Category: Uncategorized

Movie Review: Priscilla

Last year I saw the movie Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley. I haven’t seen many of Baz’s other movies, like his remake of The Great Gatsby or Moulin Rouge!, so I wasn’t as familiar with his directing style as I was with someone like Yorgos Lanthimos or Greta Gerwig. Elvis is a movie full of flashy cinematography that brings to life Elvis as the superstar that he was. In the film, there are a few scenes where we see his wife, Priscilla Presley, observing him as he flirts with screaming horny women at his shows while he gyrates to the music. We see him slap her ass affectionately before they head to bed. And we see him crying on the steps in their mansion in Graceland as she grabs her suitcase and leaves him (and their marriage) because she won’t put up with him anymore. But the film mainly shows Elvis’s toxic and tumultuous relationship with his manager, Tom Parker, and it presents a very extroverted version that brings the King of Rock n Roll to life. The focus was on Elvis’s life and not the woman who he was married to.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely loved Elvis. It was a very well-directed movie, and I loved Austin Butler’s acting. The music was incredible. But I was glad when they came out with a biopic about Priscilla Presley because up until then I really didn’t know much about her life and most of the musical biopics that I have watched about famous male musicians are focused on the men and their wives (and oftentimes mistresses) are supporting characters. (Also, it was an A24 distributed film, and I just couldn’t refuse.) The film Priscilla delved more into the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis, and how he actually treated her behind closed doors. This film is about how she meets Elvis and how she ends up finding her freedom and leaving a marriage that left her unhappy and disillusioned. I haven’t seen many of Cailee Spaeny’s previous films, but she was an incredible actress in this movie. Priscilla doesn’t speak much but even with her eyes she communicates so much about what she is feeling. Jacob Elordi also did an incredible job as Elvis Presley, and the film shows him in those private moments when he is with Priscilla. It doesn’t focus on his shows and his tour like Elvis did; instead, it focuses on how Elvis’s constant touring impacted his relationship with Priscilla and how she navigated being married to a famous person. It’s based on a memoir that Priscilla Presley published called Elvis and Me, and I haven’t read it yet but now I want to.

The movie begins in 1959 at the US Air Force Base in West Germany, where Priscilla Beaulieu, who is fourteen years old, is sitting at a bar doing her homework. Priscilla is from Austin, Texas, but she goes to Germany because her father is stationed there. She meets a young man named Terry West, who has a connection with Elvis Presley. He offers to take her to meet him because he, too, is in Germany, and she agrees to meet with him. When she meets Elvis at a party, she is taken in by his charm and his good looks. He is ten years older than her, but she catches his eye, and he starts to ask to see her more often. At first, Priscilla has to tell him that she has to ask her parents’ permission first, and her parents aren’t keen on Elvis because he is much older than Priscilla. However, Elvis is lonely, and his mom passed away, so he wants a woman to keep him company. Priscilla starts to feel bad for him, and she start to hang out with him more. Priscilla becomes Elvis’s girlfriend, and she starts hanging out with him more, and he becomes the sole focus of her life. She daydreams about Elvis in class, she goes through the halls of school feeling lovesick. And then, as their relationship deepens, Elvis has Priscilla gradually change the way she dresses and the way she looks. She starts wearing mascara, she does her hair a different style and she starts to dress in more stylish clothes. He enrolls her in a Catholic school and makes sure that she does her homework and passes her classes while they are in a relationship. The girls at school start to notice that she is in a relationship with Elvis, and they start gossiping about Priscilla. He also gives her drugs and sleeping pills, which end up knocking her out for two days at one point. She wants to have sex with him, but he constantly tells her to hold off on it. He controls every aspect of Priscilla’s life and doesn’t seem to care about what she wants or needs from the relationship. Priscilla graduates from high school and with her parents’ permission, she marries Elvis. However, she soon realizes that her marriage is far from the fairytale she expected it to be, because while Elvis is on tour, she stays at home and waits for him to come back. Meanwhile, she reads that he is having affairs with numerous women, and when she is pregnant with their first child, she finds out that he is having an affair with Nancy Sinatra. Even though she confronts him about his affairs, he tries to beat around the bush and tell her that he loves her. Eventually, she gets fed up and she decides to take taekwondo and find her own friend group, and she starts a new relationship. Even though it is tough to leave him, she realizes that she is not being treated with the respect that she deserves in her marriage to Elvis, and she leaves Graceland.

Honestly, this movie reminded me of season 3 and 4 of The Crown. Prince Charles falls in love with Diana Spencer, even though he is in a relationship with her sister Sarah. Diana is 16 at the time and Charles is older than her, but he is smitten by her when they first meet. They start to want to see each other more often and eventually they get married. However, Diana soon realizes that her marriage to Charles isn’t the fairytale marriage she imagined, as he is emotionally abusive and cheats on her with another woman. In one of the episodes, “Fairytale” Diana is seen rollerblading around Buckingham Palace by herself while everyone else has left the palace and she becomes increasingly lonely. She develops bulimia and is basically living a nightmare where no one respects or values her, including the man she is married to. This reminded me of the scenes in Priscilla where Priscilla has to be in the house all day while her husband is on his tour sleeping with other women. Elvis, like Charles, is controlling and wants control of his wife’s life. When Priscilla asks him about his affairs, he tells her “Oh, it’s nothing. I love you” even when it’s splashed across the papers that he’s sleeping with various women. I think that’s why the last few scenes were a relief, because I was like, Girl, this man does not love you. You need to get out and she finally left Graceland because she realized she wanted to be happy, and she wasn’t happy being with this man. I also thought about the movie Spencer with Kristen Stewart because that film shows how Charles’ affair with Camila affects Diana psychologically and emotionally, and how she finds her freedom and leaves the confines of Buckingham Palace to become her own person. Spencer shows how Diana struggles with bulimia and being confined in the walls of the palace, having to follow all these rules and restrictions and then finally realizing she deserves to be free (sadly, in real life, Diana died in a car crash, which is why it was so emotionally hard for me to watch this last season of The Crown because it shows the events leading up to the car crash and it just made me think, Wow, I really wish I could have met Diana. I was only four when she died, and as a kid I didn’t know much about her, but after watching Spencer and The Crown, I felt sad that I never got to meet her.)

There was one scene in the movie that reminded me of another movie I saw a while ago. In Priscilla, Elvis is listening to his records, and he is frustrated with the quality of the records, and Priscilla is just standing there quietly in this room with Elvis and these record executives, and Elvis asks her what she thinks about the records. When she shyly shares her honest opinion about one song and how it’s not that great, he throws a chair at her, narrowly missing her. He then proceeds to hug her and tell her “Baby, sorry I lost my temper. I love you so much.” He wanted to be told that he was a great musician, and when his wife didn’t tell him that, he took out his anger on her. It reminded me of this movie I saw called The Wife, which is about a man named Joe who receives the Nobel Prize and his wife, Joan, is excited for him, but as the movie progresses, it becomes more apparent that Joan was the one writing the stories for him and he was taking credit for all of her work. There is a flashback to when Joan and Joe are first married, and he is trying to become a writer so that he doesn’t have to keep his job as a college professor. When she reads his story manuscript, he wants her honest opinion, and she tells him that it’s not that good. When she gives her honest opinion, he gets upset with her and tells her that if she doesn’t provide him reassurance that he is a good writer, that he will leave her and their marriage. Joan doesn’t want him to leave, so she puts herself down by saying that she will never be as good a writer as he is. Throughout the movie, Joan, like Priscilla, navigates life as a quiet and private person, while her husband Joe, is more extroverted and networks at parties while putting down his son, David’s, dreams of becoming a writer. However, it’s clear that Joan is the one who should be getting all the credit, not her husband, who didn’t write the books himself but forced her to spend hours and hours a day away from their kid so that she could write the books for him and have them published under his name. Even though a biographer named Nathaniel wants to publish all these private details about her marriage to Joe, Joan refuses because she is a private person and wants to remain confidential about her life. Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t harbor a lot of hurt and anger towards her husband; she totally does. But she just doesn’t want all the publicity and she is also aware that Nathaniel could get so many details of her personal life incorrect and provide an inaccurate portrayal of her marriage to Joe.

The dynamic between Priscilla and Elvis sort of reminded me of another movie called Lovelace. Lovelace is about Linda Lovelace, who fell in love with a man named Chuck Traynor and was coerced into the pornography industry. The film doesn’t focus on Linda’s films; it focuses on the sexual abuse and trauma she suffered in her marriage to Chuck. When Linda first meets Chuck, she is trying to escape her home life. She got pregnant in her early 20s and she has to live at home with her parents, who she doesn’t have a good relationship with. When she and her friend are out at a party, Linda finds people watching a pornographic movie and a much older man named Chuck finds her attractive and leads her into the pornography business, where she becomes a celebrity and films a movie called Deep Throat. Chuck starts off being charming, and even though he is older than Linda, Linda sees Chuck as the only way out of her unhappy home life, so she starts spending time with him. As she becomes more involved in the pornography business, her parents start to become concerned. In one scene, she excitedly tells her parents that she got to meet Sammy Davis, Jr., but her parents realize that their daughter has changed and even though she achieved this fame, it’s in an industry that doesn’t have a great reputation. However, as Linda and Chuck continue their marriage, he becomes abusive and hits her several times and forces her to have sex with him. Even though she achieved star status, it came at a huge cost where she was disrespected and abused. She finally has to get the help of someone who gets a bunch of guys to beat up Chuck, and she leaves the pornography industry. She ends up in a loving marriage with a child, and became a born-again Christian, speaking out about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Chuck.

