It is the tail end of Summer, the equinox is merely a month away. In Korea, Autumn has already started; the Ipchu (입추) is expected around the 7th or 8th of August. Like a regular life miracle, on the evening of the 7th, Friday, I went outside after work and I did not immediately wish to run back inside. Every part of my body lights up when the air is pleasant, inviting, every condition satisfied for a walk. On the 8th, after working all day, I saw Chasedae at night. The day after, the 9th, a beautiful Sunday, I said goodbye to one of my dearest friends, then I travelled to the outskirts of Seoul to celebrate the wedding of a beloved older sister.

In the meantime, during that same weekend, I took part in a remote poetry workshop, by students from the City University of Hong Kong, to assist in the development of an app (and a paper) about collaborative writing. Over the course of three days, I was invited to write and share my own pieces, comment on the works of others, and engage in collective threads, to test their features. I joined it because I missed writing poetry; I had been trying to pick it back up for a while, and I thought the push would help. I was right. I wrote a couple of new poems, and completed one or two ideas I had left in my drafts. Today, I will share them as leftovers, not because they aren’t meaningful pieces to me, but because I am not sure what they mean to me, yet.

Houve um tempo em que eu escrevia poesia como quem não conhecia outra forma de pensar e sentir, e de dizer. Como um hábito da mente, era natural digerir o mundo em versos e símbolos, sem tantas explicações, e múltiplas interpretações. Era tão natural quanto era possível, minha estrutura interna sustentando a capacidade de deixar minhas próprias intenções livres de mim, arraigadas às de quem lia. Era um mistério gostoso, e não me fazia tanta falta o parágrafo e a dissertação. Daí, os tempos mudaram. Fiz caminhos novos através de ensaios, e da escrita científica, e eu até quase me esqueci qual era o propósito de ser poetisa. Sem brechas pra nuance no meu jeito de viver, eu queria encontrar formas de me justificar pelo espaço que eu ocupava. Acho que cheguei bem perto, mas me dei conta de que sempre faltaria alguma coisa.

For this week’s playlist, I decided not to write about each song, and just leave them here. Each one does speak to the things I have been thinking about these days, but I will leave it up to anyone following along to figure them out.

The Summer I made Playlists, #5.

1. Labi Siffre - Bless the Telephone
2. Mekons - Last Dance
3. Natalia Lafoucarde - Lo Que Construimos
4. Angela Ro Ro - Deixar Você
5. Graveola - Dois Lados da Canção
6. George Ezra - Blind Man in Amsterdam
7. The Black Skirts - SOMEDAY 
8. Toquinho, Vinícius de Moraes - Onde Anda Você

To Be Soft

first written on 29 April 2025

I squeezed the small chunk of fat on
your hip bone, soft and yielding, the 
pillow where I used to rest my head;
you flinched, but I understood you; 
I would have flinched the same if 
you had touched my softness

Your eyes brimmed with rage when 
I pinched the dough of your cheeks,
“I must be skinny,” you snapped; I thought 
I had to be skinny, too, though 
I remembered, how you pinched the side of 
my face, gently, the tip of your 
thumb tracing the cushion of my smile, and how 
I leaned into the palm of your hand. 

To be soft, to love the softness 
in others, and to not be abashed when 
found round, tender to the touch, 
a warm lump of fat pushing through 
a crack in the shell; 
to be soft, and to not be ashamed.

The Unopened Door

written on 8 August 2026, based on a prompt (the unopened door)

Once I was ablaze, and I was a dancer, leaping 
over the crossroads, never looking 
over my shoulder; I thought that
living was a game of fluke, I knew
to never think too long before I jumped, before
I turned, to never linger when 
I crashed and to never relish when 
I hit a stroke of luck

There were no strivers in the land 
of the Fates, I was told and I believed 
in it, and I took myself to the end 
of the thread, and not even once did I
let myself stop and think
about the one turn I had wished to take, the one
road I would have stopped to look back on, the one 
thing I wasn’t brave enough to chase

Last week, I watched a performance by a friend of mine1, a piece titled “Saudade.” It was an immersive experience, images, sound and movement enveloping the audience, mellow at times, hypnotising, then violent, suffocating. I think I knew his work well enough to have anticipated some parts of it, but it felt like encountering it for the first time again. The title prompted me deeper into the details.

I kept thinking about the time my first Korean teacher, in Brazil, told me she couldn’t tell the difference between “nostalgia” and “saudade.” On my Instagram Stories, after the performance, I wrote: “Nostalgia is the feeling you get when you revisit memories, the past feels close and present for a brief moment. Saudade is the feeling you get when you acknowledge the distance once again; it can be a past season, a place, a person, anything you have cherished but it’s far out of reach now. The specific type of punch in the gut we get when we acknowledge the irreversibility of time.”

