Another year

Beach or mountain?

Beach.

But Hong Kong doesn’t make you choose.

Long ago, when a grey cloud seemed to be taking over Broom’s life, I commented on her blog that she needs a patronus. And she said her patronus would be an island, I forget where. But I remember thinking, a patronus should be animal, not a place.

But now I know a patronus can be a place. It can be a stretch of beach not that far from home, nothing fancy, the water temperature just right, the waves not too choppy, the sound of the wind and the squeals of your children, with a buffalo strolling by for good measure to show you how it’s done. It’s a place that can literally wash your worries away.

My patronus is Lower Cheung Sha Beach, Lantau.

This has been the year – dare I say it – when things settled down.

The job.

The marriage.

The sex.

The job is no longer in the honeymoon period. People get on my nerves, my boss gets on my nerves sometimes. But I like the job. I enjoy it. The people I can deal with, even if they make me roll my eyes. They’re not the worst.

The wisdom these days is that you need to learn to cope with situations. True, you can’t run at the first boo. But sometimes, you need to get out. Cut your losses and run.

That’s what I did with the teaching gigs. My principle with work is that I don’t get out before I have something else lined up. Which can take time and is stressful, but I need an escape route not a new situation to fester in.

And yes, I was lucky. But also, I kept at it. Sometimes applying to jobs was so painful, I eased off, and sometimes V edged me back in and I hated him for it, but it had to be done.

But I do feel like I have the job that is the best fit for me. And I thank my stars for that second chance every day. Okay, every other day.

The job helped me calm the eff down and the extra money helped V calm the eff down and that helped our overall situation. Ironically, I work longer hours, I work public holidays, I have less time with my kids and it’s not ideal. But the time I have, I’m not in a mindfuck and that matters.

One of the girls I met on the first academic conference I ever went to wrote a post about how regardless of whether she ends up working at a make-up counter after her PhD, she did a PhD because she wants to be a philosopher, and that’s what she will be regardless of her actual job. That’s the way I’m coming to feel too. I know people in academia won’t see it like that – that you can’t be a thinker unless you’re surrounded by people who are paid to think. And I get it, academia is different, I don’t deny it. Different good and different bad. Too much for me, I guess.

I have been told that 40 is the best age. My colleague told me that 40 is the year you stop giving a fuck. The fucks I give have been slowing to a trickle – literally, ha! – but I still get riled up by people and situations. There’s definitely an element of ‘this is me, take it or leave it’, not quite the full on aunty quality of saying the first thing that comes out of your mouth not shits given, which I don’t necessarily want to be, but there’s only so far I’m going to change. I can also spot people’s defensive BS a mile off and it just makes me shake my head that people older that me still have stupid hang-ups, still trying to be too cool for school by being a bitch.

I’m not quite 40, so I have some way to go, but I’ve stopped caring. I have more grey hair and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to dye it, though I still occasionally want to get some cray hair colour, so I’ve not grown up enitrely.

I think I’m better at staying alone. I look forward to being alone. Because I’m not.

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Three books on groups of ‘cool kids’

Tags

cool kids, Donna Tart, Muriel Spark, reading, Tana French, The Likeness, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Secret History

Reading Tana French’s The Likeness reminded me of two other books which deal with groups of precocious youngsters – Donna Tart’s The Secret History and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Let’s talk about The Likeness. The most obvious parallel is Donna Tart’s The Secret History which I really did not think was all that. If the main point of that novel was “the secret”, it was a let down. If the main point was the group, which I suspect it was, then meh. Maybe because I’m always slightly impatient with those “too cool for school” kids.

I think it is the deliberate crafting that goes into their individual and collective existences that puts me off. I tend to admire the illusion of effortlessness and I can respect the Kim Kardashian/Paris Hilton extreme artifice but with these “cool kids”, their stylishness is always showing. It’s like they try as hard as your average Kim Kardasian just in a relentlessly counter-cultural sort of way. The problem is that somewhere along the way, the counter part is lost in the conformity. Do I sound like I have a massive chip on my shoulder about “cool kids”? I’ll own it.