Watching Priscilla and seeing how Priscilla transformed through the course of her marriage to Elvis reminded me of this part in the book Discussions on Youth that I read. There is a chapter called “What is Love?” and in the chapter, Daisaku Ikeda talks about how it’s important to find happiness within our own lives and that happiness is not something that someone, like a lover, can hand to us. I have little experience being in relationships to be honest, but a few years ago I fell in love with someone who was quite charming, and I had kindled a crush on this person in the distant past, but I found myself escaping into fantasies and daydreams of me and this person being together, raising a family and growing old together. This crush pretty much took over my life, and I thought, One day, we are going to marry and be happy together. It’s why when I was watching Priscilla, I really resonated with the scenes where Priscilla is daydreaming about Elvis in class and how her relationship with Elvis starts to impact her performance in school because her love for Elvis starts to consume her daily life. I let my crush on this person consume me to the point where even hearing his voice was enough to make me melt into a puddle. I remember in junior year of college filling my journal with entries about his looks, his charm, the way he flirted with me. I was so lovesick after we fell in love that I couldn’t even eat breakfast and would leave many a plate of perfectly good, scrambled tofu unfinished as I daydreamed about him in the dining hall, during class, during my summer break.

However, I wasn’t willing to accept the fact that he had a girlfriend already and continued to live in a fantasy world with me and my dream husband being happy together. It took him proposing to his girlfriend for me to snap out of my fantasy and realize that this person was happy in his current relationship and that I needed to move on and not idealize our relationship just because we had feelings for each other in the past. I fell into a pit of despair, and honestly it took a lot of therapy and Buddhist chanting for me to ease my way out of the hellhole of emotional pain I was in. I think what helped during this time was reading a passage from Daisaku Ikeda’s book Discussions on Youth, because in this chapter he says “happiness is not something that someone else, like a lover, can give to us. We have to achieve it for ourselves. And the only way to do so is by developing our character and capacity as human beings–by fully maximizing our potential.” (Discussions on Youth, page 64) After reading this and chanting about it, I have gradually begun to see that I was seeking happiness outside myself. I was depending on this young man to give me happiness, and I finally understood after three years of really digging into my Buddhist practice and seeking therapy that I had to become happy whether I ended up with him or not. My self-worth had become so tied up in wanting to be with this person that I lost sight of myself, my goals and my dreams. It was painful to confront the fact that I had been crushing on someone who was with someone else, and that love would forever go unrequited. But I am also realizing that there are other great people out there and that I have the potential to attract someone great in my life. I also realize I deserve a relationship filled with love and mutual respect. It’s not easy to believe this every day but it’s something I want to keep telling myself more often.

Anyway, I need to wrap this review up because it’s gotten really long, and I am starting to ramble at this point. Thank you for reading and to close, I recommend Priscilla because it is a really good movie. Also, the soundtrack for the movie is incredible. I went on YouTube and listened to many of the songs because I love old hits.

Priscilla. 2023. Directed by Sofia Coppola. Rated R For drug use and some language.

Movie Review: Causeway (in honor of Memorial Day)

I’m pretty late in writing this post since Memorial Day happened last week, but I wanted to squeeze in a movie about veterans to commemorate the day. I was figuring out what movies to watch for Memorial Day, but I have a weak stomach and probably couldn’t sit through Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan, even if these are critically acclaimed movies. However, I remember trying to catch up on my Oscar-nominated movies last year, and I missed one of the nominees. It’s a movie called Causeway, and it stars Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry (I was almost going to type “Brian Austin Green” because I watched an episode of Abbott Elementary and Barbara Howard keeps mixing up Black celebrities’ names and White celebrities’ names. She says she loves Brian Austin Green, but she meant another actor, Brian Tyree Henry.) I saw the trailer, and I love A24 movies, so I was pretty excited from the beginning to see this movie. I am forever thankful I have access to Apple TV, because Causeway is an Apple TV movie.

Causeway is about a young woman named Lynsey, who returns from fighting in Afghanistan to her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana, after suffering a traumatic brain injury. The beginning of the film shows how she goes through rehabilitation and has to learn how to speak and walk again after the injury. She also has to take several medications and suffers severe PTSD. She leaves the rehabilitation center even though the person taking care of her doesn’t think she is ready to leave, and she moves back home to her mother’s house. She gets a job cleaning pools, but while she is driving the truck, she has a panic attack and cannot steer the truck and ends up crashing it while driving through a busy intersection. She takes the damaged truck to a mechanic named James (Brian Tyree Henry) and has him get it fixed. He tells her that he will call her when it is fixed, and she says she doesn’t know her phone number. At first, he thinks she is kidding, but she tells him she is actually serious that she doesn’t remember her number. He develops a deep understanding towards her, and they develop an incredible friendship.

This movie reminded me of another film I watched called Mudbound. In the film, a white couple named Henry and Laura McAllen move near a Black family named the Jacksons in 1940s Mississippi, and they have to navigate racial tension. Ronsel Jackson and Jamie McAllen both serve in the war. Even though they fought in different units, they come back feeling disillusioned and lost after the war. The rest of the family can’t see eye-to-eye, but Ronsel and Jamie develop a meaningful friendship and share with each other their experiences fighting in the war. Jamie experiences PTSD and has serious flashbacks to when his fellow pilot got killed in battle. Ronsel comes back to a world of Jim Crow racism where he can’t go through the front door of a shop like white people do just because he is Black, and where he gets called “boy” and the N-word. Both Jamie and Ronsel struggle to readjust to life back at home, and even though they live in a segregated community, they treat each other like brothers and friends. In Causeway, James empathizes with Lynsey because he was in a traumatic car accident and he lost his leg and his nephew, Antoine, who died in the accident. Both James and Lynsey dealt with the worst kind of suffering imaginable, and due to their shared experiences, they develop a very deep connection of trust and respect. There is one scene where James takes Lynsey out to eat and a guy hits on Lynsey when she is trying to enjoy her time with James in peace. Lynsey lies and tells the guy she has a boyfriend, and James tells the guy to back off. After the guy leaves, Lynsey tells James that she doesn’t have a boyfriend and while they are leaving the diner she tells him that she is actually a lesbian. But James is respectful of that, and they end up smoking weed and drinking beer on a bench in a basketball court. Lynsey opens up about her brain injury, her brother’s drug addiction and how her mom was the only one left in their house, and James tells her about the car accident he was in. I think what their interactions showed me is that vulnerability takes courage and it’s not easy to open up to people we don’t know, but once we do it can open the doors to a beautiful connection.

Even though I don’t have PTSD, I felt I could kind of relate to Lynsey’s struggle with mental health. She goes to the doctor, and he goes over her medications, and she tells him that she wants to stop taking the medications. He tells her that getting off the medications could cause depression, seizures and other side effects, and that she is probably functioning precisely because she is taking the medication. He then has her tell him in more detail about the brain injury she suffered, and she discusses it in more detail, reliving the nightmare that she lived through. She later tells the doctor she wants to redeploy, but he tells her she might not want to do that because she suffered a traumatic injury, so she needs significant time to recover from the injury, especially since the injury impacted her mental health. But she tells him that she wants to redeploy because serving in the war made her feel like she had a purpose, while back home in New Orleans she doesn’t feel like she has a purpose. She tells her mom that she wants to redeploy, and her mother tells her to not go back. Her mom tells her that a friend of hers is hiring in an office she works at and encourages Lynsey to take the job, but Lynsey says that she is already employed cleaning pools. Her mother is disappointed that she is cleaning pools instead of working a comfortable office job, but Lynsey tells her that she can’t work in an office at the moment while she is trying to recover from the injury, especially since she is still just getting back to life at home. I remember when I was in my junior year of college and I suffered a serious depressive episode, and I came home for winter break and my parents found out I was depressed and they sent me to a therapist, who referred me to a psychiatrist. However, I didn’t think I needed to get on antidepressants, so I decided not to go. I also begged my parents to let me go back to school and my parents asked, “Are you sure?” because they were (reasonably) worried after what happened, but I told them I would be fine, and that I just wanted to graduate. However, I came back for the second semester, and it was even harder, especially because I still wasn’t seeking professional treatment for the depression and kept it hidden from so many people. I felt deeply alone, and I had no friends in the new dormitory I was in, so I couldn’t really talk to anyone about what I was going through because I didn’t think anyone would understand.

However, I remember there was a young woman who lived two doors down from me and somehow, she saw deep down that I was depressed, and so she showed me one day that she made a WordPress blog page for me with a message saying, “It’s important to SHARE.” I can’t remember what each letter stood for, unfortunately, but she made it for me because she saw I was really going through a lot of sadness, and she wanted to be there for me. The first week of college, she asked me for directions to a building on campus and we ended up having a really great conversation as we walked. I didn’t know that even just an interaction with someone could save my life, but looking back I have so much appreciation for this person because I really was suffering and felt I had no one to talk to, and she was the only one who could see I was going through something even though I hadn’t opened up to her about my depression. I think watching Causeway showed me that it’s important to ask for help, especially when it comes to struggling with mental illness. The film shows that asking for help isn’t easy, and it often comes with feelings of shame. Lynsey wants to live her life normally again after the brain injury, but she needs to spend a lot of time in recovery. She cannot do a lot of stuff on her own and has to have someone help her. She ends up moving back home, which she doesn’t want to do because she doesn’t feel like she has a purpose living at home anymore. There is one scene where James opens up about the car accident that he was in that killed his nephew. James’s fiancée was in the car accident, and after her son died, she left James, so now James lives by himself. He offers to let Lynsey stay with him because he is lonely and wants to have companionship, but she politely declines and decides to continue living with her mother. However, Lynsey realizes that her mother isn’t looking out for her daughter’s best interest. In one scene, they are in a pool in their backyard just spending time with each other, but then Lynsey’s mother gets a call from someone and leaves Lynsey sitting by herself. Lynsey decides that her mother doesn’t actually care about her life, and she decides to eventually go live with James. I kind of related to Lynsey’s struggle because at first when I moved home, I just needed a place to crash, but I was also incredibly depressed. I hadn’t finished addressing the mental health issues I dealt with in college, so I needed time to address them after college. I remember spending days lying in bed as I searched for jobs, getting rejection after rejection. Most of my friends lived in other parts of the country, and I didn’t see them as much, so I got really lonely. I think having my Buddhist community around was so important during that time because the people in the community supported me and encouraged me not to give up. Even though I didn’t get the symphony job I wanted, I got a job at Starbucks and looking back, that was the job I needed because I needed to gain some basic work experience. In retrospect, I think at the time, I needed to take care of my mental health and focus on paying off my student loans rather than trying to get the job at the symphony. In Causeway, even though Lynsey’s mom tells her she needs a better job than cleaning pools, Lynsey likes the work she does with the pools and it’s where she and James hang out a lot.

