1. everything has an expiration date
and that's a condition for joy
before we begin: hello. welcome to my first newsletter! today i begin with a brief meditation on joy, and then i list three hyperfixations after.
let’s have fun together! please don’t hesitate to comment, i would love to hear from you. 🥰
see you again on october nineteen, for newsletter two.
love, vicky
on october one i wrote in my journal: do what you need to stay sane, no matter what anyone says. the day before, september thirty: the purest thoughts have an expiration date, like dew drops that fade as the day wanes.
i don’t know what creates such a sense of urgency for you. for me: when i hear whole phrases of my head, i try to run and record it as fast as i can. last sunday i heard my mind say, exercises in paying attention. a lightbulb went off, and i ran to my laptop all the way from the bathroom. i opened substack, and wrote like a madwoman, pounding a semi-coherent introduction to this newsletter. that sunday morning was the first time, in a long time, that i heard a thought, listened to it, and actually saw it through. it’s like hearing your child say their first words. the only right thing to do is to rush to capture the moment.
i tended to be a distant parent to my own thoughts and ideas. for the last five years, i considered them more like sperm cells than actual babies that need to be fed and nurtured and raised. when i hear a clear turn of phrase spoken by my mind, i tended to leave it in my notes app, or in a post-it, rarely letting it spur me to action. i always figured that the viral thought, the worthy idea, the seed of a bestseller, will eventually survive and find its way out of my womb. clearly, it never did.
i’ve become a habitual traitor of my own joy (and sanity) for the sake of pleasure. which is to say, until the last few months, i did not know (or remember), exactly, what brought me joy. i know very well what brings me pleasure: the specific crunch of clover chips coupled with fizzy, ice-cold coke zero. making myself laugh with my own private jokes. knowing that i am winning an argument. words strung together beautifully (any fool can get into an ocean, but it takes a goddess to get out of one.) adding to cart. checking it out.
the scary thing about joy is that you can forget what it is when you’ve been so numbed by pleasure. joy, to quote zadie smith, is that strange admixture of terror, pain and delight. friends who practice bdsm will tell me that their pleasure in sex is also a strange admixture of pain and delight. but it is precisely an element of terror that makes it joy. terror expands pleasure into joy, gives it a timeframe, a presentiment of loss, a possible end. to be numb to terror, the anti-thesis of pleasure, is to be numb to joy.
giving birth to this newsletter terrifies me. it paralyzed me so that i spent thirty minutes sitting in the toilet playing video games, until i pep-talked myself all the way back in front of my laptop (it’s ok, you know? to feel afraid.) but at the same time, the pursuit of this, especially when i shared about it to all of you last sunday, made time expand and feel like i had more than two paltry days for a weekend. writing something and the prospect of sharing it—this gives me joy. it makes me feel vulnerable, naked, and exposed, but it also makes me feel seen, embraced, held. i’ve forgotten this, i’ve taken it for granted, i’ve abused it, but it’s one of the truest joys i have known, and hope to continue to know. thank you for the privilege of being able to do so.
how about you? i'd like to know: what gives you pleasure? what gives you joy? has there ever been a time, like me, when you miss out on your own specific joy?
and for the promised list of hyperfixations:
i’ve been walking around the house screaming HONG BAN JANG!!!
ON HOMETOWN CHA-CHA-CHA (2021)
perhaps i am hungry for a sense of culture that is accessible and not alienating as a form of escapism, which is why i have taken to korean culture so much. i remember writing to my stepdad, “i heard they sell books in train stations in korea, just like they do in italy or france.”
hometown cha-cha-cha, which i highly recommend to everyone who needs a fucking break, is a show set in an oceanside korean town, focusing on the lives of the people in the neighborhood. in episode two, chief hong, the male lead, (played by actor kim seon ho) is seen reading walden by american writer henry david thoreau. i’ve never attempted to read walden until a few days ago, and i was surprised that some of it was familiar. then, i remembered, my stepdad drops bars from this series of essays. the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation is a big one. i say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes is something he has told me while we were shopping around town.
i bring this up because my hyperfixation recently was why chief hong, as english speakers know him, or 홍반장 (hong ban jang) to korean speakers, feels like such a different male lead, even from all the other romantic comedies that i have been enthusiastic about since i was a kid.
in walden, thoreau writes: to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
the series has not ended yet, but we know that HONG BAN JANG!!!1 is simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust all rolled into one convenient kimbap of a cutie.2 actually, he is certified in many practical things (plumbing, electrical wiring, counseling, teaching kids to name a few), which makes him the ultimate kimbap of a man, if you will.
