couple of her songs in passing. I had only one song of hers on my iPod nano (I can’t remember which song, but I think it was “Hymne a L’Amour”) and I heard her famous song, “Non, je ne regrette nien” on the film soundtracks of movies like Babe, Pig in the City and Inception. And I have heard “La Vie En Rose,” but mostly covers of the song by Louis Armstrong and other artists. I didn’t know anything about Edith Piaf’s life at all before watching the movie. All I know is that Marion Cotillard put her heart and soul into playing the role of this woman, whose life was short and also filled with many challenges, including childhood abuse, emotional neglect, substance abuse, grief, and loneliness.

The movie reminded me of a movie I saw a few years ago called Judy. It stars Renee Zellweger as Judy Garland, and like Edith, Judy died in her 40s. And like Marion Cotillard, Renee Zellweger is an incredible actress and was so incredible in her portrayal of Judy Garland. Renee Zellweger, like Marion Cotillard, won an award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in a biographical drama. Both of these women were commercially successful but faced a lot of pressure in the public eye and used substances like alcohol and drugs to cope with the stress of their careers. I remember sitting in the hotel room while on vacation, sipping from a little bottle of red wine I found in the minifridge, and watching Judy. By the end, I was a sobbing mess of tissues. I only knew Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but what these biopics show me is that you have to look past the role someone plays in a movie or TV show or on stage, and you get to see them wrestling with all this deep personal stuff when the cameras are off and they are dealing with their pain alone. Edith lived through a lot of tragedy, and it was even more tragic because there is a scene in the film where she is about to die, and it is scary to see her suffering as she faces her death alone. The film doesn’t hold back from showing the suffering that comes with illness and death. Seeing Edith’s gut-wrenching pain and sadness as she lives her final minutes on her deathbed was painful, especially because she had already dealt with so much grief in such a short time. The man she loves, Marcel, dies in a plane crash. She is thinking he is still alive, and she goes over to bring him breakfast, but then her staff inform her that Marcel died in a plane crash. Watching Edith run down the halls, screaming and grieving with tears running down her face, was an emotional rollercoaster. Actually, the entire movie was an emotional rollercoaster. I really loved watching the special feature afterwards where they discuss the movie. Marion Cotillard had a lot of prosthetics on her while playing the role of Edith Piaf, and she said that she tried to bring her own interpretation of Edith rather than just imitating her. I find the process of actors fascinating, especially when they are tasked with playing people who actually lived.

The movie is entirely in French, but I watched it with English subtitles. Honestly, I don’t know if I would have been mature enough to watch this movie the year it came out. I was only 13 at the time, and I don’t know if I would have gotten through the emotional rollercoaster of this movie. Also, there is a lot of mature material in the movie. Edith grew up in a brothel, and one of the women working in the brothel is sexually assaulted. Edith is separated from the women in the brothel, and it is a pretty painful scene to watch because Edith dealt with her mother abandoning her at a young age. I probably wouldn’t have been able to deal with watching the subject matter very well, especially seeing Edith grappling with illness and death. Even at 31, I still couldn’t fathom how painful this woman’s life was. Marion Cotillard showed through her movements and facial expressions the pain that this woman went through in her life. Even though the movie shows a few happy moments of Edith’s life, it doesn’t flinch from showing the grim realities of poverty, addiction and grief. I think after studying Buddhism, I think it helped me think about the movie from a Buddhist perspective. In Buddhism we deal with the four sufferings of birth, aging, sickness and death. Even though someone may be wealthy or famous, they are still a human being at the end of the day, and they are still going to experience these sufferings. Even though Edith lived a short life, she really gave her all to her career, so it was really sad to watch the scenes where they show her later in life when she is unable to continue performing due to her declining health. Watching this movie helped me appreciate the legacy that Edith Piaf left, and it also helped me appreciate Marion Cotillard’s work as an actress. (Also, side note, but I recognized one of the actors in the movie from a movie I saw with Queen Latifah in it called Last Holiday. I found out the actor’s name is Gerard Depardieu.)

La Vie En Rose. 2007. Directed by Olivier Dahan. Starring Marion Cotillard. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, sexual content, brief nudity, language and thematic elements.