Honestly, even within the first ten minutes of Causeway I was crying a lot. Even though I don’t have PTSD, just seeing how Lynsey really struggles through recovery and with her mental health made me think about my own recovery from my depressive episodes. I wanted to just go back to being busy all the time and running around on high energy 24/7, but my depression was a wake-up call for me to slow down and take care of my health. Having depression made it hard for me to do a lot of things I took for granted, and there have been many times it sapped my will to live, but now that I am recovering, I am taking everything a day at a time. I also began to appreciate the little things that I take for granted, such as waking up and brushing my teeth, eating food, and getting sleep. I think also the film score in Causeway was really beautiful and so I think that is why I cried. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing this movie again. It was a really powerful and heartfelt film. Also, the acting was incredible! I remember seeing Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, and she was a really good actress in that movie. And Brian Tyree Henry was in another movie I saw called Widows, which was also really good (I saw it three times because it was THAT good.)

Causeway. 2022. Directed by Lila Neugebauer. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry and Linda Emond. Rated R for some language, sexual references ad drug use.

TV Review: Season 6, part 2 of The Crown

Well, it’s official. I finally finished watching the last part of the last season of The Crown, a biographical drama on Netflix depicting the life of the late Queen Elizabeth II. This later season covers some crucial turning points in the lives of the people in the royal family. In episode 8, “Ritz,” Margaret, Elizabeth’s younger sister, has to confront serious health issues. She suffers a serious stroke while partying with her friends. She is reciting a poem while smoking a Chesterfield cigarette, and then she loses consciousness, and she hears loud ringing in her ears. Before she knows it, she has collapsed. She gets serious medical attention, and the doctors tell her she has to make serious changes to her lifestyle, one of which is that she cannot smoke any more cigarettes or drink alcohol. In the earlier seasons, Margaret is seen in just about every scene smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of alcohol. Even after she gets a lung operation (the same one that her father, King George, underwent because he, too, smoked a lot), she continues to smoke. However, as she gets older, the doctors tell her that she cannot continue smoking and drinking anymore because they could be triggering her strokes. This is really painful for Margaret, and she starts to have a “screw-it” mentality, thinking, “Well, I’m going to die anyway.” After she gets her first stroke, she is shown having to learn how to speak and walk again, and the staff are shown dumping her many bottles of whiskey and her Chesterfield cigarettes down the toilet. While on vacation with her longtime friend, Ann, she still smokes cigarettes and drinks alcohol, and while in the shower, she experiences the ringing in her ears and then collapses. She turns on the hot water and collapses, leaving her with serious burns on her feet. Elizabeth is worried about Margaret’s health, but Margaret tells her that it doesn’t matter anymore and that she is going to die anyway, so she might as well do what she wants. Margaret’s birthday is coming up, and she wants to celebrate her birthday at The Ritz. However, Elizabeth doesn’t want anyone to know about her time at The Ritz because she is still a public figure and anything she reveals about her past could be used against her, so when Margaret tries to bring it up at her birthday celebration, Elizabeth cuts her off and gives a moving speech about her relationship with Margaret. There is a flashback to May 8, 1945, to when Margaret and Elizabeth are looking out the window and seeing everyone celebrating Victory Day in the streets because World War II has ended and the Allied Powers, which included Britain, won. Margaret and Elizabeth leave Buckingham Palace, which they are not supposed to do, and go to a hotel in London called The Ritz. Elizabeth thinks they shouldn’t be doing this because it’s against the rules, but Margaret just wants to party and have a good time. An African American soldier leads Elizabeth downstairs to a jazz club where people are partying and dancing. Elizabeth dances with the soldier and has a lot of fun, and Margaret and her friends go downstairs to find Elizabeth dancing and so they join in. They walk back together to Buckingham Palace the next day. This memory is significant because so much has changed between Margaret and Elizabeth since Elizabeth became Queen. Before becoming queen, Margaret and Elizabeth were sisters having fun and running around the palace. But there is one scene in one of the seasons that sets up the tension between Elizabeth and Margaret as adults. Since she is firstborn, Elizabeth faces a lot more pressure to keep herself together, and her father, the king, trains her in government and politics because she is destined to become queen when he passes away. Elizabeth feels a lot of pressure, especially since she is reserved while Margaret is outgoing. Margaret tells her that she could be queen because she likes to boss people around, but when Tommy Lascelles, the private secretary in the palace, hears of this, he immediately tells Margaret that she is not fit to be queen and that Elizabeth is. When Elizabeth becomes queen, she begins to distance herself from Margaret. Margaret wants to do what she wants, including marrying Peter Townsend, who she has an affair with. However, Elizabeth can’t let Margaret do what she wants anymore since there are laws and structures that end up prohibiting Margaret from marrying Peter. Peter ends up getting kicked out of the palace and has to spend time abroad away from Margaret, and Peter ends up marrying someone else, leaving Margaret feeling frustrated and resentful towards Elizabeth. Even as they become adults, Margaret asks for work to do, but Elizabeth can’t just give her a job because she is under a lot of restrictions as well about what she can and cannot do as queen. So, Margaret has to find work to do, and while seeking therapy for her mental health, she ends up finding out about two cousins who were cast out by the royal family for having mental illness and tracks them down. Honestly, I admire Margaret in the show for doing this because quite a few characters in the show struggle with their mental health, yet it’s seen as taboo to discuss it. In season 4, Princess Diana suffers from an eating disorder but no one in the royal family asks if she is doing okay. They just think she is acting out or sulking, but in reality, she is in a terrible unhappy marriage with a man who has been unfaithful to her, and not only that, but Camilla, the woman he is having an affair with, relishes in manipulating the young Diana into feeling worse about herself.

Season 6, part 2, shows how Diana’s sons, William and Harry, grapple with the death of their mother, Princess Diana, and their strained relationship with their dad, Charles. William faces a lot of pressure because he is the older of the two siblings, and as the season continues, Harry and William’s relationship grows increasingly tense. William argues that he faces a lot more pressure than Harry in the public eye, and Harry becomes envious that William is seen as the perfect child while he, Harry, is seen as the redundant child, the spare. (Honestly, after watching this season, I want to read Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare.) In a later episode, Harry and William go to a party that is themed “Colonials and Natives.” William dresses up as a lion, while Harry decides to wear a Nazi uniform with a swastika on the armband. At first, it seems like no one notices, but two students end up taking a picture of Harry’s Nazi uniform and share it with the press, and the newspapers eat this up. Obviously, the royal family isn’t happy to know that Harry did this when they read the morning papers the next day, and Harry feels a lot of humiliation and anger after finding out that someone took a photo of him wearing the uniform and sent it to the press. While meeting with the Queen, Prime Minister Tony Blair tries to make it seem like it was no big deal, and that Harry was just being a teenage boy who didn’t know any better, but Queen Elizabeth tells him that Harry did this two weeks before Buckingham Palace was going to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, so they can’t just pretend like it was no big deal. This made me think of when photos and videos of Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau wearing blackface resurfaced, and Trudeau addressed it and apologized because at the time he didn’t know it was offensive. Harry also said that he regretted wearing that Nazi uniform, and later on decided to meet with a rabbi and get educated on the Holocaust. There have been times when I have called people out on stuff that was racist, sexist or homophobic. However, there have definitely been times when I have said something that was uninformed or ignorant myself, and I had to apologize and then educate myself, but I’ve grown in the process of doing this. One time, a few years ago, I made an offensive joke, and someone told me “Hey, that’s offensive,” and at first, I took it personally, but then I realized that what I said was in fact ignorant and so now I don’t tell that joke anymore because I understand that it was hurtful.

