Unheard Call of Orpheus

I think... I like the idea of someone liking me, but never do I have a specific person to hope for. 

How wonderful is it to have long stares cradle your facial features, to notice and for a flicker of a second understand that you've been noticed. 

    

For someone to pick up and treasure pieces of yourself that you've forgotten you've left behind. 

    

Everyday I yearn for love to reach me, but I cannot fathom enduring myself to senseless torture. 

Loneliness, I find, can cloud the mind with hysterical dreams of things that only ever 'could' be, but never 'will' be. 

    

The likes of love seemingly far and rare. 

    

To mistake indulgence with grand gesture and make yourself a fool in the face of wholesome desire, it's the very reason reverie will stay a hopeless dream. 

However, the idea of love is dear to me, and I will defend it.

Embracing Minimalism: The Only Fight Against Consumerism

     What could be the only thing that separates the materialistic, superficial, and consumeristic value we hold in society? A minimalistic mindset. The value we hold with materials to buy and new products to enjoy and simplify our life has been deeply rooted in American consumeristic culture since the 1950s. The era of conformity pushed a new kind of standard for the "American Way of Life". Especially in the wake of the holidays, it became more apparent that people and especially children would value the presents more than the time family would spend together. From shopping hauls to 'how much I spent on Christmas' videos, it shows that the push from social media had furthered our materialistic tendencies.

    Minimalism is more than just a style to portray or an image to uphold, but rather is a mindset of cleanliness and clarity. By taking things away, we can see the things that stayed. And in turn, value them more than just another trinket. Imagine a room filled to the brim with toys and objects and clothes, it's hard to find value in a mountain of things. By removing the stuff from the room, we can see clearer. Light can pass through, air can pass through, and imagination can be ignited. How furniture shapes a room is almost as important as the purpose of the room. With everything everywhere on the ground and in heaps in the corner, it's difficult to find the purpose of the room other than just being, essentially, a trashcan.

    There is only one way to avoid consumerism and the urge to buy more and more, focus on simplicity. Focus on a minimalist mindset. From that, we could benefit from the airspace and clarity it provides. By embracing minimalism, it shows that sometimes less is, indeed, more.

How Did Hallmark Capture the Christmas Spirit?

     As I sit down and cozy up next to a warm, crackling fireplace, a nice hot tea in my hand, and a warmly lit Christmas tree beside me, the first thought that passes my mind is, "I should watch a Christmas movie." As many do. But then, instead of imagining any normal kind of Christmas movie, I instead think about a Hallmark movie. It seemed that this company had perfectly seeped into the roots of the Christmas spirit as well as any other holiday with their bad movies and nondescript celebration cards found at any CVS or convenient store nearby. It's actually become so deeply rooted in specifically American culture to watch a classic romantic comedy directed and produced by the Hallmark producers that it's hard to imagine a full jolly experience without it.

    So what's the secret? How did this company sink their claws into the hearts of all those jolly hearts? Even when so many fail and fail again to capture that spirit of a warm winter, Hallmark seems to be able to root and stabilize that often difficult-to-capture feeling. Over the last four decades, Hallmark started their tradition with cheesy and cliché movies. But along with that, they had also shaped everything from decorations to gift-giving. The network's 40+ annual Christmas movies often give the public a feeling of warm nostalgia and escapism to a world where everything is right in the end.

    In many ways, Hallmark had not only provided a warm and fuzzy feeling in those in need of some holiday cheer but had also shaped the classic American Christmas holiday into something more than a religious celebration. Many love the cheesiness of Hallmark as it has helped to define and promote a vision of Christmas that emphasizes warmth, love, and the magic of the season—a vision that continues to resonate with millions every year.

The Immobility of Blind Patriotism: The Things They Carried

    “On the Rainy River” contains the heavy feelings of the narrator. On the rocking boat, feeling uncertainty with his choice of escape. He traveled to Minnesota, onto the lake, and onto the boat. Yet, twenty yards away from freedom away from the tragedy of war, he falters. He imagines the people in his life, the people outside his life, everyone, and he begins to crumple underneath the pressure. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the passage “On the Rainy River” discusses the immobility of the narrator, feeling trapped in a choice that is fueled by blind patriotism, and pushes the reader to imagine the situation of a choice with no right solution.

