fireworks

Back in high school I had a major English assignment related to the ideas in The Denial of Death. I vividly remember reading that book on a beach vacation somewhere. The relevant point from that book to today’s post is that leaving a legacy is a common way to achieve immortality.

The second relevant introduction to today’s post is that I happen to have read The Remains of the Day (after not reading for the latter half of the year) and watch The Boy and the Heron in this last week of the year.

I found the movie very dense, and more grotesque/dark compared to all the other Miyazaki Ghibli movies. The music is great as usual though. Since I didn’t know how to understand the movie, I watched some YouTube analyses. One was saying that Mahito rejecting ownership of the tower is young Miyazaki rejecting the career of the old/current Miyazaki. I didn’t interpret it that way, and after some shower thinking, came to the conclusion that it’s acceptance that even though there is no successor to one’s legacy, hence no continuity to establish immortality, one can be satisfied and proud of one’s career/body of work.

This is a similar message to what I took from The Remains of the Day, a book I really didn’t enjoy the detached and nonchalant narrative style but recognize it’s a well written book, that at the end of one’s career and an age where one’s capabilities begin to decline and become much more real limits, it’s ok to simultaneously be proud of one’s accomplishments as the journey to reach this point and let go of the accompanying expectations (mostly self-imposed) and relax/enjoy the time that remains. That’s got to be the longest run-on sentence that I’ve written, hopefully you can follow.

Momentarily back to the movie:

1. The grieving part surprisingly didn’t leave much of an impression on me, maybe I hit my quota on processing loss this year haha.

2. I feel that Ghibli movies usually have a clear simple message, and “Acceptance” is the word I’d choose to summarize The Boy and the Heron.

And now back to the book: I had a good amount of ~thoughts and emotions~ after visiting family in China, and reading this book has surprisingly helped with some additional processing of that. In particular why I dislike, or surprisingly more accurately: don’t vibe with, the narrative style, and some anxiety regarding both my parents becoming no longer independent in their eventual old age (and my responsibilities arising from that), then even farther in the future of my own aging (and not wanting to burden someone else to take care of me).

Actually not even when I’m truly old, somehow I’m feeling the “getting old” real viscerally this year. Okay 2 very good things happened: I no longer get regular headaches and I fall asleep much quicker. But damn I don’t appreciate new stomach problems and a super shitty energy level. Like I want to do nothing but sleep for two whole days after hanging out in larger groups. The last one might be lagging recovery from poor mental health.

So what transpired in 2023?

• Survived long enough to take a 2 month leave of absence from work, in which a good half the time was spent horizontal on my couch.
• But met a new group of friends in the other half of the time, including my current partner.
• Trudged through work for most of the year but feeling cautiously hopeful about my new manager.
• Finally went back to China to visit my family, which was both rewarding and stressful af.
• Dined at multiple restaurants on my Toronto wish list, starting with Alo. Richmond Station is always great. Dailo is also great, would like to take my parents there. Would go back to Quetzal for a la carte.
• Got my license, finally.
• Moved, hopefully the last time in a long time. Also got adopted by a cat, now wear sweatpants often, and am developing a taste in coffee.
• Probably more good days than bad days.

breadcrumbs

Actually I've kept up cooking too, haven't been posting much photos here since they end up on FFXIV Ontario, but here is the first mac and cheese I've ever made:

age

Reading webtoons is the few things I kept up:

2023 clothes

This blog has been on life support for a while with FFXIV screenshots, but I am feeling motivated to do some of my usual end of year reflection and updates.

Starting with clothes today.

It's been a very long time (since 2020??) since I updated my inventory spreadsheet. Took a while to enter in all the data welp.

At a very high level, I'm even farther at a point where my wardrobe is comfy and additions are mostly pieces I like the design of rather than trying to fill a functional need. I also took the opportunity of moving to do a very small clean-out and finally sell some pieces on the second-hand market. Facebook marketplace is not a fun experience, but I'm irrationally adverse to shipping stuff out (its really not as big of a hassle as I think it is).

Notable departures:

• Office clothing: because I don't go into the office enough to warrant keeping them. Most of them were bought for PEY, so they are showing their age in either style or durability.
• Thin cardigans (3): very highschool-y, overall I've not been wearing cardigans much except for the new Patagonia recycled cashmere one I got towards the end of last year.
• Pleated skirts (3) : I very much feel too old to wear pleated skirts rip, luckily they're getting a new life with my little cousin.
• Babaton cocoon coat: it's been a good 11 years with this coat but I don't see myself reaching for it over my 101801 in any occasion. Went to a loving new home, the nicest buyer I've encountered on FB marketplace. Now to do the same with my JCrew stadium coat.
• Adidas stan smiths: RIP, hit a good 70cents per wear over 6 years.