Season 6 also shows William’s relationship with Catherine, or Kate, Middleton. Kate’s mother and Kate are walking through London, when they spot Princess Diana and her son, William, signing autographs and giving out magazines to adoring fans. Catherine and her mother approach Diana and William, and Catherine is starstruck and falls in love with William. Back home, she is shown sitting in bed with magazines splashed with William’s handsome face, and her mother tells her that she can find a way so that Kate will end up with William. Kate doesn’t believe it’s possible, but as the show progresses, her mother basically gets her to stalk William. Kate’s mom listens to the radio to figure out where William is staying and where he is going to college. She finds out that William is taking a gap year and so she sends Kate on the same gap year. She finds out that William is going to St. Andrews, so she sends Kate there, too. William falls in love with Kate, even though he is dating another girl named Lola. Lola, like William is wealthy, while Kate works at a restaurant to support herself, so it seems like she doesn’t have a chance at first. However, when William finds out that Kate borrowed the books for the art class they have together, he approaches her and they talk about their memories of the gap year program. They are having a great conversation, but then Lola comes along and feels disrespected that William is flirting with Kate. When a girl asks William for an autograph, he snaps at her to go away. Both Kate and Lola think he was being rude, but then he tells them that they don’t know what it’s like being ogled all the time and constantly having girls harass him for autographs. However, as young women in a sexist society, they deal with being ogled all the time, so they both ditch him. William dealing with the fame and being good-looking reminded me of this guy who worked at Target named Alex. In 2014, a young woman snapped a photo of a sixteen-year-old cashier working at Target named Alex because he was good-looking, and the photo went viral on social media. Alex didn’t know that someone had snapped a photo of him, but pretty soon he achieved this Internet fame and he found it overwhelming, with news agencies camping outside his home and his phone blowing up with notifications and messages. He had to leave his high school and had to be homeschooled due to all the unwanted attention he was getting. He said he preferred a private life away from the spotlight, and I feel that William in The Crown was like Alex from Target because he didn’t want all this publicity. He wanted to be private about his life, but everywhere he went, even in college, girls kept approaching him for autographs and he had very little to no privacy, to the point where a young woman’s mother (i.e. Kate’s mom) is tracking his whereabouts so that her daughter can achieve her dream of being William’s girlfriend. There is one scene where William and his bodyguard are getting groceries, and no one else is around. That is one of the few scenes (probably the only scene, actually) where William is in a public place and doesn’t have to deal with screaming girls and camera-happy paparazzi. In an earlier episode, he gets letters from his schoolmates letting him know to reach out to them if he needs anything, but then he gets another bag of letters from mostly girls around the world. Some are sympathetic, but most of the letters are about how cute and sexy William is. It’s a lot of pressure for William to deal with because he is still grieving the loss of his mom and juggling schoolwork and extracurricular activities, and he just wants to have that time to himself to deal with his grief, not attend all of these engagements and deal with fame.

The last episode is about Queen Elizabeth planning for her funeral in the future. She is overwhelmed at first that Prince Philip wants her to have this big celebration at her funeral because he himself wants to have a lively celebration after his death. She wants a quiet funeral at Balmoral with little noise. At the same time, she and her cabinet are arranging for her funeral in the future, Charles asks her permission to marry Camilla. The Queen wants to say yes, but the archbishops at the various churches approach her and say that it’s not as simple as giving her son her blessing because both Camilla and Charles are divorcees, and they had an affair while they were both married to other people. Their only option is to have a public ceremony where Camilla and Charles confess their “sins” (aka the fact that they had an affair together). Camilla and Charles end up marrying and many people celebrate the wedding.

The Queen also deals with an existential dilemma where she is questioning whether she should step down from her responsibilities as queen and find a successor. There are a few scenes in the last episode where she talks with her past versions of herself (played by Claire Foy, who was in seasons 1 and 2, and Olivia Colman, who was in seasons 3 and 4.) Olivia Colman’s version of Elizabeth tells the 80-year-old version (played by Imelda Staunton), that she should find someone to take her place because other countries have done it before, such as Luxembourg. The 80-year-old version of Elizabeth rejects this idea that she should find a successor, but word goes around that the Queen is finding a successor, and because Charles is firstborn, he is in line to be king when she passes away. Charles is super excited about this, and word gets around that Elizabeth is going to announce his succession to the throne. However, the younger version of Elizabeth (played by Claire Foy) appears and tells 80-year-old Elizabeth that she needs to continue to run things because she has been doing this job, being the Queen, for several decades and no one else has the kind of job experience she has gone through. So, when Charles and Camilla are at their wedding celebration, they think Elizabeth is going to announce Charles becoming king after she dies, but she doesn’t address it and only gives a short speech about how proud she is of Charles and Camilla getting married. Charles is very disappointed that she didn’t make the announcement, but by then she doesn’t have time to chit chat. Once she makes her speech, she leaves the party and goes to pray in a private place in the church away from all the noise. I thought it was so cool how they brought out all three Elizabeths to show how much time has passed from the time Elizabeth became Queen to when she was 80 years old. Also, all three actresses were excellent in their roles as Queen Elizabeth, and they’re great actresses in general. My family and I watched Women Talking, a very intense film about a community of female Mennonites who escape sexual abuse in the male-dominated colony they have spent years in. Claire Foy played one of the women in the movie and she was absolutely incredible. Honestly, that film still gives me chills. I really loved Olivia Colman in The Favourite, which is a movie in which she plays another British queen, this time Queen Anne. The raw energy she brought to that role was incredible, and I was so happy when she won that Academy Award at the 91st Academy Awards for Best Actress. I also saw her in some supporting roles in The Lobster and Fleabag. In Fleabag she plays the main character’s godmother, and in The Lobster, she plays a hotel manager who doesn’t elicit any emotion when telling Colin Farrell’s character that he must find a partner in 45 days, or else he will be transformed into an animal of his choice. It was a very dark and disturbing movie, and by the end I’m pretty sure I had nightmares. But as a single person I found this movie very relatable at times, even though it’s a dystopian movie. And Imelda Staunton made a really good Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I will always remember her pink checkered suits, her smug smile as she enforced all these draconian policies at Hogwarts, the annoying way she said “Hem-hem” whenever she wanted to make a point, the torture she put Harry through when she forced him to write “I must not tell lies,” and the scene where she gets swept away by large winged horses called thestrals while Harry tells her “I’m sorry Umbridge…I must not tell lies,” turning the tables after the disrespect and pain she put that young wizard through. Yep, I will remember all these things because Imelda played her so darn well.

Movie Review: 20th Century Women

Content warning: I do briefly discuss menstruation at one point in the review, so if you get easily grossed out, it’s totally okay to skip this review. Also, it’s a long post, so thank you for reading it.

A few years ago, on Halloween night, I was staying indoors instead of going out trick-or-treating. I didn’t really feel like going out, and the way I tend to wind down after a long day is to watch a movie, so I decided to rent a film called 20th Century Women, a film directed by Mike Mills that stars Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning and Billy Crudup. When I first watched the film a few years ago, I unfortunately didn’t get past the first ten minutes because something else came up and I decided to do that instead of finishing the movie. I decided to pick it up again this time because I wanted to know what happened later in the film, and I’m glad I finished the movie because it was really good. I saw another film directed by Mike Mills last year called C’Mon C’Mon, a film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who involves his nephew in a film project he is doing. It was a really touching film, and it was really cool how it was shot in black and white even though it takes place in the modern day. Somehow, I am attracted to films that were directed in the 21st century that use black and white coloring during the film, such as Frances Ha, Roma, Mank and Belfast. There is just something aesthetically interesting about using black and white. Even though Frances Ha takes place in the modern day, when I saw that the film was black and white, it gave it this sort of mellowed down feel. I also love seeing Elle Fanning all grown up; I remember seeing her in this one movie called Phoebe in Wonderland several years ago, and she was so young, so it’s really awesome to see how she and her sister, Dakota Fanning, have grown in their acting careers. I also loved Billy Crudup in Big Fish.

If you haven’t seen 20th Century Women, it is a coming-of-age movie that takes place in Santa Barbara, California in 1979, and Dorothea is a divorced single mother in her 50s raising her 15-year-old son, Jamie, while also living with tenants Abbie Porter and Julie Hamlin. The film opens with Dorothea and Jamie shopping at a grocery store and then finding their old car, the one that Dorothea’s ex-husband owned, up in flames. Abbie is a photographer recovering from cervical cancer and Julie is friends with Jamie. Abbie is in love with William, who works on the house that they live in, and they have a sexual encounter. Even though Jamie and Julie sleep in the same bed, Julie wants them to stay friends so that it doesn’t ruin their friendship, but Jamie wants to be with her. Also, she is sleeping with other guys, so he doesn’t have much of a chance with her. Dorothea is worried about her son, especially because he hangs around a lot of kids who are bad influences. He hangs out with a lot of kids who skateboard, and they invite him to Los Angeles to go to a party. He comes home drunk, and Dorothea becomes worried. She enlists Abbie and Julie to support him as he navigates adolescence, and Abbie has Jamie read a bunch of books on feminism and introduces him to the punk rock scene. Through his friendship with Abbie and Julie, Jamie learns a lot about himself and gets educated on a topic that most guys his age probably wouldn’t bother exploring.

One key theme throughout the movie is feminism. Abbie has Jamie read several works by feminist authors and these works fascinate him, such as The Politics of Orgasm by Susan Lydon. However, the other guys he hangs around think he is less of a man for wanting to learn about feminism. While hanging out at the skateboarding park in one scene, a teenage guy is talking about his sexual encounter with a young woman and how he penetrated her, but then Jamie talks about female orgasms. The guy calls him a homophobic slur for being interested in learning more about the female body and beats him up. I didn’t know this, but apparently the punk rock world was pretty divisive, so in the film there is a clash between bands like Black Flag and The Talking Heads. After Jamie gets beaten up, Dorothea goes out to find her car spray painted with “Art [homophobic slur]” and the other side with “Black Flag.” (I don’t listen to much punk rock, to be honest, but I guess the clash between punk rock groups was the 1970s version of modern-day feuds between hip-hop artists such as Drake and Kendrick Lamar.) In another scene, Jamie reads aloud a passage from a feminist book to Dorothea, and she turns around and asks him why he read it to her. Jamie is confused as to why she doesn’t encourage him to read it, and he says he is interested in the topic, but Dorothea tells him that he doesn’t need to explain feminism or the female body to her because she knows about it already. Dorothea confronts Abbie about teaching Jamie about feminism and tells her that learning about feminism is too much for Jamie and to stop teaching him about feminism. Later, when they are at the dinner table with friends, Dorothea finds Abbie sleeping at the table. He has Jamie wake her up, but Abbie says she is tired because she is menstruating. Dorothea is embarrassed and tells Abbie to not mention that at the table, but Abbie continues to explain that talking about periods shouldn’t be taboo, and even has everyone at the table say the word “menstruation” so that it becomes less taboo. Dorothea tries to end the topic, but then Julie brings up that she had sex with a guy while on her period and goes into graphic detail about the encounter. Dorothea is upset and has everyone go home after seeing how uncomfortable everyone is talking about menstruation and sex.