    O’Brien discusses the embarrassment and cowardly complacency of soldiers through the visualization of mockery from an audience of their life. Though O’Brien does not actually get confronted with real life people, he gets confronted with the embarrassment of dishonor. The audience tilts him back into the boat, “It was as if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me”(O’Brien). It was the mockery and the patriotic ridicule that forced O’Brien to his knees, the rock in the boat that shook him uncertain of his choices. The rocking of the “little aluminum boat” didn’t deter him, neither did the “wind and the sky”, it was when he “gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now”. It was when he willed himself to crash into the water, take a leap of faith, that he threw himself back. The lines of people he saw on the water, “the town, the whole universe”, they disgraced him and turned him away. It was the embarrassment that trapped him to a choice. O’Brien notes, “It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was”. It is the blind patriotism that forced him to push back against the edge of the boat, the embarrassment. Through the notions of wavering uncertainty with the rocking boat, then the tsunami of ridicule and mockery from his own conscience, O’Brien is able to illustrate to the reader the impossibility of the choice. The mental fatigue of running and the emotional drain from complying. The audience he experiences, however, isn’t real. Those people in his town and in the whole universe do not float above the water to ridicule him, the person who is there? That quiet, old man holds a significant part in O’Brien’s cowardly choice.
    

    Tim O’Brien illustrates the position of a “true audience” through allusions to the Bible, having the eyes of a higher power by a pragmatic Elroy Berdahl. The quiet man that O’Brien encountered in his route of escape, his significance didn’t seem important to the heavy weighted decision that sat in a sloppy lump on O’Brien’s plate. However, by Elroy simply being there, offering choices like doors, he plays a mentor figure. O’Brien, crushed by his fear of shame, noticed Elroy’s quietness, “his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them”. Elroy had explained that he had taken boys across the river before, helped them across the border by offering them the chance to swim. The same choice he gave to O’Brien. He watched from afar, watching the bobbing red bulb in the water, with absolute silence. God or the gods do not make any judgement while human choices are made and instead, they watch as those choices perform their consequences. Though they are supposed to make no judgement, they still have a knowing not present in a regular human, “When I told him I’d be leaving, the old man nodded as if he already knew. He looked down at the table and smiled”. It is interesting to see the old man smile, the pragmatic and still man smiling was not a regular occurrence that O’Brien understood. But having his “true audience” nod and understand his decision, it provided enough to push O’Brien to Vietnam. While Elroy made no judgement, it gives the idea that it was O’Brien to make his choice, and his alone. And further, it was not his courage that pushed him to Vietnam, but his fear.

    O’Brien highlights the irony of submitting to war and the reason for it by juxtaposing the two different connotations of leaving for war. As O’Brien battled his imagination, he decided that he would go to the war, and at the same time, he “would kill and maybe die because [he] was embarrassed not to”. This is ironic because being embarrassed not to kill and die is unheard of, but that makes the mood of the text more complex. Closer for the reader to understand the complexity of a drafted soldier feeling towards war. They’d be forced to fight for their own honor, the honor of their family, and their country. And with that, they’d serve and maybe die to preserve that blind patriotism. In this situation, there is not a correct choice, there is escape from a futile war and there is fighting in it. Both hold their own problems and escape. But, as O’Brien rethinks his experiences at war, every death he witnessed, the man he killed, the home he returned to, he didn’t find a happy ending. He simply stated, “I was a coward. I went to war”(O’Brien). The implications of war usually do not pertain to any sort of cowardice, often intertwined with bravery to serve and protect the country. However, through this lens, the reader can understand the trapped feeling of serving a nation. If he were to escape, he was disgraced, and similarly if he were to return home, he was felt with indifference. And as he felt the pressures of preserving honor, he was pressured to become a soldier. Then a veteran. But, as he stated, “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending”(O’Brien).