i have listened to this song eighty four times in the last four days
ON F(X)’S FOUR WALLS (2015)
when i hear a song i like, i feel it immediately. my pupils dilate, my eyes go wide, my heart races, my cheeks feel hot, and i want to scream. that’s how i felt like when i first heard this song at the back of a car, on the way to the hospital for a check-up. i was vibing through the first few seconds, and then the chorus came in and that’s when my eyes went wide.
it begins innocently enough. it twinkles, as beautiful things are wont to do. think, the gorgeous girl by the bar who catches your eye. surprisingly, she sidles up against you. do you want to dance? she asks. she leads you to the dancefloor. she is dizzyingly close. this song sounds like the beginning of a promising night out.
which is why it's surprising to learn that it’s a song about being friend zoned. i unearthed the original demo to this song on youtube by ldn noise. the lyrics are disappointing, but the music sounds better in the demo, i think. it has a rawer, less polished feel. but then i do tend to have a bias for demos.
my hyperfixation with this song is finding out what instrument makes that sound in the specific part in the chorus, where it goes dununun-dun-dun, going up and immediately dropping to its first note, again and again on a loop. i’m still looking for what exact synth sound is being used, i suspect it’s from the roland sh-101. i listen to the song on loop, anticipating the consistent micro-drops, as i find the right words to describe it.
in the world of the neuroatypicals, this can be considered as stimming, short for self-stimulating behavior. it’s a protective coping mechanism to keep something familiar or controllable (tapping a finger, jiggling a leg, rocking back and forth) in response to perceived overstimulation. doing these things doesn’t mean you have autism, adhd, or other ~*maladies*~, but i do know that it is one surefire way to get me focused and calm. (i play one song over and over and over when i bake.)
my sister tells me i like music that sounds like they belong to classic video games. repetitive, electronic, cute. i grew up playing easy arcade games, think circus charlie and tetris, and in some senses i still do. i recently picked up a candy crush dupe, which i play instead of scrolling on social media. i’m already up at level 223. this was the game i was playing in the bathroom for thirty minutes as my ass went numb. i love the soundtrack, even if it features no synths. i prefer it to candy crush.
i’m excited about reading again, somehow
ON READING BOOKS (AGAIN)
one of the things that has always allowed my brain to go quiet was reading. as a kid, i was hungry for books. as a teenager, i would spend whole afternoons in bookstores just to finish books we couldn’t afford to buy. when i got older, especially when i hit my twenties, that passion really waned. now that i’m here, two years shy of thirty, my relationship to books dwindling to tepidness. sure, i would read every now and then, still finding it pleasurable. but i wouldn’t really say i recaptured that spirit and hunger for reading until i started reading fan fiction again.
i forgot that i read fan fiction. the memory has been so long buried only the feelings remain from the fact. i vaguely remember it being about harry potter, and maybe cho chang? but i can’t remember where i read it, or how i found it. i don’t remember the stories. probably one of the neurons that got pruned while i was growing up.
you know when you read a book, or watch a series, and it’s so resonant you get emotionally attached to it, and there’s a hole in your heart when it ends? that’s something fan fiction comforts. things having endings. so when fan fiction is good, it feels like transcendence. it feels like the world seems bigger, because characters get to live in parallel universes written large (some very very large, in hundreds of thousands of words, dozens of chapters), in different lives, careers, narratives. that some ideas don’t have expiry dates, just invitations to create alternate universes.
reading fan fiction has helped me regain some sort of enthusiasm for reading blocks of text that have no direct application to life. which has, i guess, lead me to having enthusiasm again for writing blocks of text that have no exact application to life.
i noticed that a lot of the books that drew me in were things marketed towards young adults. for example, sally rooney’s existential and horny characters sounds exactly right up my alley—why am i only reading her now? oh right, because everyone was reading it last summer, which made me suspicious. i think have tyrannized my own joy by being suspicious of things that a lot of people like.
i am currently reading a lover’s discourse, a novel by xiaolu guo. it was inspired by roland barthes’ lovers’ discourse, which i have never read. i am aptly engrossed. i reach out for it while waiting for meetings to start instead of my phone. maybe i’ll talk to you about it soon.
if you watched it you will understand why i say, nay, scream HONG BAN JANG!!!
this is a reese lansangan reference. she always described herself as a: visual artist, graphic designer, fashion designer, musician, and songwriter; all rolled into one convenient sushi.