Remaining wardrobe overall stats:

• 108 pieces being tracked
• 24 items below $1 per wear
• 57 items over 5 years old

I half-heartedly wanted to not purchase any new clothing this year, but in fact did buy 13 new items:

• A blue knit crop tank in Montreal: $35 ish?
• Several items on Taobao, 2 mockneck layering pieces and a qi-pao collared satin top: $70 ish?
• Uniqlo and Mame Kuroguchi collab heart neckline top and 3d mockneck knit: $75
• MM6 bias cut skirt, a very impulse buy in China: $500 ish
• Nanushka faux leather pants, because windproof: $280
• Vickyyoung cream pants, technically bought ages ago on Taobao but only got it now: $25 ish
• MaxMara coat, my HG: $3578
• Zara shearing jacket, probably the only leather jacket that suits me: $90
• RM Williams wholecut chealsea, an impulse buy to match Rashik's but am wearing quite frequently: $700
• NB754 to replace my stan smiths: $91

I'm going to again half-heartedly commit to not buying clothes for 2024, because I would really like to pay off a bigger chunk of the mortgage when it renews in 2 years.

lodestar

I started the gatherer relics to motivate myself to play more, and did manage to finish my first one! Fsh isn't soooo bad, maybe 1-2hr per stage depending on your luck. I'm pleasantly surprised by the relic questline tho, it's so heartwarming. Definitely needed that. 

Would definitely like a commission with Lakeland landscape, it remains my favourite location in game visually. 

grape

Slowly getting back in the swing of playing XIV. Otherwise irl has been busy.

Took a few days but we finished the Sil'dhin Subterrane:

omphalos

I feel very blessed by all the information we got on the ancients in the raid and alliance raid quests hnnng.

lunar subterrain

It took this long to catch up to msq...but at least I got a cool background for it.

Now to gather the will to do the alliance raid x20 and finish a few relics welp.

XIY

 A short and sweet trip to XiAn:

TFU

 Another trip back to the homeland:

• Food was tasty, cheap and plentiful
• Shopping (irl and online) is convenient af
• Family incites the full range of emotions
• I arrive and leave exhausted

A few snaps from pandaland:

asphaltic

 End of an era, thanks my stan smiths

yearling

Newest addition to my family of black boots: RM William's comfort craftsman.

It was very much an impulse buy when Rashik was shopping for boots (he got a pair in a thicker leather & in brown). But I sure don't have a pair of chelsea's. Been wearing them on short and long walks around downtown and they are really comfortable. The additional insole right at the arch is very supportive and cushion-y. I do also like how pleasantly confined my feet feels, no seams in the wholecut upper is great. 

The buying experience was nice too, chatted with the sales assistant at Australian Boot Company for a while nerding out over boots. He even threw in a free polish (and oil for Rashik's), I'm assuming because most people that come in buy Blundstones ahaha. 

spectral

 A very belated post of another FF14 mod that I gposed like back in July??

P11 stage is best location, but I afk'd too long and got kicked out of the instance before I could take more images :(

ambrosia

Opps it's been a month. I'm alive and pretty well (fuelled by caffeine), here's food I've been cooking (and a bonus meal that Rashik made):

The Problem of Pain

I had wanted to read an ethics adjacent book after finishing How to be Perfect, that resulted in me trudging through The Problem of Pain. It's definitely a more difficult read than his other books (primarily comparing it to The Great Divorce), it's also my fault that I was reading it while barely conscious. Regardless, some interesting passages that stood out are:

Most attempts to explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be explained as when anthropologists derive it from fear of the dead, without explaining why dead men (assuredly the least dangerous kind of men) should have attracted this peculiar feeling. Against all such attempts we must insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension from fear. They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives to the universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just as no enumeration of the physical qualities of a beautiful object could ever include its beauty, or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aesthetic experience, so no factual description of any human environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.

The kind of love which I attribute to God, it may be said, is just the kind which in human beings we describe as 'selfish' or 'possessive', and contrast unfavourably with another kind kind which seeks first the happiness of the beloved and not the contentment of the lover. I am not sure that this is quite how I feel even about human love. I do not think I should value much the love of a friend who cared only for my happiness and did not object to my becoming dishonest.

Again, we are afraid that heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw-but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of-something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side?

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest- -if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself-you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre looked to every man like his first love', because she was a cheat. But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

It is from this point of view that we can understand hell in its aspect of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.

truffle

Did finally get a reservation at Alo few weeks ago, really happy that I got to try the restaurant out! My favourites are (and Jae & Rashik largely agrees): the mackerel amuse bouche, chanterelle, madai, and the strawberries with champagne cream palette cleanser. There is nothing to complain about, but for the price point I also wouldn't go again unless its for a big special occasion where the quiet environment is necessary. 

Akira Back

Very belated post of mom's birthday dinner. Great interior, the hot dishes were amazing, cold dishes is a mix of hit and miss:

• Tempura corn cake: excellent
• Grilled scallops: maybe my favourite cooked scallops I've had??
• Anago& unagi sushi: I was so excited to try this because eel, but execution wise the sauce was overpowering and I couldn't distinguish the two different types of eel.
• Some white fish in a gochujang sauce: unmemorable
• Dessert: the Akira cigar is great, the rest is fine. Had a great lychee mocktail tho!
• Another fish crudo that I don't recall, ordered it entirely because it had gooseberry in it.

tart

Recent eats:

• The bestest farmers market find: whole plants of basil & SOUR CHERRIES!!
• Also found cheapish mangosteen at the chinese supermarket
• I always don't know how to best put together a chickpea salad, the latest variation is with cucumber, charred anaheim peppers, pickled red onion, bulgur wheat with a tahini and preserved lemon dressing.
• Big medley of veg: snap peas, bamboo shoot, daikon radish, carrots, red onion, mushrooms, fried tofu and chinese sausage.

source

Lakeland is still hands down my favourite location, now I have a proper set of gposing there! 

Gear mods:

• Wayfarer's Remembrance for the ES crystal necklace
• Enhanced Blade's Euphoria for extra pretty ShB relic weapon