hello everybody and happy december! winter is officially upon us (or i guess it will be soon, technically).
december is a nice month because despite the more chilly weather and shorter days, we are still very much in the midst of the holiday season. in fact even this year, with the constant anxiety and bad vibes that come with a global crisis of the scale of the covid-19 pandemic, i've been finding SF's annual holiday staples especially wonderful and comforting. if you too live in a situation and city where you can get up and walk/drive around and see lights, trees, etc., i suggest you do so! then again, i realize not everyone is from the same background as me. personally, my family used to go on "light tours" regularly every holiday season when i was younger, so i think i find happiness by tapping into those nice memories.
in any event, maybe a more broad takeaway for me was finally realizing a big part of the reason people put up christmas lights (or at least, my take on why people do it). i had never really thought about it too much; it's true that some people do it for local competitions, etc., but i think part of it is sort of a detached, asynchronous socialization. when you walk down a street and see people's decorations and lights on display in their window, it's evident that they willfully meant for them to be a signal to passerby. in that way, i think it's especially reassuring to see that now, as we find ourselves unable to interact regularly or closely, even with our loved ones (much less strangers!). i put up some lights in my apartment this weekend, but after looking at so many on display out and about, i sort of want to get more and display them in my window.
* * *
holidays aside, i've been on the more optimistic side recently, in spite of the fact that the public health situation is by all accounts worsening at perhaps the most aggressive rate it has thusfar during the pandemic. unlike at the beginning, i think the knowledge that there is a (likely) definitive-ish endpoint within sight is super reassuring. i remember talking with friends when this all started and saying how surely it could not last for longer than the summer or so. quel naïvité.
this started making me think about what life will be like as we approach a vaccine being distributed and people receiving it, and eventually the lessening of restrictions and return to some form of "normalcy" [1]. what will i do on the first day that i can hug people again? then again, that might be a while, fwiw, so maybe it's wishful thinking.
i imagine this plays into a pretty common [2] line of thinking, which i'd describe as "quarantine qua cocoon" [3]. it's hard for my brain at least to not rationalize this quarantine period as somehow significant and therefore worth some value to me, whatever that means. point being that if i have not changed in some demonstrably interesting way s.t. when i emerge from my apartment to hang out with my friends again they find me completely new, exciting, and intriguing, then i will descend right back in to peak-quarantine levels of deep depression.
anyway, so as i was thinking this to myself in the park this evening, i was trying to reflect on exactly what had changed about me. to do this, i read through my journal entries from the last year (they're pretty sparse, but it's certainly not empty!). what i found was interesting, although not new to me: not only would i say that i sort of have been writing to myself about the same topics/issues/etc. for (more than) a year, but i've also reflected on that very observation multiple times already. in other words, i've long known the ways in which i want to change (to some identifiable extent, at least), and yet have not really changed in those capacities at all.
* * *
i wonder if i will emerge from quarantine a changed person. some things about me have changed a lot, i think. for instance, i very rarely use social media now, which i think has overall been a beneficial change for me. but broadly speaking, it seems unlikely at this point that i'll come out of my quarantine cocoon a dramatically new man. that's definitely disappointing i guess, but really it's just a reminder of another fact that i already know yet can't seem to fully internalize...there are some things in life, i think, that are very easily influenced by exterior circumstances. there are some things, though, that genuinely can only be changed through hard, continuous, willful effort on one's own part (combined, probably, with external circumstances which are conducive to this end).
i think that for me at least, there isn't actually a quarantine cocoon. at the end of the day, though this year was certainly unique and interesting, really i've been wrapped up in a cocoon defined by these very things that i've been constantly revisiting in my journal. though external circumstances do play a huge role in our lives, i think it's important for me personally to realize that fundamental, personal change (or metamorphosis, if you will) only happens when i break out of the cocoon of internal change.
for now, i'll try and work out how to do that better, i guess. after all it seems like i've been wanting to know for quite a while :p
* * *
no playlist this time, but as a bonus, here are some holiday photos...
 |
this is in downtown la, taken during my short trip there! so pretty... it did a flashy routine to music
|
 |
another big light ornament in dtla
|
 |
| christmas tree in some random office building or something (sf downtown/fidi) |
|
|
|
* * *
[1] let it be known that i detest any usage of the term "new normal" and am very grateful that everyone stopped using it a while ago when it became abundantly clear that everything sucked and we couldn't bear to accept that such suck could not possibly be normalized
[2] this is a blatant assumption, maybe i'm alone in this or this vague analysis is completely wrong
[3] please pardon my use of "qua." i promise i won't again. i blame talking to too many yale english majors. but also, you can't spell "quarantine" without "qua," isn't that funny?