Thoughts on the movie Whiplash

Several years ago, I watched a College Humor parody that Weird Al Yankovic did of the movie Whiplash to promote his Mandatory World Tour. In the parody, Al makes it so that it actually looks like he is starring in the movie, and that Terence Fletcher is his instructor. Except that Al is playing the accordion, and not the drums like the main character in the movie. It’s a funny parody because Fletcher is this huge perfectionist who keeps pointing out Al’s mistakes, and at first Al is fine with it because he tells Fletcher at the beginning that he wants to be perfect, but he keeps playing the piece at the tempo he wants, not at the tempo Fletcher wants him to play at. The sketch was hilarious, and I saw it years before I finally watched the movie, Whiplash. I’m glad I watched the parody first, though, because watching the actual movie was a very intense experience that made me think of my own struggles with perfectionism and ambition as a musician, and remembering those experiences isn’t always fun because I look back at the kind of person I was back then, and I was super self-critical and hard on myself about everything (I’m still working on taming my inner critic, but I’ve gotten better at recognizing when I’m talking negatively about myself) and I don’t want to be overly critical of myself anymore.

If you haven’t seen Whiplash, it takes place at a fictional music conservatory in New York City, where an ambitious but shy young jazz drummer named Andrew Neiman enters his freshman year. The movie opens with him practicing for hours in a practice room, and Terence Fletcher, who runs a world-class jazz ensemble, comes in and sees Andrew’s potential. Andrew is starstruck to have met Fletcher because of his reputation, and he expresses interest in wanting to join Fletcher’s ensemble. Andrew starts off in an ensemble where he is not known for being the best player, but then Fletcher visits the class, and everyone is super intimidated by him. Fletcher ends up recruiting Andrew for his jazz ensemble because he can tell that Andrew wants it so badly, and Andrew is so elated to join the group. However, he is in for a really harsh and rude awakening when he realizes that Fletcher is not there to stroke Neiman’s ego or make him feel good about himself. He is there to tear Neiman down until Neiman has a breakdown. Fletcher hears someone playing an out of tune note during rehearsal, and he blames it on one of the horn players. When the kid starts crying, Fletcher shouts at him. Over the course of the movie, Fletcher screams at his students, throws chairs at them, calls them nasty names, humiliates individual students in front of the class and pits the drummers against each other. Andrew ends up taking things to extremes, such as breaking up with his girlfriend, Nicole, so he can pursue his career as a successful jazz drummer. At first, Nicole and Andrew are hitting it off, and Nicole likes Andrew because he seems nice, but then Andrew breaks up with her later on in the movie because he thinks that their relationship is going to hinder him from going after his music dreams. Nicole is deeply hurt and later in the film, when Andrew calls to invite her to a performance of his, she tells him that she would need to ask her boyfriend first. Andrew is hurt because he thought that Nicole would easily forgive him and leave the breakup in the past, but he realizes that Nicole moved on and ended up with someone else.