Honestly, though, I appreciate Jamie for making the effort to educate himself on feminism and female sexuality. It reminds me of this sketch I watched from Key and Peele called “Menstruation Orientation,” in which Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are two men named Shaboots Michaels and T-Ray Tombstone speaking to an audience of men during a Ted Talk (it’s called FAS- For All Species- as a parody of the TED Talks logo) about what to do when their female partners are on their periods. They emphasize to the men in the audience that even if they are uncomfortable with learning about menstruation and don’t want to attend the lecture, they aren’t the ones that have to deal with having a period every month, so they need to learn and get educated on what their wives and girlfriends have to go through. (Note: I am continuing to learn about and get educated on gender and sexuality, and I understand that the experience of menstruation is not limited to cisgendered women like me, but also encompasses people who are trans and nonbinary.)

Warning: contains strong language

When I first saw it, I busted up laughing but as I thought more about it, I really appreciated that Key and Peele did this sketch because growing up, I didn’t know many guys who were comfortable talking about menstruation or willing to educate themselves about it. During health class it was a topic that elicited giggles and inappropriate comments from 8th grade boys (to be fair, I did giggle when my health teacher started talking about the reproductive system, so I was part of that group of immature kids who laughed.) Menstruation always felt like this thing I felt embarrassed about or that I could only talk about with other women, but watching this sketch gave me hope that if I was with a guy I didn’t have to feel embarrassed about mentioning whenever I was on my period or had mood swings. Even still, I sometimes feel embarrassed to talk about my menstrual cycle around people and even feel awkward when getting sanitary pads from the pharmacy and self-conscious while wearing them. But watching how Abbie in 20th Century Women felt openly comfortable talking about her period around men and women, especially during the 1970s, was, well, I don’t have the right word to describe it, but “empowering” sounds about right. I do appreciate how we are working to take the stigma out of talking about menstruation more often. There is a sweet commercial that Hello Flo where a girl called The Camp Gyno goes around giving her fellow campers tampons and giving them “menstruation demonstrations” with a Dora the Explorer doll (spoiler: her program fails miserably because all the girls are getting Hello Flo period starter kits in the mail, so they don’t need her to be Camp Gyno anymore.)

Somehow this movie reminded me of other movies I have seen. Julie and Jamie’s friendship reminded me of When Harry Met Sally, because there is one scene in the movie where Harry tells Sally she is attractive even though he is dating her friend, Amanda, and Sally is offended. Harry thinks it’s ridiculous that he can’t tell her she is attractive without it sounding like he is coming onto her, and when she firmly tells him that they are just going to be friends, he tells her that they could never become friends as a straight male and a straight woman because “the sex part always gets in the way.” Harry argues that a man can’t be friends with a woman he is attracted to because he will always want to have sex with her. Even though Sally remains firm about remaining friends, Harry continues to find her attractive. Even though Julie wants to remain friends with Jamie, he has romantic and sexual feelings for her. Jamie educates himself on female orgasm because he wants to know how to pleasure a woman, but Dorothea is uncomfortable that Jamie is learning so much about the female body at a young age. It’s interesting how their relationship has unfolded over the years, because when he was younger, Dorothea advocated for him to have his own bank account, and even let him skip school when he didn’t feel like going (she even was impressed that he forged her signature when signing absence permission slips.) However, as he gets older, they struggle to have a good relationship together because he is becoming a teenager and is becoming more distant from him. Dorothea loves keeping track of stocks, and has Jamie calculate the stocks with her, but he isn’t interested in doing that anymore. Even though Dorothea asked Abbie and Julie to help her have a deeper relationship with Jamie, Dorothea still wanted to keep Jamie sheltered from a culture of drugs, parties and punk rock.

Also, it’s wild to say this, but it boggled my mind while watching 20th Century Women that there was a time period when people lived without smartphones. They had to entertain themselves and be bored, they couldn’t just watch YouTube or TikTok. There is a scene where Jamie has Julie take a pregnancy test, and they have to wait two hours for the results, so they go outside and learn how to smoke. They didn’t have cell phones at the time, so they had to be bored and find creative ways to have fun. Julie tries to teach Jamie how to smoke like a cool guy, and not look unsure of himself while he does it. But then Jamie decides to stop because he learned that smoking wouldn’t be good for his health. I can only speak for myself, but whenever I feel bored now or stressed or anxious, I want to distract myself from those uncomfortable emotions that are coming up. I distract myself nowadays by going on my phone and scrolling through YouTube. Even though deep down I know my brain is overloaded by all the data and information it is taking in as I spend time scrolling on my smartphone, I still do it because my brain gets a temporary rush of dopamine every time that I check my phone. However, that’s why I have to keep checking my phone so I can have those repeated rushes of this pleasure chemical, dopamine. But before I know it, I have passed time and haven’t done much other than scrolled through YouTube videos on my video feed. I scroll through my phone to avoid being bored, but I end up not feeling great after my phone use. When I finally got bored of YouTube, I decided to pick up a book and read. After I dove into a few pages of the book, I remembered how much fun reading was. While my phone is helpful in many ways, I have also noticed that I tend to be on it a lot, and that I could benefit from cutting back on the time I spend on it. Jamie and Julie would probably live a very different life if they had smartphones in 1979.

Annette Bening is amazing (she is the actress who plays Dorothea, Jamie’s mother). She was in a movie I saw several years ago called The Kids Are All Right, which stars her and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple who meet the man who was their sperm donor when they conceived their two kids. She was also in a really good movie called Nyad, which is a true story about a swimmer named Diana Nyad who came out of retirement and swam from Florida to Cuba in her 60s. That movie was truly about never giving up, because she had to overcome serious obstacles: panic attacks, killer jellyfish, and saltwater. Not to mention she had to start over several times. But she never gave up, even when her team told her that she could potentially die if she continued chasing this risky dream. It was a great film, and Annette Bening and Jodie Foster made a really good on-screen duo. I also love seeing Greta Gerwig with red hair; for some reason, her character, Abbie, looked like someone I knew in college. Also, I love Greta Gerwig’s other films, which she directed: Lady Bird, Little Women and Barbie. Each of these films spoke to me personally in some way, and the stories for each of them were really touching. In 20th Century Women, I really love how it spans from past, present and future. We get to know each character’s backstory and how their lives unfolded in the future. In all, I’m glad I finally got around to watching the entire movie because it ended up being a really touching and powerful movie.

20th Century Women. Directed by Mike Mills. 2016. Rated R for sexual material, language, some nudity and brief drug use. 118 minutes.

Movie Review: 50/50

I watched a movie a couple of days ago called 50/50. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Bryce Dallas Howard, Angelica Huston and Anna Kendrick. I really love these actors; I have seen their other movies, and they are all really good in their movies. I really loved Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days of Summer. This movie was pretty serious; it’s categorized as a comedy-drama, but it’s about a 27-year-old man named Adam who finds out he has cancer. It is based on the director’s own experience with finding out he had a rare form of spinal cancer in his 20s. (I also looked up Will Reiser, the director, on Wikipedia and I found out he attended Hampshire College, which is really cool because I took a couple of courses at Hampshire during my time in college and the people there are pretty cool.)

Even though he is a healthy person, Adam receives the cancer diagnosis, and it shatters his world. When he first tells his friend, Kyle (played by Seth Rogen), Kyle acts as if he is going to be okay and that the cancer is no big deal, but as the movie went on, I saw how Adam’s cancer diagnosis took a hit to his self-esteem and made him question his existence in life. It was also hard for his parents to find out about the cancer, especially because Adam was so young and his mom was already taking care of his dad, who has Alzheimer’s. When they are at the dinner table, Adam tries to prepare his mom for the news, and she laughs it off at first, saying “How bad can this really be?” But when he finally tells her he has cancer, she goes silent and then she cries when she finds out because she doesn’t want to lose her son. Adam also sees a therapist named Katherine, who tries to help him process all of the intense emotions that have come with hearing about his diagnosis and going through chemotherapy. At first, Adam doesn’t want to open up and he thinks that Katherine is only trying to make him feel better and cheer him up, but that what she is doing isn’t effective. However, Adam begins to reflect on what is important to him in life after going through chemotherapy. He is still friends with Kyle, and Kyle has his back the whole time, but it’s really hard for Kyle to see his friend going through this intense battle with illness. The scene where Kyle finds out that Adam’s girlfriend, Rachael, cheated on him was pretty sad, but it also showed me how hard it was for both Adam and Rachael when he found out he had cancer. They hadn’t had sex in several weeks and she felt like they were growing apart. She is late picking him up from the hospital one evening and she apologizes, but at this point he is too worn out to hear about her apologies. Kyle goes on a date and finds Rachael making out with another guy, and when Rachael comes home to Adam and pretends like nothing happened, Kyle comes in and tells Adam that Rachael is cheating on him. Rachael is at a loss of words, and Kyle kicks her out of the house. Rachael tries to come back, but Kyle tells Adam that she needs to leave and that they put her box of stuff outside the house. Rachael tries to reason with Adam that it’s been really hard for her lately and that no one picked up her art at her exhibition. At first, I thought Adam was going to feel sorry for her and want to get back together with her, but then Rachael starts kissing Adam and then he realizes that she cheated on him and he tells her to leave. Kyle then starts taking Adam to parties, celebrating his newly single status, and he tells Adam to use his cancer diagnosis as a tool to pick up girls, but it ends up not working out well. They go out with two girls, and one of them is curious about Adam’s cancer and asks if she could touch his bald head. He lets her, and they go home, but while Adam and the girl are having sex, Adam feels a lot of pain and is too tired from the chemotherapy to have sex, so the girl ends up leaving.