    In “On the Rainy River”, Tim O’Brien illustrates the feeling of entrapment of embarrassment and shame. By understanding the implications of preserving the honor of family and the nation, soldiers often sacrifice more than just their life. This pushes the reader into the tight shoes of the soldiers. O’Brien criticises the societal norm of embracing a forced draft. Through his experience of a futile war, he expresses the futility of mental strain about such a thing. War is innately human and conflict is expressed on many levels of the human condition, but when put in the shoes of a civilian man turned soldier without a choice, it applies the same feeling to the reader. O’Brien is a veteran and a writer, he is also a man and a son, same as he is a boy and a child. Both and all can be true, but identity does not portray purpose. It is decision and action, the choices made both passively and actively, the audience that watches, and the reason taken towards that make the human experience complex. Immobility is the same as mobility, just as a rocking boat on water is the same as standing out on a battlefield. Look out into the rain and wonder: Is the river running?

The Glorification of Bookclubs

     You know those women, middle-aged, no problems, maybe two or three sons and a girl, that have a surprisingly strong commitment to bookclubs? I've always wondered how they seem to consume books like candy. Just one after another. I wonder if they even remember what they read and more importantly, what haven't they read. It seems like books are becoming similar to that of the fashion industry: Fast fashion. These run-of-the-mill novels of the same tropes with the same characters and the same writing style are saturating the publishing industry faster than ever. And it seems like a majority of bookclubs hyper fixate on those books that could be summarized in a total of two sentences.

    Notice how you are assuming right now that you think I'm referring to romance books? It's actually a lot of the books we expect to be different that disappoint us the most. All the modern poetry and philosophy books seem to just reiterate the same concepts that hold a mask of nuance. It seems hard to write a book that doesn't consider the tropes in the trending category. And, as much as I love to sit down and read those books and just enjoy, it makes it difficult to actually discuss that book in a bookclub. If I'm reading something that just doesn't seem all that nuanced or offer any new idea to the table, how can I expect to take anything from the book other than "it was good".

    Bookclubs are amazing at connecting a group of people together with the beautiful art of literature, but often times I feel that we forget that bookclubs have a purpose of finding new ideas. To have good conversation, we need good topics. If we essentially read the same book over and over, our discussions at our meetings will probably get exhausted with repetition. People often think that those who are in bookclubs don't really read but rather just like to talk and drink - going back to that stereotype again - which may have some truth to it, but that is only because the idea of being in a bookclub is so glorified. It is so deeply rooted in our human nature to compare ourselves to one another and intellectualism has well been the grounds of the battling of our egos for many years. It only makes sense that we say we are in a bookclub just to say that we "are in a bookclub", and to support our bubbled egos, we say the we read books like eating candy. It is the glorification - and literally just lying - that is killing the bookclubs. While it could be argued that the books itself are the ones that are hurting the groups, it's really just the type of books we choose to read in order to keep the bookclub going.

So What's the Big Idea?: Vernacular Language

     Have you ever heard those iconic American catchphrases and wished you could understand what they were saying? Me too. I was born here by the way. I find it particularly interesting how vernacular American phrases come to be, like Coloradan phrases (which I had no idea were a thing) sounded so obscure and odd to me. I have an extended family that got remarried a long time ago, meaning before I was born, and their family is majority white. It's sometimes odd having just a random group of white people in a mostly entirely Mongolian household whenever we'd celebrate New Years or Thanksgiving. I try to make an effort to avoid them, I don't have anything against them, I just don't really know what to say other than "It's been a while!" (It's been exactly 330 days). However, this last Thanksgiving, I lingered and tried to continue my conversation with my uncle-in-law. Now, Brian is a very nice man, but he is so... Coloradan. 

    He's "born and raised in the peaks" (LOL), which went over my head initially, and when he collected that I didn't get it, he cleared his throat and shoved his hand into his "dress jeans" and said, clearly not boasting in the slightest, "The peaks are the 14'ers... Y'know, the summits?... Okay, mountains?" 

    In an effort to not seem inadequate with this strange slang that I've never learned in my years of living here, I simply smiled and nodded, "Ohh, gotcha." (I didn't 'gotcha'.) I cleared my throat and swallowed awkwardly, with nothing else to discuss with this Baby Boomer, I returned to one of my safety topics: My grandma.

    "So, my grandma is coming soon... From Mongolia." I said, nodding. Thankfully, the topic of my grandmother always proved to be a great conversation-saver and Brian quickly exclaims, "Oh, very nice!"

