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meikuree1. this is not a drill I have tickets to see tori amos live next year, this is not a drill!! just like Wu Qingfeng of sodagreen, also a tori superfan, I know that I will likely be crying my eyes out during the concert. not because of fannish ecstasy but because so many of her songs strike the chord of melancholic catharsis and saying the unsayable. I do tear up every time I listen to Cooling and she sings, in a despondent but hopeful voice, "maybe I didn’t like the year, but I still can’t believe Speed Racer is dead..."
2. a friend sent this to me: a 词汇表 (vocabulary list) from a chinese curriculum for 15 yo IB students in Singapore. it went viral in the Singaporean news, with several parents commenting on how complex and obscure the phrases here were.
for people on my page who are learning or know chinese: what do you think of the list? upon discussion withfirstroad, our take was that in reality few of the words here have complicated meanings; they simply look intimidating at first glance, because there are a few uncommon hanzi, and phrases you rarely hear in everyday conversation. but as long as you familiarise yourself with how to read all of them, you'll be fine; they're approachable for native or semi-native Chinese speakers (it'll understandably be different for CFL learners). in fact, uh, these would likely be pitched at the primary school standard in Mainland China.
it's also quite a strange mix, with no ostensible theme among some groups. you have 熟悉 (shuxi), 谦虚 (qianxu), 编织 (bianzhi), 鉴赏 (jianshang), 阐述 (chanshu), 啰嗦 (luo suo) and 生活开销 (shenghuo kaixiao) -- all common phrases -- appearing next to each other or 循规蹈矩 (xun gui dao ju), 腼腆 (miantian) or 缺憾 (quehan).
3. rewatched Kon Satoshi's Perfect Blue and watched Millennium Actress with my partner. I first watched the former when I was 16; to say it was age-inappropriate would be an understatement, lol. it warrants several content warnings. but I wrote a short, crude meta here based on my rewatch. with fresh adult eyes, I'm grimly musing about [mild spoilers] the unusual fact that the victims of gruesome murders in Perfect Blue were all men; they also all had their eyes gouged out, which to quote Susan Napier is significant in a film preoccupied with voyeurism, almost like a symbolic castration of the male gaze, a not-very-straightforward and unsettling female-enacted revenge fantasy (which I really want to think more about, in terms of the limitations of that sort of blunt-force revenge fantasy).
the effect of watching several Kon Satoshi films, all concerned with the blurred boundaries of theatre/acting/performance with everyday reality, was that when I went for one of my NHS talking therapies session, I ended the session telling my partner that I felt like I was not so much participating as a person called mei, but an actor acting out a therapy persona called mei, or therapyself if you will, with the borders of the online call serving as the metaphorical four walls of a stage.
4. I was recced Tash Aw's (a malaysian author) The South by my supervisor; all he said cryptically was, "Hm... it's a very intersectional book." then I went home, looked it up, and found out there was gay cousin incest right in the opening. not a big deal, but it tickles me somehow: the family ties are definitely intersecting there...
5. my pastime is browsing nice longline coats, because I am half-heartedly but not really thinking about replacing one of my old thrifted coats. my pastime is also subsequently being pissed off by the consistent lack of inside pockets in women's coats. I'd rather stick with my current coats given the state of affairs in commercial fashion design. an inside pocket is a bare minimum for me; it certainly seems to be for men's coats. is it so much to ask for for coats to be functional?!?!
I want to be able to stow away my phone or other valuables while walking outside to mitigate theft.
here are the three coats I currently rotate, which all have inside pockets. at this time I feel like I must have struck lottery with how I struggle to find those now:
2. a friend sent this to me: a 词汇表 (vocabulary list) from a chinese curriculum for 15 yo IB students in Singapore. it went viral in the Singaporean news, with several parents commenting on how complex and obscure the phrases here were.
for people on my page who are learning or know chinese: what do you think of the list? upon discussion with
firstroad, our take was that in reality few of the words here have complicated meanings; they simply look intimidating at first glance, because there are a few uncommon hanzi, and phrases you rarely hear in everyday conversation. but as long as you familiarise yourself with how to read all of them, you'll be fine; they're approachable for native or semi-native Chinese speakers (it'll understandably be different for CFL learners). in fact, uh, these would likely be pitched at the primary school standard in Mainland China.it's also quite a strange mix, with no ostensible theme among some groups. you have 熟悉 (shuxi), 谦虚 (qianxu), 编织 (bianzhi), 鉴赏 (jianshang), 阐述 (chanshu), 啰嗦 (luo suo) and 生活开销 (shenghuo kaixiao) -- all common phrases -- appearing next to each other or 循规蹈矩 (xun gui dao ju), 腼腆 (miantian) or 缺憾 (quehan).