Adam’s cancer diagnosis gets him to start thinking seriously about what he wants out of life. In one hard-hitting scene, Kyle is drunk and wants to drive Adam home, but Adam insists on driving Kyle even though he neither knows how to drive nor has a driver’s license. Kyle at first doubts him, but then he lets him drive since Adam doesn’t have long to live. Adam almost gets them killed and almost hits other cars. Kyle finally has him pull over and shouts at him for his erratic driving and Adam has him get out of the car. Then Adam screams and then breaks down crying because he doesn’t have long to live, and nothing in his life is going as planned. He feels hopeless, but what helps is him calling Katherine to let her know that he is really not feeling okay. This was a total contrast to when he first met her because at first, when she tried to get him to open up, he didn’t want to talk about how he was feeling and insisted he was fine, even when he was going through a very intense chemotherapy process that made him feel like hell. But he realizes that it’s okay to reach out to people and admit that you aren’t okay. Katherine and Adam develop feelings for each other, and Adam begins to feel like he can trust her because she gives him space to feel what he is feeling. Adam also realizes that Kyle is also trying his best to support him because he goes back home and sees that Kyle has been reading a book called Facing Cancer Together, which shows that even though Adam thought Kyle was only focused on sleeping with women and getting high on weed with Adam, he really was doing his best to try and understand what Adam was going through and was willing to do the work needed to support Adam. I thought about this movie called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which is about a young man in high school named Greg who doesn’t have a lot of close friends but ends up befriending a young woman named Rachel, who has leukemia. At first, she doesn’t want him around, but as the movie goes on, they develop a strong bond and he and his friend, Earl, support Rachel through her battle with leukemia. It was a pretty sad movie, but it reminded me that facing illness is a battle that you can’t fight alone. I thought about this chapter I read in a book called The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace by philosopher Daisaku Ikeda. The chapter “Facing Illness” talks about illness and death from a Buddhist perspective, and Ikeda says that “illness teaches us many things. It makes us look death in the face and think about the meaning of life. It makes us realize just how precious life is.” (p. 255) I haven’t battled cancer, but I have battled mental illness, specifically clinical depression, and honestly, depression really forced me to look at how I was living my life and got me to examine honestly how I wanted to live my life moving forward. I had thought that I was so useless, that my life had no value or meaning, but through getting professional treatment and engaging in my spiritual practice of Buddhism, I have learned that my life has so much profound meaning and that I can encourage others who are battling depression that it’s okay to ask for help. For so many years I was reluctant to see therapy, to get on medication, but I am realizing that those things are important to taking care of my mental health. In the book I highlighted this one quote in the chapter that really encouraged me: “Though one may be ill, this has no bearing on the inherent nobility, dignity and beauty of one’s life. Everyone, without exception, is an infinitely precious and noble treasure.” (The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace, part 1, revised edition, page 254) I had to read this quote often because having depression made me feel like my life was worthless, that I wasn’t going to be able to live my life because I have depression, but I learned that I’m not the only one struggling and that it’s okay to ask for help. I realized after a certain point that it wasn’t safe for me to continue tackling depression without seeking professional help, and that getting professional help or treatment didn’t make me weak. I love reading the “Facing Illness” chapter in the book because it reminds me that my life is still worthy of respect and valuable even though I have this depression that is telling me that my life doesn’t mean anything. It’s still a battle, but I am hoping to encourage more people through sharing about my mental health challenges more often.

Another part of 50/50 I liked was when Adam made friends in the hospital who were also battling cancer. The first time he meets Mitch and Alan, Alan offers Adam cannabis-laced macaroons and Adam eats a few, and he finds himself going down a hallway with this dazed look on his face and it seems like he is heaven, even as he passes all these people on stretchers and the nurses and doctors running through the halls on these stretchers. Adam looks back and then starts laughing, but then he snaps back to reality, and he is back at home throwing up in a toilet. He develops a great friendship with Mitch and Adam, but then when he finds Mitch is not with him and Alan, Alan tells him that Mitch died. It’s during this scene that Adam has to grapple with the reality that he is dealing with a life-threatening illness, and it makes him feel depressed and wondering why he is still living. Even though Kyle at the beginning was telling Adam, “Oh you’re young, you’ll be fine,” Adam realizes that he can’t take life for granted anymore because he only has a 50/50 chance of living. The pivotal scene comes when Adam and his parents are at the doctor after Adam has gone through chemotherapy, and they are hearing the news of whether the tumor has gotten less or worse. The doctor tells him that the cancer has gotten bad and that they need to do a surgery on Adam to get the tumor out, but that it’s a life-threatening surgery. Adam gets the surgery, and right before he goes in, his mom hugs him and doesn’t want to let him go, but the doctors pull her away and lead Adam into the surgery room. It was pretty painful to see Adam’s parents being unable to spend more time with their son before the surgery because they didn’t know whether he was going to come out alive after the life-threatening surgery. Thankfully, he survives, but that scene was pretty intense. It was easy for me to think that because I was young, I didn’t have to worry about illness and dying, and I thought very much like Kyle, this attitude of “Oh, you’re young, you’ll beat cancer.” But many of my close friends who were older passed away, and it really made me face my own mortality, the inevitable reality that someday I, too, was going to die, so I started to study more about the Buddhist perspective on life and death. Reading this philosophy made me want to take my life more seriously, and I started to get more serious about what goals and dreams I wanted to accomplish. I have started to appreciate my life on a much deeper level, too.

Summertime

I love summer. I don’t enjoy the weather, necessarily, because down South it gets really hot, and I’m talking, you can fry an egg on the sidewalk kind of hot. I love the prevalence of things to do during the summer. There are a lot of things for kids to do, and I remember going to summer programs was a great investment of time and money for my parents. I remember going to summer school when I was in elementary school and taking a class where we learned about multimedia. I also remember taking a Spanish class where we had a cool teacher named Ms. Basdeo, and she would sing songs with us in Spanish. One of them was “Willaby Wallaby we, a elefante setse do en mi. Willaby Wallaby,” and then we had to go around and sing “[insert name] got sat on by the elephant” in Spanish. I think one of my favorite parts of the summer programs was going to the vending machine and getting those Cookies n Cream ice cream cones. My least favorite was riding the bus to the program because I was shy and quiet, and had difficulty being comfortable around the other kids because they seemed to be more outgoing than me. I really enjoyed art class, though, because I love creating things. It was nice to sit in the class and draw and paint and sculpt things. I remember sitting with some pretty nice people and would often give them my soy nuts and other snacks to munch on during class. They actually really liked the soy nuts; I didn’t think they would, but one of the girls at the table kept putting her hand out every time and so I would give her some of my soy nuts. I also loved the snacks they served at these enrichment programs; Cosmic Brownies was my jam, as were Little Debbie Zebra snack cakes. The sugary filling in the middle, and the softness and puffed-upness of these snack cakes was like being on Cloud Nine, I’m not kidding you. Even though I am vegan, I can still taste how good those Zebra Cakes were. Art class was one of my favorite things to do during the summer, because it gave me an outlet to express myself and it gave me something to do over those hot long months. I really liked one of the classes that I took because we got to have little indoor picnics where we had pieces of fruit with this creamy cheese that we spread on crackers. We were pretending like we were eating French food. I fell in love with that creamy cheese, and even though I can’t eat it anymore due to my lactose-intolerance, I can still imagine the creaminess of the cheese as I spread it on those crackers and ate it with those pieces of fruit. There was another art studio that was above the college preparatory summer school I ended up going to a few years later, and it was called The Artist Within. I sat with a small group of kids, and we just drew and ate snacks and listened to music. The kids were really nice, and they somehow embraced my quiet and sensitive personality. There was one girl named Rose who had a short blonde haircut and wore all black, and she was pretty cool. The art teacher was really sweet, too. She and I had some pretty good conversations. I vaguely remember one of the songs we listened to on that little radio was “Any Other Girl” by an artist named Nu. I didn’t know who the artist was at the time, but I just looked up based on the few song lyrics I remembered, and I got lucky because most times I hear a song, but I don’t know who the artist is.

As I got older, I started participating in more music programs. I still loved drawing, but by this point I had started playing the cello the summer before sixth grade and I fell in love with it. So, I attended a summer program at a university that was about an hour from where I lived that was for cello students in middle and high school. It was really fun getting to play with the other students. They offered a masterclass, which is a class where a faculty member has some students play for them and gives them feedback on what they did well and how they can do better. I didn’t know what to expect from a masterclass at first, and frankly it sounded intimidating. The word “masterclass” made me wonder if I needed to be an advanced student to be in the class. I don’t think I ended up participating in the master class, but I remember watching the older students perform and thinking, Wow, they’re so cool and mature! I want to play like them! Some of the tunes I remember playing was this piece called “Evening Prayer” and we had two really cool instructors named Louann and Andrew. Andrew was part of an ensemble of cellists called the 440 Alliance, and my parents and I went to see them play. They were really, really good and they played cello in this really cool way. They were rocking out together, and it was just a blast to watch!