In both novels it’s not exactly clear to me what is so special about the groups involved. Okay in The Secret History, it’s that they are obsessed with Ancient Greece, but I dunno, they seemed to be to so closely role playing that it comes across as more odd than charming. I vaguely remember that they’re supposed to be beautiful, but the only one that sticks in the mind is the female twin, just as in The Likeness Rafe stands out for his looks. And then they’re mainly defined by being “chosen” by this one difficult teacher, which for me is a turn-off. Being a groupie/teacher’s pet does not a cool kid make in my book.

Thankfully, in The Likeness the group is not beholden to any particular teacher. They are wrapped up in each other and the whimsical desire to live some kind of communal life in the house one of them inherited. They are all Lit postgrads – thankfully not Classics majors again – and they seem to reject the trappings of modernity – the internet, texting and the pursuit of money.

The problem though is that although each of them has a different research interest which is spelled out, they don’t seem to talk about it or literature at all. Rather, they all blur into one amorphous lump of people lying around idylically stroking one another’s hair, repairing odd knickknacks that they find in the attic and occasionally painting the walls. Okay.

The Likeness is an improvement over The Secret History, both in terms of the fleshing out the individual,  making them somewhat likeable and also in the actual mystery at the heart of it all. But the novel that I think does ‘cool kids’ the best is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

This classic by Muriel Spark is about a group of chosen one’s by a schoolteacher in Scotland. Each of the girls is special in her own way, even if one of them is special for being mediocre and basically the runt that gets picked on. Miss Brodie stands among them as a towering figure – one that we can admire even as her flaws become increasingly apparent.

Miss Brodie reminded me of our revered English Lit professor in college. She too had an aura about her, was a rebel who flouted authority and who edged us towards rebellion ourselves, whose life was a slap in the face of conventional morality that she saw herself as superior to. She also had her chosen ones – and the casual but cruel way that Miss Brodie goes about her choice reminded me retrospectively about this teacher too. If you were not in her inner circle you always felt slightly like a fish out of water. I wonder if she sneered at us like Miss Brodie did. I hope she was kinder, but Miss Brodie makes me suspicious.

I liked how each of the girls were allowed to grow up and outgrow Miss Brodie even though she remains the most profound influence on their lives. I loved how even as children, some of them defied her and how each of them had a personality, even though the whole thing is narrated through one surprising perspective. These girls too were defined by their choice of Latin in senior school – what is it with these classical languages – but somehow they are more interesting than the “too cool for school” types of The Likeness and The Secret History.

It just struck me – the only “cool kids” I can bear are the ones in Clueless who are such over-the-top parodies they are genuinely funny.

So, were you one of the “cool kids” in school or college? Did you want to be? Did you like The Secret History?

 

 

Elena

Tags

#thegoldfinch #reading #justread #elenaferrante

When I read Elena Ferrante’s novels, I feel like my nerves are on edge, like I’m in a world of complicity, that they are – through strangers in a strange land – saying what I feel, telling my story. For the one and a half day or so it takes me to inhale the novel, I am in a fog, emerging only reluctantly to the ‘real’ world. V senses this, maybe I get a certain look, and he gets angsty. This too mirrors the world of the novels.

I was predisposed to like Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Books about the strong bond between two girls – it sounds quotidian like this, but I know from experience that it is always more – sign me up.

But it was The Story of a New Name – which ironically is the story of an old name, the names that both girls keep – that really swallowed me. My Brilliant Friend seems almost like backstory, the childhood of poverty and the family and neighbourhood connections that made these women who they are. I did not love the writing, which I suspected would be better in the original Italian. There were powerful sentiments in that novel and the writing conveyed it, despite itself.

[spoilers alert]

The Story of a New Name yanked me in from the start. I’m glad it began where My Brilliant Friend ended – at Lila’s wedding. As we learn what happened to her in excruciating detail, I have flashbacks of my own. No, I was not beaten bloody on my wedding night, but I did have a similar sense of disconnection, this idea that the one one had chosen for stability, for being different, after a heady and charmed courtship that only soured towards the date, was more of the same and the only way to cope, was to detach emotionally if not physically.

Which one am I? is the obvious question, the question a female reader would ask, a tradition at least as long as Little Women, a book Lila and Lena too discovered and that triggered their ambition to write themselves to a better place. The two girls are distinct and yet their names lend themselves to blurring. Lila is Lila only to Lena; she is Lina to everyone else, just as Lena is Lenu.