3. rewatched Kon Satoshi's Perfect Blue and watched Millennium Actress with my partner. I first watched the former when I was 16; to say it was age-inappropriate would be an understatement, lol. it warrants several content warnings. but I wrote a short, crude meta here based on my rewatch. with fresh adult eyes, I'm grimly musing about [mild spoilers] the unusual fact that the victims of gruesome murders in Perfect Blue were all men; they also all had their eyes gouged out, which to quote Susan Napier is significant in a film preoccupied with voyeurism, almost like a symbolic castration of the male gaze, a not-very-straightforward and unsettling female-enacted revenge fantasy (which I really want to think more about, in terms of the limitations of that sort of blunt-force revenge fantasy).
the effect of watching several Kon Satoshi films, all concerned with the blurred boundaries of theatre/acting/performance with everyday reality, was that when I went for one of my NHS talking therapies session, I ended the session telling my partner that I felt like I was not so much participating as a person called mei, but an actor acting out a therapy persona called mei, or therapyself if you will, with the borders of the online call serving as the metaphorical four walls of a stage.
4. I was recced Tash Aw's (a malaysian author) The South by my supervisor; all he said cryptically was, "Hm... it's a very intersectional book." then I went home, looked it up, and found out there was gay cousin incest right in the opening. not a big deal, but it tickles me somehow: the family ties are definitely intersecting there...
5. my pastime is browsing nice longline coats, because I am half-heartedly but not really thinking about replacing one of my old thrifted coats. my pastime is also subsequently being pissed off by the consistent lack of inside pockets in women's coats. I'd rather stick with my current coats given the state of affairs in commercial fashion design. an inside pocket is a bare minimum for me; it certainly seems to be for men's coats. is it so much to ask for for coats to be functional?!?!
I want to be able to stow away my phone or other valuables while walking outside to mitigate theft.
here are the three coats I currently rotate, which all have inside pockets. at this time I feel like I must have struck lottery with how I struggle to find those now:
- this COS blazer coat, for transitional weather. I thrifted it from a charity shop for £15.
- massimo dutti water repellent trench coat, purchased from vinted for £10 (RRP £199)
- weekend max mara down coat, also with a flimsy inside pocket. bought from vinted for £30 (rrp £350+, I think)
no subject
Date: 2025-10-29 01:25 pm (UTC)I looked at the Chinese vocab list and found I knew just under 50 out of 80 (in the sense that I understand the meaning and could probably pronounce them if you let me off getting the tones right); agree that, while I'd find them alarming for, like, a first- or second-year Chinese class, for native speakers or people who have been studying for at least a few years they're not at all unreasonable (I have encountered a bunch of them in contexts like fic and song lyrics, they're not THAT obscure; also I know 腼腆 because it's what Zhu Yilong's coworkers call him in interviews...).
I felt like I was not so much participating as a person called mei, but an actor acting out a therapy persona called mei, or therapyself if you will, with the borders of the online call serving as the metaphorical four walls of a stage.
oh this feels very familiar. (Did you find it more or less helpful, I wonder?)
no subject
Date: 2025-11-05 10:45 pm (UTC)that would rock!
re: chinese vocab, I'm glad my assessment isn't too off -- I don't necessarily consider my Chinese 'good' for someone who's spoken it from childhood, but I also don't know the experience of people who had to learn it much later!
I have the slightly-cynical view that therapy is one arm of the many medicalising institutions around today, so with that in mind, it's helpful in the sense that it gives some meta-perspective for what I'm doing or how I'm presenting my life during therapy sessions. (or in less 啰嗦 terms: what I tell my therapist is really a very curated, limited slice of who I am outside therapy, so therapy can become a 'box' people shoehorn themselves into too.)