One class I took over one of my summers (it was either fifth or sixth grade) was an improv class at a local university. As a quiet kid, it was really hard for me to fit in at first. I was so used to reading my book and not talking with other kids, and I was more accustomed to talking with adults than with the other kids. But looking back, I am glad I took that improv class because it helped me go outside my comfort zone. That’s not to say that right after taking the improv class, I stopped being introverted. But it helped to learn something new, something that I wasn’t used to doing. I remember being in that summer class and the kids were all super outgoing and talkative and I just wanted to crawl into a corner and read, but I couldn’t so I did my best, but I suffered from so much social embarrassment. I remember one time I had to get up with a couple of other students in the class, and we had to pick one or two other students to join us in an improv game. I was freaking out because everyone kept getting up when it came my turn to choose, and yelling, “PICK ME! NO, NO, PICK ME!” I desperately just wanted to hide in a corner, but I ended up making a decision and we played this game called The Party Game. I forgot what it entailed, but I somehow survived standing up there in front of a bunch of kids, worrying about how people were going to judge me. Like I said, I definitely needed to get out of my comfort zone.

Summers were also a really fun time to visit family. Summers in Chicago were a lot of fun because my family loved going to the movie theater. I would excitedly mark in my calendar the movies that were coming out and we would go as a family to see them. We were too young to watch any PG-13 or R-rated films, but we would see movies like Shrek or The Rugrats Go Wild, and we loved them. Fast forward, and in the summer of 2016, I am walking down the streets of Chicago to go to the Chicago Culture Center. However, at that moment I was no longer the carefree seven-year-old but now a 22-year-old college graduate with major depressive disorder and no plans for the future. I rode the L train to the center, determined to battle whatever inner turmoil was going on within me. I went to the center and furiously chanted the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo over and over again. I wasn’t trying to work miracles at that moment. I was battling this fundamental inability to believe that my life was worth living, that I had a future full of possibilities and opportunities that I couldn’t even imagine. I was in a state of suffering, and I was determined more than ever that summer to claw myself out. After chanting, I felt so empowered to make efforts to transform my suffering and my state of life expanded. A few months later, I finally got the help that I needed, and was able to finally address that inner turmoil with a mental health professional. That moment during that summer of 2016 was a profound cause for me to transform my life on a deep, deep level.

Movie Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

To be honest, it took me a really long time to write this blog post. I watched Marcel the Shell with Shoes On a few months ago but didn’t get around to writing the post. I mean, how can you convey how this incredible film made you feel? Seriously. It was that good. It was a really cute film, and for some reason I found Marcel’s voice very soothing. Before I saw the movie, I saw the trailer for it. Normally the films I see from A24 are R-rated features like Midsommar, Hereditary and X, all films that I don’t have the stomach to watch unfortunately because I am not a big fan of scary movies with a lot of blood. To be fair, I have seen quite a few A24 features, like Lady Bird, Uncut Gems and Minari, and those weren’t super bloody features. But I was really excited when they said they were coming out with a PG-rated feature about a shell who goes on an adventure to find his family. I had not seen the original “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” clip when it came out (or maybe I did, but it was a long time ago, so my memory is fuzzy) When I saw the trailer, the song they played during the trailer was “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins, and that has been one of my favorite songs since I was a kid. I remember on the way to school in the car with the radio on, my mom and I listening to those powerful drums and the moving vocals of Phil Collins. There was something so beautiful about this song, and it still gives me goosebumps when I listen to it. I ended up watching the trailer for Marcel the Shell with Shoes On three times, and each time I watched the trailer I started crying because it looked like a very touching story.

From what I can remember about the movie, it is about Marcel, a small shell who goes on a big adventure with his Nana Connie and his trusty friend, Dean Fleischer Camp. They have to go on a journey to find Marcel’s family because the family lived in the house of a couple who got into an argument and the boyfriend walked off with Marcel’s family of fellow shells in a drawer. Marcel learns the spirit of not giving up on himself, even when he faces challenges along the way when trying to find his family. The movie also shows how Marcel’s journey goes public on YouTube and how Marcel deals with being famous on the Internet. I thought the most touching part of the movie (then again, the entire movie was quite touching) was when Marcel reunited with his family, and he sings “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by The Eagles. For some reason, I couldn’t stop tearing up during this scene because it was really adorable and also just really poignant considering Marcel lost his Nana Connie while on his journey. Nana Connie has so much wisdom and she was really supportive of Marcel throughout his journey. For some reason, this movie made me think of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie or really any SpongeBob episode where they featured real people because in the movie David Hasselhoff makes a cameo appearance as a live action human being (not a cartoon) and takes them back to Bikini Bottom (I saw the movie back in 2004 so it’s been more than a minute, so my plot details are pretty fuzzy.) I really love the song “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by The Eagles, so I think that is why the scene where Marcel sings it is really touching. I thought it was cool how Marcel got to appear on 60 Minutes because that was his dream.

The movie also made me want to appreciate the little things in life. Marcel lives a very simple and beautiful life, and his Nana Connie tends the garden, and he has his living space set up in a certain way. And his voice was also really soothing and sweet. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t watch Marcel the Shell with Shoes On when it first came out, because it would have cheered me up when I was in high school. This is the original video. It really warms my heart each time I watch it.

TV Show Episode Review: The Crown, season 6, episode 5 (“Willsmania”)

I took a break from watching The Crown for a while. I had finished part 1 of the last season and was just really saddened when Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) dies in a car crash with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed (played by Khalid Abdalla) while they are in Paris. I just didn’t think I would be able to continue to go on with the show after that part. But I decided I wanted to finish the series because it has been incredible to watch, and I wanted to know what happened next. I totally forgot that I had watched this episode, “Willsmania” before, but it was helpful to watch since it has been a few months since I finished part 1 of the final season. In this episode, Diana’s sons, William and Harry, are grappling with the death of their mother and the grief process. This episode mainly focuses on the grief that William is dealing with. Harry appears in a few scenes, but mostly this episode was focused on William. William finds himself studying extra hard and also missing the extracurricular activities he once did, and the headmaster checks in on him often. There was a scene in the episode where William finds two bags of letters in his dorm room. One bag has letters from fellow students at William’s school, and the other bag is full of letters from young people around the world, many of them teenage girls who have a crush on him. When William comes out of the car and the Royal Family is walking past the crowds, Queen Elizabeth is miffed when she finds that the crowds aren’t focused on her, but instead are focused on William. When William comes out, a bunch of girls scream and fangirl as he is walking. They are shaking and leaning over the fence and also crying, holding signs expressing their romantic feelings for Will. It was kind of a stressful scene to watch. To be honest, I probably would have been like those girls in the crowd, freaking out when I see a famous person walk by. But now that I am older, I realize that celebrities might not always want that public attention and that they just want to live life like normal human beings. William ends up throwing the letters from the girls because it is really overwhelming, and honestly, that is fair because he going through a lot of grief. He also harbors a lot of anger and resentment towards his father, Charles, because Charles had an affair with Camila while in his marriage to Diana. In one scene, Charles meets with William to patch things up, but while Charles walks on eggshells, William calls him out for not taking accountability for Diana’s death. Charles explains to him that he is going through his own grief and that he, too, is still grappling with Diana’s death. Philip, who is Charles’s dad, meets with William over chess and tells him that William isn’t actually angry at his dad, but that he is actually angry at his mom because she was comfortable in the public eye, and he is not comfortable with all the publicity around him. William ends up hugging his dad later on.

To be honest, I didn’t know much about William or Harry before watching The Crown, other than watching a clip from the royal wedding between Harry and Meghan Markle. I’m sure I learned about them in history class, but that was so long ago, and I haven’t kept up much with news about the royal family. However, I watched a documentary last year (I think it was last year) called Harry and Meghan, and it was pretty good. I know it left a lot of people divided and people had a variety of opinions about it, but I don’t know enough intimate details about Harry and Meghan other than what they covered in the documentary to give an in-depth critique about it.

Movie Review: The Miracle Club

Content warning: I briefly talk about abortion in this review since the movie touches on abortion.

I was browsing on Netflix what movie to watch, and I came across this movie called The Miracle Club. A few months ago I heard Dame Maggie Smith was in another movie, and I was like, What?!? Fuck yes!!! The woman has had a very long career as an actress: she was Professor McGonagall, she was the Dowager Countess, and so many other roles. So, I was very pumped she would be starring in a movie with Kathy Bates, another great actress. (I loved her as Molly Brown in Titanic) I had not known much about the movie before watching it, but it was such a great film overall. The acting was great, and it made me want to visit Ireland again.

The film also talks about some heavy subjects as well. It takes place in the 1960s and it’s about a woman named Chrissie who returns to Ireland after her mother’s death. Chrissie travels with two older women, Eileen and Lily, and a younger woman named Dolly, who formed a group called The Miracles as part of a talent show. They get the opportunity to go to Lourdes, France, because they believe that a pilgrimage to this place will help them heal from their problems. Eileen has a lump in her breast, Dolly’s son, Daniel, cannot speak, so she hopes that he will talk on the pilgrimage, and Lily wants to go because she has always wanted to go. However, Eileen and Lily bear a grudge against Chrissie for not coming back to Ireland until after her mother died. While on their trip to Lourdes, Chrissie tries to patch things up with Eileen and Lily, but it is difficult at first. However, the relationship between these four women is tested when they finally get into the baths at Lourdes. Dolly tries to get her son to get into the baths to try to cure him of his inability to speak, but he refuses to get in. I appreciate that they didn’t just magically cure him because it showed me that Daniel was going to talk when he was ready, and that Dolly didn’t need to feel like a failure just because her son wasn’t able to talk. Dolly feels like she failed as a mother, and she beats herself up. She also confesses to Eileen, Lily and Chrissie that she tried to abort Daniel when he was in the womb. Chrissie ends up being able to relate to Dolly because she tried to abort her child when she was pregnant. It is such a deep and profound moment between these two women, especially because Lily and Eileen made a lot of assumptions about Chrissie and were angry that she didn’t come back to Ireland. Lily has a moment when she is about to go into the baths and is sitting with Chrissie, and she says she won’t ever forgive herself for the grudge she bore against Chrissie, but Chrissie forgives her. Even though the four women found that the pilgrimage to Lourdes didn’t work these miracles they had wanted (Eileen still had to go to a doctor for her lump, it wasn’t magically cured by getting in the water) the priest who goes with them, Father Dermot, tells them that the real purpose of the trip was to have faith even if there weren’t miracles. This kind of reminds me of Buddhism because there is no magic; we bring out our Buddhahood as we are. Buddhahood isn’t a far-off destination we need to escape to; it is present in our immediate realities. It’s why I have to chant every day, because I have to understand that my enlightenment, my absolute happiness, is within my life, not outside of me.

