youth is for wasting

stocking the kitchen

Dear ounce,

In the blink of an eye we are halfway through August! Thankfully, the peak of summer was only mildly sweaty. For me, it was spent hopping in between jobs, frolicking in between weekend trips, and wondering why I always like to be in between. I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t edited the Ecuador video I said I would two months ago. The truth is for these two months I didn’t produce much of value at all (at work and outside) which is alarming to think about, but my bad excuse is I was truly in the trenches of a creative rut.

A while back, J shared this golden phrase “You can only cook what’s in the kitchen”, which I love because it gives credit to the experiences and conscious curation of taste necessary, but often overlooked, to make anything good. I held that quote in my head all summer to feel better about producing nothing, because at least I’m living, and that amounts to something in the kitchen.

This creative rut felt a little déjà vu to last summer, and I blame the in-between-ness of june and july for always doing this to me. What’s laughable is this time I would try to make up for my lack of output in abstract and unquantifiable ways like being funnier in conversations and braver in uncomfortable situations. I would take mental notes at a function to recreate when anyone said anything witty, and I would feel pleased when I did something I had never done before.

You, a consolatory soul, might argue that character gains are good and valuable gains too. But still, I start feeling empty when I’m not making anything, and I do believe that an important part of character is the part that’s an amalgamation of its creations.

I love and hate how contradictory I can be. The more I hate my thoughts the less I create, even though I know that the more I create the more chance I have at loving what I create.

The good news is I no longer feel the need to optimize every single second. There’s this Chinese saying I appreciate: “青春是用来浪费的” which roughly translates to “youth is for wasting”. It’s comforting to think about how anarchic being “young” really is and that it’s to be expected that we’ll fail and do stupid things and change our minds all the time, because when else would we be able to do that? Meanwhile, my friends have been taking turns reading The Defining Decade from which the biggest takeaway seems to be that we all need to get our shit together right now. Supposedly, our 20s is what defines the rest of our lives. I refuse to read the book because it seems to me like our 20s is more about filtering through conflicting information and influences to determine what works best for ourselves, and what works best for ourselves might not necessarily be to have this decade be so defining. I’d like to think we’re in it for the long run, which means we can be more forgiving of ourselves for not having done [insert life milestone or societal expectation] yet. These days, my approach is more like: doing things for the plot, making judgements based on the vibes, and being satisfied with generally trending in the right direction.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t have things we work towards. Recently, I’ve picked up new routines like running and practicing guitar which bring me a lot of joy. I am also trying to get back into “cooking” (the figurative kind) by making a foray into fictive writing (see last letter here)! This will be an experimental series of conversations and stories from a made up group of people who intersect lives at a made up seaside town. Note this concept may evolve or dissolve in the future so bear with me. Of course, I will continue to also share my silly ruminations and life updates through this blog but perhaps just expect an ambiguous “I”. As always, feedback/comments/reactions are very appreciated to make the void less lonely <3

Love, oz

… how am i supposed to work

---

More ounces:

• a summer playlist (mostly city pop, hyper pop, disco, bossa)

• recent reads i liked:

  • Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. 11/10 execution. The writing and storytelling is incredible but overall the novel maybe loses a few points with me for feeling too disconnected from a real human experience, which to be fair, is understandable considering this is the story of a murderer

  • A Comedy of Nobodies by Baron Ryan. This is exactly what I expected it to be - basically a longer, written version of Americanbaron skits. No one else captures the feeling of a slightly awkward, but silly and very endearing sort of existence as well as he does