────── ༚༅༚˳.𓆑.˳༚༅༚ ──────

• Art is so incredibly important. It stimulates such connection, over language and culture barriers, and can carry messages inexpressible with mere words. And I love that great art can never be created with profit in mind.
• A great thing about being able to escape into your head is that you can pick yourself up at any time and fly straight into the sky. You can soar, and soar, and soar, out of anyone’s reach, and they’ll never know where you’re going or what you’re doing. But you know. And you will create treasures that you hide deep within your soul, that will never be shown to anyone else unless you so please.
• I see the shuttered down, old-timey, rugged restaurants here and there in every city and want to cry. The masterpieces once made there…. The craftsperson who owned the store… have they passed on? The lost art… is something nothing can ever bring back… and when the last of their dishes are served… no one will ever notice.
• I look at the Google Maps images, an aerial view of my tiny house… and I wonder what I was doing inside when the picture was captured. I, standing, or sitting, or sleeping, or walking… unconscious that I was to be captured in perpetuity. Beyond what pixels on the screen would you find my frozen body? Beyond what pixels would you find others’ frozen bodies? I suppose it’s like Schrodinger’s cat… and since no one can “brush aside” pixels to discover, like paleontologists, what secrets are beneath other than cyan, magenta, and neon yellow light strobes…. I’ll never know. I am nowhere and everywhere at once.
• Sometimes when I look at some generic text I’ve never truly noticed before, such as an error page, I wonder who the person who wrote the words was. What’s their life like? Where are they now? Are they proud that thousands of people see their writing on the Google error page every single day?
• Many people reflect on how varied the human race is, but I find myself surprised at how similar we all are. I see shadows and glimpses of people I know or used to know in new strangers every day.
• I saw this quote somewhere, that “it is not the crying owl you should fear, but the laughing owl”, and I’m realizing how true that is. How much more scary a laughing face with anger underneath is than a face that directly shows its anger! Problems that don’t hide under the surface, pretending to everyone that they don’t exist, making you seem crazy if you realize they do… they are so much less to fear.
• You know when something that used to feel really happy and peppy and energetic suddenly also feels like it’s crusted at the edges with unfathomable sadness? And this, this very un-silver lining just keeps spreading in and in, all across it.
• I glanced down at my student id, and I wondered. How many other series of numbers refer to me, this specific person? Government ID, email ID, IP addresses, my account number, my birth certificate… all of them, all of them point to me. And I don’t even know how many there are. And it all strikes me as being at least a little bit ridiculous, that strings of numbers matter that much, they determine whether someone is deserving of love and compassion or punishment and aggression.
• There’s something magical about learning how to write your name for the first time as a child. Suddenly, you have a way to make a mark on this world that represents you. I remember learning how to write my Chinese name for the first time, and how enchanted I was with the swoop of the letters, the layering of the strokes. They mean me. These letters felt made for me. Only I had them. I wrote them out hundreds of times, on anything I could reach. I scribbled my name in notebooks, on the inside of pencil cases, etched them in cardboard boxes with the sharp tips of my pencils.
• I don’t understand languages. What do you mean you can’t widen your throat a little, say that vowel a little broader? And what do you mean I can’t roll my Rs and incorporate the lower parts of my throat and push out clumped up sound as smooth sounding as silk? I unknowingly did the hardest thing I will ever do when I was just a baby. I learned how to natively speak my tongue.
• Some colors can’t be reproduced, not with dye, not with print, not with screens. Your eyes can take in far more color than your hands can ever synthesize. So the next time you stare at a bold, big, beautiful blue sky, hold it tight in your mind’s eye: nowhere else will it look so beautiful.