I identify with Lila’s cold rages more than Lenu’s self doubt. But overall, I’d say I’d identify with Lenu, the bookish wallflower who slowly discovers her place in the world. I’m not sure I had a longstanding Lila. I did have one friend who would qualify in terms of both looks and impetuosity if not intelligence (Lila is a prodigy). In a sense, it is both their intelligence and their emotional complexity that defines the two girls.

In the matter of love, I am more Lila. Lenu stays with and makes out (for want of a better word since they significantly did not have sex) with Antonio although she considers him her inferior. She likes and is attracted to him but balks at committing to him forever. Been there done that.

But Lenu has her sights on the cultivated, intellectual type symbolised by Nino, and it has always puzzled me how I do not share this attraction. From early on, I saw Nino for the self/absorbed brooding intellectual male that he is and hoped Lenu would not pursue him. I was almost relieved that he met his match in Lila, though I empathised (somewhat) with Lenu. Why she didn’t just tell Lila early on or even a bit later what her feelings were is one of my frustrations with her, but I guess that’s how people are. They don’t always do the logical thing and sometimes the face-saving gesture turns into quicksand. But apart from disliking the arrogance and essential selfishness of the intellectual male type, I’m also rarely attracted to that type at a baser sexual level. It’s like a mind body split with me. Or maybe at some level I’m just scared of a competition I will lose and prefer to be the admiree not the admirer in love?

Like Lila in her choice of Stefano, I tend to choose the classically masculine and seemingly safe type. That this safety does not always last is probably part of the package and our (Lila and my) outsized drama at its crumbling is also of a piece.

I am all about female friendships and yet I have only once had that kind of intense singular bond with a woman. Maybe the intensity of it is why I have usually deflect the possibility of such relationships with women, because the potential heartbreak so much more searing.

The thing that set me apart from these characters is of course their poverty. The book makes the reader identify with Lenu and so with her struggles to make it through the upper middle class milieu or academia. Her realisation is of lacking what Pierre Bourdieu called the cultural capital of the middle class; her experience is akin to that described by Dalit students in India, the feeling that no matter how hard you try, you lack something undefinable that is essential to success. Ironically, the reader would have to be of the privileged class, just to be reading the book.

This book engulfed me so totally that having digested and spat me out, my nerves tingling, I’m actually holding back from reading the next one. For one day at least.

Resolutions

Tags

#newyear #resolutions

I was so meh about the ‘festive’ season this year, that I thought I’d ignore New Year. But there are some things I’d still like to get done this year:

1. For the god-knows-how-many-years-running, be calmer. I read this anechdote on Quora about the difference between responding and reacting which was attributed to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. Reacting is knee-jerk, instinctive, flustered action; responding is pausing, thinking, making a choice. In my interactions with my family members, I find myself reacting. In V’s case, it’s because he knows exactly which buttons to push. I need to respond more. Or just not react more. Freeze basically. But well, I’ve said this more, so let’s see.
2. Not get hassled when I have do something slightly unpleasant (e.g. exchange discount coupons, handle taxes, cook, follow up on research paper that has not been published yet). Just do it.
3. Pick up after myself more. We have slightly more domestic help than we need at the moment and it’s easy to just let someone else pick up after me. But on principle, I’m going to this as a matter of discipline. Depends on how tiring the new job is, though.
4. Brush my teeth at night more.
5. Check my own bank accounts and savings status more.
6. Find a way to exercise even with my new full-time job and eat.less.chips (after the stash I brought back from India is over).
7. Write something creative OR submit one more research paper from the thesis.

The year of disconnection

This is the year that I found the lights switching off on a lot of things.

Not so much my relationships with family and friends, but my expectations of them. Everything has been shifted to a low setting, with an accompanying level of engagement from my end. Part of this was due to crazy pace and uncertainty in my professional life for the last six months of the year. I had very little time to reach out, but I also found that to be equally true of the people I care about. They too were preoccupied either with work, children, health issues or just the general drama of their own lives.

I’ve been disappointed by people I hoped for support from, but this disappointment has been greeted with a shrug rather than a rage against the machine. More and more I’m coming around to the idea that people have their own shit, they go through phases and if their crazy phase and yours happens to occur at the same time, something’s got to give (this is probably the story of my marriage’s downturn). It doesn’t many anyone the bad guy.

