amber waves

[meikuree]

it's only been a month or so since my last entry but it feels like it's been a million years

• february was massively busy with multiple deadlines in single weeks but i've just dusted off the last important Big Thing i had to do. happy for it, i can now sit back and faff around without the sticky residue of guilt in my bleakly limned soul and so on
• anyway! below are some happy things that have happened recently

fandom

• I have done no writing since my yuletide treat last december, lol. life is just a lot fuller now and I have less mental energy to open word docs and write. I do still daydream and spin up phrases to use in hypothetical future fic in my off time
• i'm a very visual person I think, which is traditionally a codeword for I never developed disciplined means/funnels of writing and am trying to hide that but for me also does come from a piece of advice offered by ao3 writer montparnasse once, which is that you have to work for your craft. my process often involves going about my day and noticing odd or unexpected mundane connections. in my notes i've jotted down things like: "yellowjackets - remnants of food in sink drain like a pre-raphaelite garden: explosion of reds, greens, browns; dirty brown water = oxblood red' and 'blue eye samurai - cracked lineaments in teapot covers like nitamago'.

fragrances

• i've been looking for fragrances that'd fit zenin mai's vibe, as a treat to myself. I don't usually buy merch for any shows, and a fragrance is a nice, idk, useful thing that could also still give me joy because of a self-constructed connection to a fictional character. this is actually just my way to sublimate my despair over the fact that I still regularly get into emotional pits over fictional women at my age
• as a recap, this is what zenin mai looks like:

• i don't know the first technical thing about perfumeries or the alchemy of fragrances, but i've googled so many eau de parfums by now that I know some basics, i think. i'm on the hunt for something dark, sophisticated, and most importantly brooding, either floral/fruity (more mainstream) or metallic (more avant garde).
• black orchid, dark violet, plum, or black vanilla as the top notes might do nicely
• and not required, but it would be nice if there was some sort of """"east asian"""" element in it like japanese incense, hinoki wood, japanese pear, osmanthus, lotus blossom, or water lily among the notes
• a dash of secret sincerity or devotion among the base notes would be the last thing to really top it off, to parallel mai's eventual sacrifice. i'm stumped for this one: maybe lotus blossom, water lily,  white musk, or yuzu...?
• an eclipse theme or motif would alternatively be great too: black vanilla, white musk, black lily, etc.
• some fragrances I've been eyeing: tom ford's black orchid/velvet orchid, alkemia's madame x, pulp sonnet x
• what I am actually doing though, because I prefer to repurpose things from family and friends is asking my sister to hand me her old unused perfumes and seeing if anything in that pile fits

reading, literature, etc.

• finished Convenience Store Woman (3.5/5, generally enjoyed it, some bits worked much better for me than others) and Tender Is The Flesh (1/5, did not enjoy much at all from the concept to execution). the latter was billed to me as a dystopian cannibal slaughterhouse novel which piqued my interest, so of course as a literary cannibalism lover I picked this up as a potential comfort read while I was ill in bed. but it just kind of annoyed me. more to come in an eventual review post.
• i'm currently reading The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, a Malaysian author who grew up in penang. I'm having conflicting responses, which is generally a good thing -- it's a sign I'm being challenged -- I like the prose style generally and historical details of post-WW2/Malaysian Emergency-era malaysia and the cameron highlands setting, but the pov character and misalignment of focus between form and content are giving me pause... and also squicky feelings. I'll also elaborate on it in a forthcoming post.
• I will say, though, that this book would nearly be a wonder for me, if not for one or two missing components in its equation: the romanticised and simplified racial politics, the pov character who seems to build her life around men even though the driving force of the entire story is an emotional debt to her late sister, etc.
• or, you know what, I could just summarise and clarify my complaints as such: I love hard-headed, ruthless, and cruel women (who may still have a counterintuitive warmth at their core), but I long for a story about women who are ruthless even though and perhaps even because they were raised by women, live by creeds yoked to women, and who subvert that usual idea about the love of women being a saving balm. something like the lesbian worldview of tazmuir's books, where the cruelty, pain, joy, liberation, debt of lesbians both psychosexually torturing or uplifting each other are centre-stage
• on that note, another friend recced Exordia by Seth Dickinson to me with the headline that there's a mother pursuing a revenge quest against her own daughter who gave her PTSD, and [rubs my hands together in glee]. I hear the book also has nice nightmare and body horror fuel, which: [happy cackling]
• some friends shared this Elizabeth Knox post recently: "In purgatory stories are street lamps." I like the discussion of kitset language and the aversion towards speedy or glib diversion during difficult times, because it's put into words something I've thought about often: when I am going through a difficult patch, I similarly prefer to read affectively difficult things. I don't like conventional escapism in reading, or rather my escapism looks very different from the usual and involves reckoning with darkness. as I've aged I've had less patience for books that tell me the same things as the generation of books that have come before them, which I call a quality of lacking mystery, or riskless behaviour; I don't really want to be comforted or told feel-good motherhood statements about how there's always a light at the end of the tunnel. I want to face difficult problems without any solutions, that may never have solutions in human lifetimes
   

fun, misc

• went out to a gay bar with some friends recently, and got tipsy off an embarrassingly small amount of alcohol. we got our friend who's a spanish native speaker to teach us some Very Important Phrases for Lesbians, and walked out into the (quiet) streets after singing "FUERSA LESBIANAS!" and "FUERSA FEMINISMO!" the most fun I've had in a while. 
• sometimes I've wondered if the concepts of slow death and cruel optimism (both from Lauren Berlant, 2011) appeal to me precisely because they capture the effects of attrition, unnoticeable but constant pressures. my self-inflicted constant rush to meet deadlines due to my excellent procrastination skills is not remotely comparable to those things, but, well. metaphorical constellations!