On Blue Hour

After a week-long heat wave Berkeley settled into its cool and breezy self. I crossed these tracks during blue hour, a time made memorable by Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. You can read her description of blue hour here.
 
I’ve lived in Berkeley for almost two years. Most young people land here because they’ve been accepted into UC Berkeley. They spend four years here and then take small leaps into nearby cities like Oakland or San Francisco. I moved to this collegiate hub a couple years after spending my own four years at UCLA. My velcro-fastened acceptance letter from UC Berkeley offered spring admission, which felt like a backhand compliment, like being invited to a party on the condition that you show up several hours late. As there is only so much food, drink, and room on the dance floor, you may arrive only after the other guests have settled in, only after enough of those guests have departed early.
 
UCLA gave me the the opportunity to live in Los Angeles and love it because I didn’t have to deal with the discomforts that would make me hate it. Admittedly, my version of LA is skewed because my travels were limited to where my feet and the bus could take me. Given that my everyday revolved around campus, I saw no utility in owning a car in a city that vows to make driving a miserable experience. “Driving” is putting it far too kindly, as what LA traffic actually requires is that you sit in your motionless car, surrounded on all sides by other motionless cars. As the exhaust slips in to mix with the stale air blowing from your AC, you unwillingly gaze at a sky littered with billboards of famous people and their movies. If I did that every day I would become anxious thinking about how much time I spend not getting anywhere. A quarter-life-crisis in driving form. It leads to daydreams of using my feet to traverse sidewalks, swimming in the color blue. Berkeley is lovely. But Joan Didion promises there’s nothing like blue hour in New York.

On Short Stories and College

During one of those predawn, sluggish, unknowingly pretentious conversations that thrive in college dorm rooms, a floormate brought up Edgar Allen Poe. By that point, it was late Winter Quarter, I had stopped asking, This stuff happens?
 
See, on the first night of my first year in college, I was alone and homesick in my dorm room. Right outside my door I heard feet shuffling and bodies settling and soon after guitars strumming. Following social protocol, I left my room to join whomever was outside because I read it’s important to make friends during your first week in college. There were about ten people crowded together in a narrow hallway. By the time I sat down, two boys had started playing “Wonderwall” by Oasis and everyone was singing along. Like summer camp. I thought, This stuff happens?
 
During that predawn in winter, I learned that Edgar Allen Poe kept his writing short because he thought readers should be able to finish a story in one sitting. Poe hated the thought of a story stretched out over multiple days because “the affairs of the world interfere.” Real life is distracting. Only uninterrupted reading could offer the unity that was essential to experience a story and grasp its meaning. Poe therefore stuck to his poems and short stories, which worked out alright.
 
At the risk of disappointing the late Mr. Poe, I hardly ever read an entire book in one sitting, though I want to work on that. I do read a lot of short stories in one sitting. Short stories are a good way to re-visit an old story without taking away from any new one to discover. They are short but dense, tricky but beautiful. I recently re-read Teddy from Salinger’s Nine Stories, and I often “recently re-read” stories from that collection. My all-time favorite is For Esmé – With Love And Squalor. In college I even told people that I wanted “Faculties Intact” tattoed on my wrist, which comes from two lines in the story, including the final one: “I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact.” Years later I told a friend about the tattoo idea and she said it sounded like some declaration after a long stint in a psychiatric hospital. By that point, I agreed.

Follow on Bloglovin

On Catching the Flu

I’m on Day Five of a strong and mighty flu. The searing sore throat, the pulsing headache, the fever, the fever+chills, the itch that crawls up your throat until you’re in tears, and the long-lived cough. The cough that lingers as a way to remind us that good health is precarious, and that we must be grateful, as even the slightest discomfort makes a considerable difference. But when perusing WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and all the other sites that reassuringly report the exact symptoms that you have typed into Google, there is no mention of the mental toll of lying in bed with nothing but your flu-drenched body and mind.
 
For starters, I start to feel guilty for not appreciating how healthy I usually feel. I then start to imagine what it would be like to be sick all the time and I get scared. I then dutifully think, Being healthy is a gift, what am I going to do with this gift once I’m better? The pressure to make the most of my post-flu life sets in. Worst of all, I remember where I would be if I weren’t sick in bed, which would be in my office at work, which isn’t all that much of a better option, so then I concern myself with whatever that means.
 
But the loudest thought that rings continuously is that the seasonal flu (without the complications, of course) is really nothing compared to the real ailments that can fall upon us. To inhabit a healthy body is to be lucky, so use the time well. As the director Baz Luhrmann advises, enjoy your body, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.