But I know I’m not been there for anyone as I probably should have. And that’s because I’m so depleted myself. I am beginning to understand the husband or maybe you just become like your significant other, because finally, I’m resorting to exactly his defense mechanism – withdrawing into myself, seeking solitude, blocking out what I don’t like or want to deal with. No more digging deep, I’m just gliding these days. Any painful emotion, I just open my Kindle and start reading.

I’ve done enough deep digging over the years to recognize crap for what it is. The thing is recognition is not healing. Once you know the harmful pattern you’re in, how do you break out of it? Noone really has the answer to that, and if you live with someone who has their own destructive patterns to deal with, well. Let’s just watch an episode of Mad Men instead. V’s strategy has been coasting, without much analysis so far, and although that’s not my choice of survival mode and I resent playing the game on his terms yet again, having tried everything else I can thing of, here I am. It takes two to tango after all.

The laughable thing that always happen is that when you – even inadvertently – start mirroring someone’s else’s behaviour, they can’t handle it. I always come to this point with men.

The problem is that for me, this is not a temporary measure. Something in me has indeed broken off and floated away. I’m not sure I actually want that part back anymore. I’m liking this shut down. I don’t want the lights on anymore. I’m getting comfortable in the dark.

 

 

 

Staying alone

The irony if part-time teaching is that while the husband with a full-time job could take off for a two week vacation without much thought, I couldn’t swing that much leave. For one, I had an exam to invigilate and grading to do so I couldn’t take off early. And if I was teaching the next semester, I’d have to prep for that so I needed to be back early.

Not that I was gutted about this in practice. This is the first year in which going to India did not seem to matter as much as it used to. I want to see my parents, but I don’t need to see them in India anymore. Ditto to friends, most of whom are not in India anymore anyway. I feel a sense of detachment, which has been my general state of being for about six months, exacerbated by the stress of the past few months. But I think also that my rootedness in Hong Kong has grown to the extent that I feel a certain detachment from India itself. Of course, there is a connection that can never be severed with the place one grew up, but it has become that to me, a past.

So I bid farewell to the kids, my helper E and V as they left for India five days before me. I have to say that I had not been dreading this moment. For one, I had a ton to do. But also I was looking forward to the peace and quiet. It wouldn’t be an entirely empty house as our helper J was staying back. But basically, I’d be left to my own devices.

For a person, who a decade ago learnt to dread solitude due to a stint of too much of it, I’ve come full circle. I found that the stretches of time empty of much human company initially a bit weird and, then, nice.

I did have a social life and I could order it as I pleased. The night everyone left I met a couple of friends for dinner and drinks. One of them told me I was free to join her and other people for dinner the next night, but I wasn’t really keen. As it happened, someone else asked me to dinner, but had they not, I would have been fine. The next night, I caught the latest Star Wars flick after a traipse around the mall (and discovering to my horror that Gap and Mango had disappeared from their usual spots) and a quick bowl of noodles for dinner. I’ve long ceased to see a movie as a social event, because really you can’t interact during  a movie so what’s the point in company in a situation in which safety in numbers doesn’t apply? One day, I had lunch with a friend who I owed a lunch treat.

I found time to exercise. V joked that I was making a last ditch attempt to get in shape before India and part of that was true, but basically, I finally had the time. The thing with kids (and husband) being around is that the time I have to work is unpredictable. Anything could and would come up and disrupt my plans, not to mention the general claims on my attention. Now, I blank days to order as I wished.

I also gained control of the TV remote and watched a programme of my choice on the TV after ages. Season 2 of The Crown if you must know.

I cooked! Mixed results, but an improvement overall. Stuffed mushrooms with garlic bread that was lip-smacking if I may say so myself. An Indianized version of Thai curry that was not. And a pasta with marinara sauce out of a bottle, but I added accoutrements that made all the difference. So I can indeed survive on a desert island.

I did miss the kids, but mostly, it was a revelation how I enjoy being on my own. This is a big change for me, one that I’ve been sensing but that has not really been confirmed till now. Again, I do make plans with people, but I know that the silence does not spook me anymore like it used to.

