#shapelylampposts

may 12: this morning i was trying to preemptively brainstorm this really nice and sentimental thing about birthdays and i was going to write something about a really pretty quote i love from this play about rites of passage and how they’re how we honour and celebrate one another as we pass through time. now that today is over though, i can’t think of anything but how grateful i am for everything and everyone and everything. i spent time with and talked to a lot of people i love today. some high school friends did a surprise visit in the evening, and i ended up i losing track of time and having to jog to the park to catch the tail end of this sunset. still, i can’t help but marvel at how pretty this civil twilight is, and how unbelievably lucky i am to have people in my life i would miss sunsets for. (i don’t want to wait until december to reciprocate the sentimentality so maia you are on the list and i love you <3)

june 3: it has been a hot minute! this sunset is ridiculous. yesterday i had the "put your hands up" song from bo burnham's latest special looping on repeat for a solid three hours straight. when i first heard it while watching the show i didn't think too much of it, but afterwards someone i follow on youtube mentioned that it was their favourite, so i looked up the lyrics and listened to it more intently. i realized it's sort of the opposite of john green's whole thesis.

"there is a pink flower growing through a crack in the asphalt". i think this newest special is bo choosing "a. it looks like futility". this is my favourite lyric (stanza?):

You say the ocean's rising—like I give a shit You say the whole world's ending—honey, it already did You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried Got it? Good, now get inside

i still think futility is a less-than-ideal response to the state of the world, but i find the song really mesmerizing and beautiful. 80% is probably bo's performance, but i've also always loved the idea of partying at the end of the world. this song is tinged with this wistfulness/fear/grim acceptance of the world feeling absolutely ruined and unfixable. i was lucky enough to not be plunged into a quarantine depression thanks to my sister and a lovely group of new artsci friends (wink wink), but i imagine this song is what it must have felt like in the months where everything felt truly hopeless.

all of the reviews i've read of the special so far talk about it capturing the essence of pandemic isolation. i imagine it'll be one of those songs that reminds us of painful moments but doesn't ask that we stay there, and i'm really glad it exists.

aug 2: first downtown hamilton sunset! i really liked your mall post. for some reason every time i read about eyes now my mind goes to tj eckleburg and those giant billboard eyes looking over the ash valley. in gatsby, it was probably a metaphor for god (sorta like the watchers in marvel who observe important events but can’t interfere). it’s weird because most of the time writing about eyes goes on about emotions and evocativeness, almost like looking into someone‘s eyes was how you read their mind.

with covid, though, and what you mentioned about how we feel less connected to strangers, looking into someone’s eyes over a mask feels more like looking at tj eckleburg than it does the window of the soul. i don’t know how to feel about that.

june 6: this entire post is going to be unabashed sunset fluff.

my dad took this photo on our drive back to markham yesterday as we passed through downtown. we left hamilton around 8:30pm and got back around 10, and the sun was setting for an entire hour of the drive, so i basically got to see like 10 different sunsets in the span of that hour. around 9:20 the sky turned this unbelievable shade of pinkish-orange and i was driving so i asked my dad to take a picture of it so i could post it here. he's usually a really big picture-taker (he asks the waiter for pictures when we go out to a restaurant to get food), but when i asked, he said "but you can see that anywhere" (in chinese).

i didn't try to explain my months-long romanticization of sunsets, both because i don't know the word for "sunset" in chinese and because i don't actually know how to explain it. i can't really articulate what it is. how did it start? i suppose it started with john green, but technically with pok. well, not pok itself but the idea of it, maybe? the people i met. well, sort of. i guess it started with a conversation about art, or maybe god. i don't remember.

john green (amy krouse rosenthals?) excellent observation about attention is one of those things that only seems self-evident after you hear it. that things only gain importance when we bestow it onto them is obvious, but goes unacknowledged in almost every facet of our day-to-day lives. what the heck is money, right? i supposed i realized when my dad told me that sunsets are mundane how sustained my attention had become. a few months ago i would have answered the same way had someone asked me to take a picture of a sunset, or really anything. but i'm not her, and the sunset yesterday was lovely, and i'm putting "long highway drive east during sundown" on the bucket list.

june 4: i haven't been posting a lot here because i feel like i haven't been thinking/having as many thoughts as i did when we first started the blog, but as usual reading through your incredibly insightful and wonderfully-written blurbs never fails to switch my brain light on! so prepare yourself for a semi-long to actually-long post about plastic flamingos.

in grade 12 english, to practice rhetoric, we had to read these passages and write a rhetorical analysis essay on the passage. the one i remember most clearly was this passage about how the plastic flamingo became so ubiquitous in the states. i read a statistic a while back about how there are more plastic flamingos in the world than real ones, and reading through your post reminded me of that. the passage i read described how in the 1920s (the gatsby years). this fancy hotel in the florida used a flamingo as its logo and thus made it "synonymous with weath and pizazz" (yes i dug up the essay we are citing sources now), and travellers would bring back little flamingo souvenirs. in the post-war economic boom, more people were able to travel to the fancy hotels on the coast, and so the flamingo started popping up everywhere in american yards.

your point about how we are drawn towards controlled simulacrums of the natural world was really interesting, and i think very true. even when we try to "connect with nature" in our lives, it's always in a manner of our choosing, for a purpose we choose. i think that's what differentiates us from nature, even though we exist among it. while certain animals are more powerful than others, none of them really get to choose how nature acts on them as much as we do.

maybe i'm taking an overly cynical view of this, but i find myself asking whether it's possible for us to create little manifestations of nature in our own lives for ultimately non-selfish reasons. the pink plastic flamingoes are on one extreme; they began as an explicit symbol of wealth and audacity and flamboyance. what does a pollinator garden represent, if anything?

- j

may 28: this was taken in the parking lot of the grocery store near my house (my sister and i went to pick up some last-minute macaron ingredients). before you ask, yes, that building being constructed is indeed another condo complex. THE CONDOS ARE MULTIPLYING. i just wrote out a sentence that started with “a few years ago” but it is 2 am here and i have a compsci midterm in 7 hours, so i will resist the temptation to write another post romanticizing condo construction in the suburbs.

may 18: made brownies today! relistened to the new anthro episode on this walk, ‘twas a vibe.

may 11: 99% of the posts on my end are just going to be me desperately trying to make suburbs look presentable, apologies in advance.