Hello, hello,
It is moments like this when I am reminded of the privilege of being bored, of feeling the nothingness. The privilege of mundanity. These moments can feel just as rich and decadent, if you know how to layer it on thick. I’ve been taking advantage of the jetlag and every morning I wake up with the sun. I’ve been drinking coffee, which strangely enough I can never do when my life feels high intensity. I can only drink coffee after stretching, and while staring longingly out a window. This is the only way.
This is my love note to the filler episodes of life, to committing to every experience with my whole heart. This isn’t a waiting room, but a whole world within itself. Healing and transformation have this sneaky way of creeping up on you. It is often in these moments when you feel like nothing is happening at all that the most happenings are taking place.
How to do a filler episode:
Remember stagnancy also has its own purpose (if you can meditate over a stagnant pond of water, you will find there is much to observe)
Stare wistfully out a window
Read old love letters, or break up letters
Take a bath (submerge whole head underwater)
Fantasize about running into an old flame
Go on long walks
*Sigh*
Go to the bookstore or the library and get that book that you’ve been meaning to get
Find new recipes
Watch a dreamy rhythmic film
Allow yourself to be immersed in the nothingness
A tiktok I made many filler episodes ago that captures this essence
It’s reflecting something in me…get it
I watched Lost in Translation the other day. I have really been on a Sofia Coppola thing for the past few weeks. I love Lost in Translation. Yes, it goes without saying that all white people in the ~East~ films are quite strange, and this film has a very weird relationship to Asian women and their unruly sexuality (very weird). They all sort of serve as props to be triangulated against blonde-haired blue-eyed Scarlett Johansson’s white femininity. Legitimately, the amount of sequences in the film of her blonde hair in a sea of black hair, it’s like damn okay we get it…
We are also pointed to the numerous bodily differences that make Bill Murray also foreign in this land, notably his height. But of course, it is Tokyo that is foreign, not them. They are welcome faces, clear and legible in a sea of untranslated Japanese.
Despite the insistent whiteness of the film (needless to say the majority of Coppola’s oeuvre) there is something about the way that Sofia Coppola captures a rhythmic dreamy malaise that makes me feel so seduced by the film and of course the incredibly captivating performances of the leads. In the case of Lost in Translation, it isn’t so much just Tokyo that is a ~character in the film~ but, the hotel: the grand park hyatt. The luxury of the space and the facilities are really mapped out for us over the course of the film: the pool, the bar, the sauna, the gym, large windows that look out over Tokyo, that the hotel seems both apart of and separate from.
Coppola really seems captured by hotels. I also watched Somewhere recently, about a stuck bad-boy actor holed up in the Chateau Marmont. The Chateau Marmont is of course (say it with me) a ~character in the film~ and a very mythologized one at that.
I love hotels in film. There is something about hotels that seem to be both the site (or sight) of horror, but also whimsy. I think they have a sort of liminal quality, not quite a home but still somewhat in the realm of the private. A space that is supposed to provide indulgence and luxury (whether that be true or not). It is an ample place for chance encounters (whether those chance encounters be good or bad). It is an escape from the domestic home space, and I suppose that escape can be both freeing, or unnerving.
I used to have recurring dreams about being in a hotel unable to find my room. I would walk aimlessly along the long halls lit up in warm light, wander around the lobby, stare at the wall of elevator buttons, trying to figure out how to get back.
In Lost in Translation, the hotel is the perfect space to capture the floating aimlessness of the main characters Charlotte and Bob Harris as they wander the hotel at night and find an escape in one another. They are both stuck, floating in this limbo that seems embodied within the grand park hyatt. A dreamy limbo where two characters feel unable to communicate or be understood by anyone except each other.
It captured some essence of how I’ve been feeling. The beauty that exists in this dreamy, maybe a little lonely, undefined space.
Small, Sweet Moments
Some things worth noting:
Playing scrabble with my parents, going out to eat with my Dad and feeling the lightness of all the harmony that once felt so impossible.
The sheer luxury of opening a fridge that is filled with food you didn’t pay for.
Eating leftover halloween candy while watching The Crown.
Running into my fucking favourite video essayist that I literally linked last newsletter omg wtf, we chatted it was great.
Knowing deeply that it is all happening, even (and especially) in these moments of nothingness.
Painting again, experimenting, and noticing how the fear of getting it wrong is only a whisper when once it was a pounding in my head.
Eating in the parking lot with my best friend after getting our nails done, thinking that this is the one small thing I miss about the suburbs. The insular world you can create between two people who love each other in parking lots anywhere.
Sitting in a kitchen with a friend, talking and listening to Norah Jones with the freshly minted winter just outside. Marvelling at how we have never felt as young as we do now.
The mundane presence of love all around, where nothing needs to be forced or changed, we are all here with each other because we want to be. It is impossibly safe, I could almost take it for granted.
Life is filled with many jokes
Moss/Loss
Sometimes, my poems can feel like loose change at the bottom of the drawer. Sorry, let me start again. In my room there is a door. You can only find it if you run your hands along cream walls until something gives way. There are times when I pretend that it doesn’t exist. Times when the weather is warm, and life courts me from an open window. But, the first snow has caressed the ground, and I am reminded that I haven’t called my sister in three months or four. These are the times when I let the day turn away from me. I keep the lights off for a while, so I can feel its absence. Behind the door there is a hotel. It only takes opening the door just a crack, and the pungent smell of algae, decay, and mosquito babies holds you close for a kiss. Now that I think about it, it could just be the smell of garlic pickled things from the basement, or the smell of something sour after sex… Sorry, let me start again. In the lobby there is a fountain. It might have gushed once, but curdled milk becomes her now Moss grows because everything is useful even death. Loss never quite feels like the right word, more like some part of me has always been in this lobby because I can’t find my room key.
& Some Prompts
What in your life do you not feel the desire to change? What does that feel like specifically, is it a satisfaction, a sense of peace, a comfort, an ease?
As always,
Talk soon.
Love, thai xx
<3