 

 

 

The ethics of bingeing

At a conference I once attended, a woman with pink hair presented a paper on the ethics of bingeing on TV shows. She argued (and I paraphrase what I understood) that given that several TV shows are engaging with topical ethical issues, bingeing could be seen as an immersion in ethical dilemmas and not a retreat. While this is an attractive proposition, someone in the audience pointed out that bingeing today may involve engaging with complex ethical issues, but it doesn’t really go beyond that into actual political action. It remains a solitary, self satisfying act.

I’ve been off TV for a while. For one, I prefer reading and V hogs the TV (we have only one in the house, shocker!) and because I have alternative entertainment in the form of books I’ve never really fought it (except when he started watching Trump’s antics through the prism of Fox News that is). Then we discovered streaming software and I slowly got back into TV, partly fueled by the fact that there is really a lot of excellent TV being produced.

My current mental state also means that I need an escape route. So yeah, I’m not one of those claiming any ethical dimension to my TV indulgence. It is escapism pure and simple. TV helps me ignore the claims and worries of real life by projecting me into other worlds and giving me other things to think about.

If I’m honest, books do the same for me and probably always have. V was the first person to suggest to me that there was nothing intrinsically noble about reading and it was just escape. I don’t entirely agree. Books stretch the imaginative faculties in a way that TV doesn’t – which probably accounts for why TV has been my escapism of choice lately, it’s just easier. Ironically, I can finish a good book faster than I can watch an entire TV series (I can’t/don’t watch on the MTR or at uni, instead I read recaps and analyses of the episodes). Also finding the right book is also challenging. I do have some ideas in mind, but it involves a trek to the library. Yeah boo effing hoo I have a library system at my fingertips but don’t seem to have the time for a ten minute walk. I also still have vestigial guilt about reading anything not PhD related or more recently unrelated to the courses I’m prepping for. Reading is not free from worry and need to work.

So yeah for probably the first time in my history, TV is taking precedence as a form of relaxation and all I can say is:

A) who would’ve thunk?

b) I’m grateful. Grateful that a medium of such entertainment exists. Grateful for streaming services that are like a cave of treasures for the taking.

Not grateful for the problems I’m trying to escape but they are admittedly not life and death.

This too is another change. I used to want to tackle things head on, wrestle with them mentally and figure out What To Do. Now as more things seek beyond my control, I’m leaning towards Let It Be. However, I’m not evolved enough to just LIB without some kind assistance. Enter the Idiot Box – the 20th C’s own form of therapy lite.

Life without control

I have not yet mastered the art of letting go of the things I cannot control. If anything, I have become more anxious, or at least I am conscious of my anxiety, or there are more things to be anxious about. Or less things that I can control.

For example, when applying for jobs, I worry about what if this one calls me before that, will I accept, but what if? Which is all pointless because a) noone calls b) if they call, would it have done me any good to be worrying about all the possibilities and permutations and combinations before the fact. To be fair, I worry about these things because I want to figure out whether to apply at all. Why apply, if I won’t accept. But I only won’t accept if a number of other things fall into place, which I have no way of predicting. So.

I have always said that having kids is an exercise in losing control. This feeling of basically having to let go and go with the flow (even if the flow is basically getting no sleep, or having to sling your baby and carry her around 24/7 because she will not be put down. The alternative is to run from pillar to posts for solutions that basically stop being relevant just when you found them because the baby has moved on to a new problem). I never quite got the hang of this loss of control or at least, I never got over the resentment of having to lose control, but thankfully, the babies grew up, and gave in to a modicum of a routine. Of course, modicum is the operative word.

My kids are older, but they are unpredictable. One of the unpredictable things is there health. Last year, Nene has been sick one every month, if not more. He basically has a permanent stuffy nose (like allergies, but to what we don’t know, likely the air which we have no control over and I do not possess a husband who believes in the expat solutions of air purifier, special cleaning of aircon with tea tree oil, what not), which at some point degenerates into a bacterial infection/tonsilitis. Mimi’s health has been pretty robust – being around a sick brother notwithstanding – but occasionally she falls sick too. And then, there’s me. So there are three variables that cannot be controlled, and doctors visits and care etc which all takes time, which in between trying to finish writing a dissertation and apply to jobs and write a proposal for a postdoc that will anyway not consider me (and which now is not posting the recruitment ad eveb) and prepping for the poorly paid jobs I’ve been offered, is time I barely have. Even with hired help at home.