There is one scene in the movie where Andrew is sitting at the dinner table with his family, and his parents are excitedly talking about his brothers’ achievements in sports and extracurricular activities, but when Andrew tells them excitedly that he got into Terence Fletcher’s jazz ensemble, they kind of go “So what?” or “Who cares?” Andrew tells them that it’s the top jazz ensemble in the nation, and his family asks him where that is going to lead him in the future. Andrew tells them about all these famous musicians who worked really hard at their music to be successful and tells his family he wants to be this huge success as a musician, but the family still doesn’t care about his accomplishments, and Andrew takes this personally and starts to put down his brothers’ achievements, thinking he is better than them because he got into Fletcher’s orchestra. Honestly, this movie resonated with me because I remember in 2016, when I auditioned for this professional orchestra in my hometown, auditioning for this one orchestra became my sole focus, and anything else that didn’t have to do with getting into a professional symphony orchestra took a backseat. I practiced and shredded at my cello for hours upon hours weeks before the audition, cramping my muscles and berating myself over and over for missing notes and not being able to play the piece perfectly. Looking back, I would have probably had a lot more compassion for myself because Don Juan by Richard Strauss, which is a common audition excerpt for symphony orchestra auditions, is a very challenging piece to play and it requires you to play all these notes very fast. It is a beautiful piece to listen to, but it requires a lot of practice to master, and also, if 30-year-old me were talking to 22-year-old me, she would have told her to prepare well in advance instead of trying to cram in hours of practice mere weeks before the audition. 30-year-old me now looks back and while I am grateful for the intensive musical training I underwent and all the hours I have practiced, now when I play my instrument, I try to think long-term about my goals rather than only focusing on getting one audition perfectly, because I realize now how unrealistic it is to expect myself to win an audition perfectly on the first try. Of course, maybe people saw the movie differently, and saw Andrew’s perfectionism as healthy and inspiring, but as someone who went through berating myself and putting myself down, I realized looking back at how I thought about success in my 20s wasn’t very realistic or healthy. I know people say that there is healthy perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism, but I think it’s best to say that there is a difference between healthy striving and perfectionism. Because everyone is going to have their own different version of what “perfect” is, and at the end of the day, it just wasn’t healthy for me to continue pushing myself the way that I was. I still love music and love to play my instrument, but I also have learned to have a life outside of just professional orchestra auditions. I remember when I started working after college at Starbucks, and all I could think about was, “Why am I not playing at Carnegie Hall in New York City right now?” I really wanted to move to New York City to pursue my dream of playing a Carnegie Hall, but back then when I was in my early 20s, I had a very narrow, two-dimensional perspective on success that was just focused on satisfying my own ego. Even though I didn’t win the audition for section cellist, I got on the list of substitute players. I felt kind of crushed, but I asked my orchestra director from college about it, and he encouraged me to not get discouraged about it, which I appreciate looking back because I really wanted to be in that orchestra and beat myself up about it, and I remember while working at Starbucks, I was so impatient to get an opportunity to sub for one of the cellists and I didn’t get any opportunities to sub that year, and I felt rather disappointed. I think in retrospect, dealing with that disappointment and not being able to get what I wanted was probably the best outcome, because I realized that I tied so much of my self-worth and greatness to getting into that symphony orchestra, and I noticed that when I auditioned for other orchestras, I got rejected and would feel so crushed about it. Of course, it’s perfectly normal and healthy to feel disappointment when you don’t ace a test or win a position in an orchestra, but it’s about how you cope with that disappointment. Are you going to throw in the towel and say, fuck it, I am a terrible musician, and I’m not cut out for this career? Or are you going to say, Hey, this really stinks, but it’s not the end of the world and I still know my worth isn’t impacted by whether or not I got into the orchestra.