I love the part where Dolly, Lily and Eileen leave their husbands to fend for themselves when they leave for Lourdes. The men are so used to letting the wives take after the kids and clean, so of course they are resistant to them going off to Lourdes. It kind of made me think of this movie I saw called Bad Moms, but of course this movie was set in 1967 and they were going on a trip with a priest, so they couldn’t get too wild like the women in Bad Moms. But it’s kind of similar to the movie Bad Moms because when Amy decides she is not doing anyone’s dirty work, she has her son and daughter figure things out on their own rather than doing their homework and making them breakfast. Kiki also learns to set boundaries with her husband and lets him take care of the kids for a while (of course, because he made her take care of the kids all the time, it is stressful for him at first and he is always calling her for help) In The Miracle Club, there is a scene where Eileen’s husband, Frank, go gets the groceries and he accidentally drops them everywhere and is having trouble picking them up. A woman in the neighborhood comes along and helps him and makes some comment about how now he knows what it’s like when his wife has to go out and get groceries and cook all day. When Dolly is away, her husband tries to change their kid’s nappy with disastrous results. And Lily’s husband sits in bed drinking tea and eating crumpets alone in bed. Through their pilgrimage, these four women become closer than ever.

Overall, I really liked this movie. For some reason, I totally forgot that it was set in the 1960s. I somehow thought it was set in the modern day. A couple of other great movies that take place in Ireland are The Banshees of Inisherin and Belfast. The former is a dark comedy that was pretty hard to watch at times, but it resonated with me because the main character experiences depression and loneliness, although I am grateful that today I can go to therapy and talk about my anxiety and depression with someone. Back then they called it “despair” and there probably wasn’t therapy or medication one could take to manage their depression (the film is set in the 1920s on a remote island, and this of course was way before cell phones and computers were around) Belfast was intense but a really touching film about a boy growing up during the 1969 riots in Northern Ireland. It also has Van Morrison’s music in it, which I love. I also really love Laura Linney’s acting in The Miracle Club. Several years ago, I watched a movie called The Nanny Diaries, and she played a really mean character named Mrs. X. Mrs. X treats Scarlett Johansson’s character, Nanny, like total dirt and Mr. X is a scumbag who makes inappropriate advances towards Nanny. I guess that is what I love about watching movies, though, because actors are so versatile and can play a variety of roles. Also, this is a tangent, but for some reason Dolly’s character (the very beautiful young one with the brown hair in an updo) kind of looked to me like the American singer Lana del Rey for some reason. Every time she was on screen, I just thought, “Wait, is that Lana del Rey?” and then I realized “Oh wait no, that’s a different person who just looks very similar to Lana del Rey.”

The Miracle Club. Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan. Rated PG-13.

On Burnout, part 1 (content warning: mental illness, self-harm)

I am no stranger to burnout. In fact, this year I made a determination to take better care of my physical and mental health, and in Buddhism whenever we make a big determination, we face obstacles. One thing I’ve been noticing about me is that I tend to burn out very quickly. In my first year of college, I wanted to take on as much as possible, and I’m glad I took on the challenge, but I remember I wasn’t taking care of my health much during that time. I decided to work two work-study jobs, one in the dining hall as a dishwasher and the other as a pre-K teaching assistant at a daycare. I had a heavy courseload and also was burning the midnight oil well past my bedtime. My roommate would turn off her light around 9 pm, and I was determined to stay up until 12 or 1 in the morning poring through my philosophy textbooks, studying each book several times and perfecting every draft of every essay I wrote. It’s no surprise that I would come into class feeling tired and sleepy, and I would nod off during class. I would at first start off enthusiastic and alert, but as the class went on, I found my notes started to get a little less legible and my eyelids were feeling rather heavy. Before I knew it, I was dozing off at my desk in just about every class that I took. It wasn’t that the lessons were boring; they were very interesting topics. However, when you’re running on four hours of sleep each day, your body soon starts indicating that this is not a sustainable habit in the long run. And by junior year, I realized that it certainly wasn’t. During my first and sophomore year, I found myself gradually becoming more tired, more irritable and more withdrawn. And by junior year, I had hit rock bottom with my mental health. That fall semester there were several unarmed Black people that got killed at the hands of police, such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, and reading the news about police brutality made me feel disillusioned, frustrated, and depressed. I became a lot more hyper-aware of my Blackness, and going down the streets of the predominantly white town that I was in made me feel very self-conscious and unsure of whether people were looking at me because I was Black or whether they were thinking about what to grab for dinner or what time to pick up their kids from school (a.k.a not looking at me because I was Black). All I knew was that I was in a life state of pure Hell during that fall semester of junior year, and frankly I’m not sure how I even made it out alive, because I had lost so much hope in life. When I came back to school in my spring semester that year, I lost steam and was just running on fumes at this point. I had very little energy, I went to class feeling like a numb zombie, thinking everyone around me hated me and wanted me to disappear. I would go to bed a lot earlier than normal, which was great because my body needed to compensate for all the hours of sleep it lost due to my poor sleep hygiene those first two years.

I remember during my first year, I would hear gentle reminders from folks to take care of myself, to schedule fun time, to hang out with friends. The seniors often saw me running around during my first year juggling all these commitments, and they always reminded me to get sleep when they saw me staying up late in the hallway, click-clacking an essay on my laptop. I didn’t even go to senior banquet because I thought all I had time to do was study. However, the next day the seniors let me know, “Hey, we really missed you.” One of them gifted me a planner so that I could schedule time for myself, reminding me that college wasn’t just about the classes. At first, I got upset and offended when anyone told me to take care of myself and schedule time for self-care, but now that my body is recovering from years of being on all the time, I’m learning the tough way that self-care is a daily practice. I’ve also learned self-care doesn’t always need to be expensive. Sometimes self-care for me was taking walks in nature (as hard as it was to not have my own vehicle on campus, I did a lot of walking and I think that helped with my health to some degree), reading a book that wasn’t for class, or hanging out with my housemates. During my senior year I decided to try twerking for fun, so during study breaks I would twerk in my room to Iggy Azalea and other hip-hop artists’ music. I wasn’t very good at it, but it was fun, and it relieved some of my stress.

After college, I still had to learn that self-care is something I have to do every day, not just when I feel like it. And I learned that taking care of my body is important as a musician. In 2016, I auditioned for a local professional orchestra. I had this idea in my head that I would get the audition and be able to pay off my student loans just like that. Little did I know that it was a lot more challenging than I had envisioned in my idealistic mind. I remember shredding away at the audition excerpts for hours on end, without taking a single break to get up and drink a glass of water or exercise. I did go to the gym, but only sometimes, when I felt like it. I remember feeling really exhausted after practicing for three straight hours, and unfortunately, I still felt horrible about how I was going to do at my audition the next day. At around 2 am, I started harming myself, which is something I struggled with in my junior year of college. I didn’t want to be alive at that moment. Life felt too painful. The next morning, I lay in bed, feeling like life was over for me and that I should just give up. I didn’t have the energy to leave the bed, I didn’t have the energy to go to my orchestra audition later in the evening. I felt like a complete and utter failure. A relative who lived out-of-state called to check up on me, and at first, I missed his call because I didn’t have the motivation to answer the phone, but this time I answered and thanked him for calling me. He told me to take care of myself, and honestly, I think his phone call saved my life at that moment, because before he called, I had no hope and had lost the will to live. I made sure to rest my body before the audition, and in fact, that was all I had energy to do at that moment. About fifteen minutes before I had to go to the audition, I decided to chant to my Gohonzon (it’s the scroll I chant to morning and evening as part of my Buddhist practice) to have a good audition. I was terrified at this point about auditioning, and as I chanted the words “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo”, I started crying. I realized that I didn’t want to take my own life, I wanted to live, and I was tired of feeling numb. I cried on the way to my audition, and my dad gave me a hug. I got to the audition space (it was in a church) and the person helped me sign in. She was really nice. I went into a small practice room and warmed up with scales. It was an unrealistic expectation that I would play perfectly at this point. I just needed to focus on doing my best and getting through the audition. When it was time for me to go in (I saw only one other person going into the church to audition) I saw two people: the conductor of the orchestra and the principal cellist. They sat at a small table. I was nervous, but somehow because I chanted, I was able to be myself at that moment. I played “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saens for my solo piece, and then did my best on the excerpts. Sure, I fumbled quite a few notes, but looking back, I did my best. I think because I chanted, too, I was able to have a very natural down-to-earth interaction with the conductor and the principal cellist. After the audition, my dad and I celebrated by getting Taco Bueno.

To be continued…