like snowflakes over this softened city
appreciating collections
It’s snowing in new york today. The city is sepia-toned but faded off-white, as if someone set the world at 70% fill. I like to watch the snowflakes drift the way they do now - more so floating up than falling down. They stay in the air like that for awhile, riding randomly with the currents indeterminable distances until finally they touch something more constant. Rooftops, branches, streetlights are coated in a colorless, perfect blanket which I know in a few days will turn into puddles of mucky brown and gray. It’s beautiful in all its impermanence.
We finally got our heaters fixed after months of “it’s not that cold inside” and wearing hoodies around all the time. I guess we reached a tipping point when L looked up from her desk this morning and asked only half-jokingly “should I put on gloves right now?”. We laughed because we could ignore the problem no longer. My best excuse for laziness is my theory of its correlation to heightened tolerance for unideal circumstances.
Recently, I’ve been drifting too, although I do not know if I am the snowflake or the wind carrying it. My days are made of scattered thoughts and futile obsessions. I spend time on useless things, just like the kind of gifts I used to hate the most: impractical, unproductive, even a bother for the space they take up. But as much as I avoided the seemingly pointless before, now I choose things that may never land. It matters less that there is no obvious theme and no numbered reach. I think that sometimes it’s better to go even when you do not know where you are going.
The rest of this letter is evidence of scattered thoughts but less scattered because they are organized into lists: a bucket-list, a playlist, a list of specific slightly awkward everyday moments. I’ve been loving collections because of how much the collectivity adds value to each item on its own. Individually, perhaps a thing is insignificant or does not make sense, but with many others it can stick to form shape and grow meaning. Lists are the most unadorned and accessible type of collection.
2024 bucket-list: out with new years resolutions and in with new years bucket-lists. here is an extract from mine:
go to beach
go to a gay bar
get manicure
have omakase
become a regular at a cafe or restaurant or bar
do skateboard trick
try sparklers
try korean hot dog
staten island ferry roundtrip
mail a postcard
get fortune read in east village
walk the brooklyn bridge at dawn
complete moomoo band setlist
i thought a lot about this playlist: if right now we were in a room and had two hours to listen and talk about music this is what i would play for you.
list of specific slightly awkward everyday moments
when you’re walking in public and have to turn around and pass the same people again because you realize you were going the wrong direction
mismatched socks
getting out of a swimming pool
deciding what drink to order at a bar counter
delayed sweatiness from walking outside when it’s hot so that when you finally get inside where there’s actually a/c, you start dripping sweat
making eye contact too early with a person you’re meeting when you’re still pretty far down the street
parting moment with an acquaintance and you’re not sure whether to go for a hug (or dap) and what orientation of hug (e.g right arm over left shoulder and left arm under right shoulder?)
More ounces:
pt 1oz. it has come to my attention that this substack’s name is not self-explanatory. there is a condensed explanation which i could give but if im going to give an explanation at all then i might as well give the complete one so the story starts 4 years ago in the gregory college house dance room. the dance room is located downstairs where there were mirror-lined walls instead of windows. it could have been an average afternoon or it could have been an ungodly hour when the rest of the university population was sleeping. i sat on the floor cross-legged with S, J, and a few other yet-to-be-sisters. they were yet-to-be-sisters because we had not yet formally join the sisterhood we would eventually pledge our allegiance to. other schools and sisterhoods sometimes refer to this period of pre-sisterhood as “pledging”; however this was a banned term for our particular female society so i will refer to it as the “new member process”. it was in fact for the new member process that all of us were gathered in that box of reflections under gregory college house; for whatever reason or not which for the sake of the society i will not go into further detail of, we were exercising our creativity for the creation of rap verses to introduce ourselves to the brothers of our sisterhood (who later became ex-brothers whose revoked brotherhood i, again, will not go into further detail of for the sake of the society). at the time, i did not (and perhaps still don’t) grasp the essence of the hip hop genre. thus, this was a particularly laborious and cringy part of the new member process for me. nonetheless, all the raps were eventually written and with enough collective gaslighting we came to truly believe in the artistic value of our verses.