I think that is why I really loved watching the movie Soul, which I saw a few years ago. If you haven’t seen Soul, it’s about a middle school music teacher named Joe Gardner, who wants to get his big break as a famous jazz musician. He isn’t really happy with his teaching job, or his life in general. He wants to become something great, not lead an ordinary life. However, everything changes when he falls down a manhole while walking down the street, and he falls into a coma. The movie shows how he learns to appreciate his life and not take it for granted after he comes out of his coma, and through his journey as a soul, he realizes the value of his own life and how his worth isn’t based only on how good of a musician he is. Early in the film, Joe wants to impress this legendary saxophonist named Dorothea Williams (played by the beautiful Angela Bassett), but she doesn’t really care about boosting his ego. In fact, she scoffs when he tells her he is a part-time music teacher at a middle school because she doesn’t think that’s a reputable career, so she assumes that he doesn’t have what it takes to be in her jazz band. However, he is so hell-bent on impressing her and while he is performing in the jazz quartet one evening with her, he is dazzling the audience, and Dorothea lets him play quite a few solos. However, after the show is over, even though he got all this applause and recognition, Joe asks her what happens after they played what he thought was his ultimate debut as a jazz musician. Dorothea gives him a huge reality check, though, and tells him that they come back to the club and do the same thing over and over again, play for the same audience every night. Joe realizes that he was so focused on getting his one “big break” as a jazz musician that he ignored so much of what was going on in his daily life. He often took the people and little things in his life for granted, all because he wanted this glamorous career and thought that playing in Dorothea’s quartet was his one shot at being a great musician, but he reflects on what he missed out on in his daily life by focusing only on getting into this lady’s jazz quartet. Honestly, that’s why I really resonated with this movie, because through practicing Nichiren Buddhism, I have learned to appreciate and value my life, whether I play at Carnegie Hall or not. Early on when I was playing music, I was just playing because I loved the music. I wasn’t thinking about conservatory or anything. But as I got older, my teachers started to become more demanding and because I had such a big ego, I would chafe every time my orchestra teacher in senior high school pointed out my mistakes in class. I think all of these music instructors were trying to show me how overly critical I was of myself when I would make mistakes and how arrogant I was at times. I was very fortunate to be able to continue my cello lessons after graduating from college, and I was able to find a wonderful cello instructor and start lessons with him in December of 2016. However, I came into the cello lessons with a sort of cockiness, and I thought, I’ve become an advanced player, so all this guy needs to do is make me a great orchestra musician. I want him to make me the best cellist in the world. He is going to help me make it big as a musician. However, looking back, taking those lessons with him helped me do an incredible amount of human revolution, or inner transformation, because I really did think I was hot shit at the time because I had achieved what I thought was an enviable level of musicianship, but whenever he pointed out my mistakes or got frustrated with me over me repeating these mistakes, it bruised my ego and I would get defensive with him and frustrated with him. As I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and participated in my SGI Buddhist activities, though, I started to really see how arrogant I was becoming and realized that I didn’t need to be arrogant in order to be a great musician. We’re encouraged to chant about our goals and dreams in the Buddhist community I am a part of, and it’s cool because as you continue to practice Buddhism, other parts of your life open up and you begin to see the opportunity in challenging circumstances to create meaning and value. I was so focused on becoming a great musician and playing at Carnegie Hall, and honestly at the time, I thought that Carnegie Hall was the only time I could prove to people that I had “made it” as a classical musician. But I also realized through chanting that I have other skills and interests that I love and enjoy, such as writing and watching movies. I have learned that having a life outside of music is really important, because it helps you gain perspective and realize that the entire planet Earth doesn’t revolve around your success and your ego. I would often feel ashamed to tell people in classical music circles that I had a day job at Starbucks (and later on, a law firm) but after gaining more confidence in myself, I know now that I needed those jobs to gain basic work experience. I remember going to a classical music symposium that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra had for women and people of color who worked in the classical music field, and we had a concert one night where I got to meet the musicians after the concert. I got to talk with one of the cellists in the orchestra, and I thought that she was going to give me this super glamorous insider advice about how to win an orchestra audition and was going to tell me how wonderful being a member of the orchestra was. While she said some great things about working in the orchestra, she said that you also have to deal with a variety of personalities and attend frequent rehearsals. She also encouraged me to not focus only on winning the audition, too, and gave me a realistic perspective on having an orchestra career and auditioning. After we talked, it felt like I been brought down to Earth. Also, talking with my cello teachers helped me because they had been in the professional field for years and had played with orchestras and as soloists, so they were able to give me a realistic picture of what life as a professional musician is really like. I was in my early 20s when I listened to their experiences, and frankly, I wanted them to make a career in a symphony orchestra seem glamorous and effortless. But it’s not like that. Reading the book Reaching Beyond with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Daisaku Ikeda also gave me a more hopeful outlook on being a musician. They said that one’s behavior offstage is just as important as their behavior onstage, so when Wayne was alive, he would treat people with respect even though he was this renowned musician. His Buddhist practice helped him also tap into these endless reserves of creativity and he also used his music to inspire and encourage others, not just for his own personal glory. Herbie Hancock is also the same way. He, too, is a renowned legend in the jazz world, but he always goes back to his Buddhist practice and talks about how it not only helped him tap into those reserves of creativity, but it also helped him value and respect the dignity of all people regardless of their social standing or how much money they made. When I first read the book, I didn’t know if it would apply to me, since I’m trained in classical music and not jazz. But it applied to me very much, because reading the book helped me understand that being a musician is so much more than playing your instrument and it’s definitely not about dazzling people or becoming famous. Music is an expression of people’s humanity, and music has the potential to give people hope and possibility when it doesn’t seem like there is any. I was so focused on stroking my own ego while pursuing this music career, but reading this book encouraged me to go back and chant about my fundamental purpose in life, not just as a musician. Because even if I got my big break at Carnegie Hall, that by itself wouldn’t make me a better (or happier) person. I would still have to show up and go to work like everyone else, and I would have still had to deal with disappointment and failure just like a lot of musicians have to deal with in their careers. But I now play music because I love it and because I want to share it with others.