Happy new year of the water tiger! I couldn’t let another week go by without checking in with you. I hope your dip into 2022 has been a cool and relaxing one.
So far, 2022 feels as though several old things I’ve been working on and holding on to are suddenly accelerating (either moving forward or falling away)—at the same time that unimagined opportunities and conundrums are popping out. In response, I find myself feeding a lot of my time into different habits of tracking, and retroactively processing my day-to-day through those traces. Maybe I'm being a bit sentimental these days having just turned 40, but it does feel like, for the first time, I’m beginning to get what the previous couple of decades were about. My ways of inscription and transcription change too, as a result.
I have my constant practices that I enjoy even more now that I’ve had a fair amount of time to deepen them. Six years since I started the habit, I still keep up three pages of longhand anything-goes writing first thing in the morning with my coffee. I’ve also benefited a lot from using the Day One app since 2012, which helps a lot to catalogue spur-of-the-moment or handwritten fragments. I stick to a morning Centering Prayer and my own chant (or desperate cry for help lol), keeping it to about 25 minutes every morning. It gives me the feeling of arriving at a place of mind that is quiet, potent, and hopeful.
Unlike my old self from ten or twenty years ago, I physically write less. I’m not swallowed up anymore by the aimless journaling and verbatim lecture transcriptions of my years at uni. These days, being in a workplace where I am sunk into meetings almost 60% of the time, I am learning the difficulty and joy of brevity. I take more lists, sum up things quicker, dash off shorter punchier phrases heard in work meetings. I try to be more consistent with my meta-data, like my shortcut labels for recurring things. I do it so I don’t have to think too much when doing a quick stocktake of a big swath of time (like a week), and to find patterns of what area and mode of work tends to eat up the most time. It’s a pretty basic form of time-tracking, but personally I find it satisfying to carve little lines to mark the completion of an hour or tangible task, like write an important email.
Outside work and written language, I tend to favor visuals—pictures and screencaps—and the joys of filing, coloring, and arranging them. I use Day One to log and tag the photos later on. They function as a visual mnemonic tool (something tangible to jog my memory about a more abstract seed of thought inside it), and the latent message of the tool itself.
I think of the daily five-kilometer walk I take around the subdivision of my family’s house as a full-body transcription. Between 8 and 9 every morning I choose to turn either east or west from the gate of our house (depends how hot the sun is). As I walk that route, I listen. Either I’ll absorb a podcast with three Jungian analysts (I find them comforting in a similar way to period-drama murder mysteries), or my playlist for 2022 that I immerse in for pure instinctual enjoyment (i.e. it’s random as hell).
It’s always a refreshing walk. The residents of this neighborhood managed to save a fair number of endemic hardwoods, which attracts a great number of birds and creatures, and supports many weird and pretty plants. I try to take a picture of at least one gorgeous thing every morning. There’s something incredible about trees and their capacity to support the “transversal mobilities” of a loop necessary to healthful living.
Because of the diversity of birds I’ve been seeing these days, I’m feeling the stirrings of a bigger curiosity into Philippine birds. There’s a birdwatching community on Facebook that I find really inspiring and funny. Birdwatching is a special kind of civic transcription—its impulse to share information and beauty is pure generosity.
It’s been exactly a year since I finished four sessions at The Company HK with the tattoo artist James Lau to complete my forearm tattoos. I think a lot of the conversations and sensations of those sessions with James and the folks at the studio, even though I don’t remember the specifics anymore. Somehow they precipitated changes that would follow for the rest of the year.
Sometimes, these days, a colleague will ask me how I feel about being back home. Here’s my answer: it feels like being surrounded by every single year and corner of your life thus far, while the constants in your life (family, friends, communities) morph and take new shape right beside you. All the time I randomly retrieve physical objects charged with meaning and history. I don them, trying them out again, seeing if I want to keep them. I feel replete, weighted, and clear.
Here’s one of my dad’s house shirts. One of our aunties in the US brought it as pasalubong during a visit home.
I wish you many deep moments to inscribe the soft fragments of your love into a pattern of self-made being.
My books in March and April are currently open for private sound sessions over Zoom, for individuals or groups. Send a message here to book. And! I recently published something for Critical Asia Archives - I’m happy with how that little piece turned out, and would love to hear your thoughts about it.