    It was short lived. With another few pandering seconds of awkward brainstorming of the next conversation topic, which I suddenly realized in that moment I clearly needed to add on to, Brian spoke up again, "Hopefully her flight went well. Make sure you say hey to Blucifer when you pick her up." He said lightly.

    I smiled and nodded (again), but in my head I was trying to decipher who 'Blucifer' was. And it seemed like Brian has an insane fake-laughter-detector that he jumped into (yet another) quick explanation on what 'Blucifer' was,

"Y'know, that scary blue horse at the airport?"

"The what-?"

"... With the, I don't know, red glowing eyes, it's standing up?- Nevermind." He shrugged off quickly Immediately, I feel horrible for making him feel this awkward. But it also made me wonder why the hell this demonic blue horse was named Blucifer... of which, by repeating to myself, I get now.

    I use this awkward interaction with my white in-law to illustrate the pains I know immigrants get whenever they strike up a conversation here, or literally anywhere else in the United States. That's what's so interesting to me, the vastness of this country. It's huge and its vernacular idioms and slang differ from state to state. So whether I'm in New York City, Chicago, Toledo, or even Colorado Springs, I'll always feel like a sort of outsider. But maybe, instead of viewing myself as a "forever foreigner", instead I could see it as that I'll never run out of things to be fascinated by.

BookTok: A Quick Look

     "BookTok" is the subcategory or subgenera of media from TikTok, it's mostly about books. Within, there are even more divisions going from classic literature to silly romance to childhood books we've all read. But by far, the largest group within BookTok is the romance readers. TikTok has affected the successes of many authors with its ability to gain mass amounts of attraction from all over to a book. For example, It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. 

    Though there are other books that get popularized by TikTok that do not identify itself within the realm of romance, a majority of them are. With the main demographic being young women, BookTok finds itself saturating its books with the same story. 

    Over time, BookTok has gained the image of being mainly romance books with those common tropes like enemies-to-lovers. These type of books are engaging and quick, which makes it kind of obvious why they gain so much traction especially on a platform that caters mostly to women. 

    BookTok has no doubt been more of a community than a subcategory of media and it provides a space where people can talk "book" with each other. However, it has gained criticism for its lack of authenticity and superficial tropes that critics argue "get tired" quickly when repeated too much.

    But, regardless of the criticisms and arguments against the community, BookTok has changed a whole generation and engaged countless readers. Its impact on the publishing industry is substantial and has been able to both lift up new authors and respect the classics.

Pseudo Intellectualism: The Intellectual Parasite

   

    Douglas Sirk, a German film director, said that "Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals." Which can turn out to be very true, though the quote may have its faults and certain personal prejudices. With Generation Z now embarking onto adulthood and having grown up so closely tied to the very real effects of social media, it's very common to find "fakes": People who are pretentious or snobby with everything that they say or do. The very idea of being a pseudo intellectual comes from the fear of being perceived as "less than" or "dumb". Those people will hide underneath the mask of classic books and uncommon hyper fixations on random "intellectual" subjects. It becomes very annoying when suddenly their undeveloped opinion - that they most definitely plagiarized - becomes their entire personality. Suddenly they are off discussing the impact of Anna Karenina on the world today when it is simply just a regurgitated, superficial, condescending chunder they fished out of some random Reddit page or TikTok post. But, as social media takes a stronger grip, it becomes nearly impossible to find a piece of media that is impartial or without opinion. And sometimes, people would forget that they took an opinion they didn't know very much on. It makes sense, it would take too much effort to spend hours researching a topic to be able to even form an opinion, especially if it is a subject that shows a large popularity of an opinion or a side that just seems to be inherently "correct". It just wouldn't be worth it to spend so much effort and time to something that doesn't need to be proven. Which can make us all somewhat pseudo intellectuals. The bottom line then becomes: Don't be a snob.

How to Write a Story. Again, How to Write a Story

    How to write a story: Start with a couple characters, show how they interact, show how their interaction impact each other and other people, develop ideas through the relationships that happen within the story. 

    Scratch that, how to write a story: Make a plot line with one or multiple characters as the leading perspective and then chart and track their relationships with other people, themes, and ideas - which creates a message to employ to the reader. 

    One more time, how to write a story: Do everything and anything to make it both as entertaining as possible and as long as possible, regardless of the "message" or "theme".