I am sorry to say that the time before last that Nene fell sick I collapsed into a blubbering mass because I just did not have the time to take him to the doctor. Again. Then I felt guilty about that.

But today I did better. Today when each of my children complained of some ailment that would require a trip to two separate doctors, requiring me yet again to reschedule my carefully laid plans for the day, I took a deep breath and went with it. Sequenced the events in my head – prep helper to get appointment for local pediatrician in case ENT for Mimi doesn’t work out, call ENT on repeat in the morning and request afternoon appointment so I do not have to cancel lunch meeting with former boss, if afternoon is not available, cave and take whatever appointment, but resist urge to contact former boss until this has been confirmed. Once inevitably only 2 pm appointment is available, accept it and cancel lunch. Go with Mimi to Central to ENT to be told she has middle ear infection, but basically it could have been diagnosed by pediatrician (but what if it coudn’t have so good I did ENT and saved myself two potential visits, at least I’m covered by insurance), head back and work on bibliography while Nene plays with cars on my leg, only snapping at him when he jabs at my keyboard and basically erases entire bibliography which I thankfully am able to recover, then dither over whether to send Nene to doctor with helper because the doctor will give the same medication anyway, cave to guilt and take himself, bring home the same medication including one dodgy looking cream that I’m not sure I want him to apply, dither over whether to sacrifice run in favour of packing for next day’s minibreak which I probably should not go on because of all these doctor’s visits but it’s the summer vacation…

The thing with kids is that I cannot afford to procrastinate on my own stuff. When time is mine, I have to work like a horse, because I have no idea at what inopportune time the interruption will come. How do working parents with no flexibility do it, I wonder? But I know. I was that parent. You do what you can. You don’t feel guilty because you don’t have a choice. Because I seemingly have ‘the time’, I am plagued by endless claims on it. But it is finite and so am I. Nobody else seems to understand this.

I am not good at making decisions on the fly because I want to agonise over the perfect one. I am getting better at deciding something and then squeezing my eyes shut down on the what ifs. Today I managed this, even with the PMS hormones raging and threatening to take me down into sadland. Of this I am proud.

Gratitude

A couple of years ago, I started doing a gratitude challenge on Instagram. In addition to helping me focus on the good parts of each day, when I analysed what I had been grateful for over the month, there were some surprising results.

This year, I decided to do it again. This time, I must admit, I didn’t reflect on my day as much. Because the challenge overlapped with my India holiday, I lost track. I also tended to focus on the prompt and to take pictures to reflect the prompt, because it’s not necessary to stick to the order of the prompts. I think the whole thing was more haphazard this year, but also one thing was evident to me.

I am most grateful for my children. They are a huge source of happiness in my life. Their presence, the charming things they say, the way they enable me to see the world with fresh eyes and push me out of my comfort zone, getting me to do stuff I end up enjoying but that I would otherwise not have tried or been too lazy to actually do.

As a person who was never into kids, this is a huge and unexpected change in my personality and life. It is why I encourage people to have at least one kid, one’s situation allowing for this of course. By this, I don’t mean that I go about evangelizing the need for people to have children, but if someone who is ambivalent asks my opinion on the subject, my answer is usually positive. I agree that I am fortunate to have great help in raising my children, but had that not been the case, I would still advocate having one child, again if one’s general life situation allows for it.

I am sure there are people out there that regret their decision to have kids, and that these narratives need to be told and heard too.

In my case, though, despite the stresses that children put on my body, my finances, my marriage, my lifestyle, my emotional and mental wellbeing, overall, when I do a cost-benefit analysis, the sheer joy, breath of learning and general fun they bring to my life trumps the negatives.

PS: The second thing that I seem most grateful for is my job, the opportunity to do the PhD. The third is probably living in Hong Kong. This is just my overall impression.

Resolution

This Next year I’m keeping it simple. Just one thing to do:

1. Shut the fuck up.
2. Zip it.
3. Count to 10.
4. Breathe deeply.
5. Think Inner Poise.
6. Swallow the rage until it forms a bitter little ball in the stomach but as long as the exterior is Lake Placid, all is well.

Etc.