Youngdon, the performance artist, squirmed, snapped, tumbled, tore things apart. It feels a bit cumbersome to admit just how much salt it rubbed into my wounds. I know the physical language of sentiments like it’s my own mother tongue, cursed as I was, with nerves that tremble at the smallest sound. When a painful memory comes up, it hits me in the gut and I have to fiercely shake my head, and catch my breath, before I run out of air. I envy people blessed with the ability to reign it all in.

After the performance, I had to leave in a hurry, to go to a party. In our brief exchange, Sunghoon, my friend, said he thought the sound had to be louder. I wanted to tell him it was good enough for me, but I am too sensitive to be a good judge of intensity. Late to my next appointment, I rushed up and down the hills of Gangnam in heels, all of my toes squeezed into the tip of my slim-square Mary Janes. Once again, I had to grapple with the embarrassing idea that all pain is an implication of being alive.

^{Promo video for “Saudade.” Taken from Instagram. Original post.}

mecanismo de enfrentamento

escrito de madrugada, em 15 Agosto 2026

Existe uma versão da história em que 
a porta estava aberta; em outra dimensão,  
o amor foi correspondido,
a oportunidade não foi desperdiçada, e 
o sonho não foi despedaçado; em que 
uma porta surpresa não precisou ser aberta
no fim de uma rua sem saída.

Existe uma versão de mim que descobre o motivo
pelo qual, nessa vida, a jornada era outra, e 
ela se vai em busca da felicidade, a mesma
felicidade que eu esperava encontrar 
naquela vida, a vida que ela precisa aceitar que
escolheu trilhar, a jornada que eu
busquei, mas não fui capaz de alcançar.

coping mechanism

written overnight, on 15 Aug 2026

There is a version of the story where
the door was open; in another timeline,
the love was reciprocated,
the opportunity wasn’t wasted, and
the dream wasn’t broken; where
no other doors had to be found where
there seemed to be no other way out.

There is a version of me that finds out why 
None of this was meant to be, in this life, and
She goes out of her way to look for
The joy I had hoped to find if I lived 
That life, the life she has to remind herself 
She chose to live, the path I have to forget 
I searched for, but couldn’t find.

I used to think my redemption arc as a writer would come the day I stopped using it as a tool to say the things I couldn’t tell others, and entertaining the secret hope they would find it, and get it. I realised this was mostly about my drive to produce essays. Poetry is the ultimate game of leftovers — I write poems about the feelings, thoughts and experiences that have no other use, because they hurt too much, and they make my life harder whenever they come up again. I don’t want them to go to waste, so they may be made into something else, to find new life in the realm of things we can’t explain, where the uses of art are realised. Where to be understood matters infinitely less than to have said it.

Back in May, when I decided I was going to “enjoy my Summer,” what I really meant was that I was going to attend loads of music events. My weekly gigs were not enough. I wanted to check out different venues and artists, write about them, make new friends, and finally build a life in Seoul that reflected the years I had spent loving Korean music from afar. The most important part was finally attending Pentaport, a ritual I had to comply with, to feel like I belonged to the music scene in Korea. I am so glad I did it, and not only because I thought I had to, but because I wanted to.

I was born in a city that was big and important enough by various standards, but not by my own. From childhood, I started to build myself a parallel life, where everything I loved was experienced at-a-distance—first through TV, then through the internet. Once I got to places where I could live out the life of my dreams, as a grown up, I realised it would take a specific type of effort to rebuild from up close my relationship with the things I aspired to live.

Sometimes I feel like I am still living to compensate for all of the things I wish I had enjoyed when I was younger. I have done so much over the last decade or so, it should have been enough to satisfy those cravings. But the debt I have to my younger self is impossible to settle.

For this week’s playlist, I will share songs from the artists I saw live on day 3 (Sunday) of Pentaport 2026.

The Summer I made Playlists, #4

1. Confined White — "When You See Me Shine", "Boy"
2. bongjeingan — "12 Languages", "Know You Did"
3. Bek Hyunjin — "Into the Woods" 
4. Noizegarden — "The Wave", "나는" + "기다려" 
5. TOUCHED — "Night View" 
6. Silica Gel — "Tik Tak Tok", "Ryudejakeiru"
7. Sultan of the Disco — "Hide Out", "Ttungtanji"
8. Pixies — "Head On", "Nimrod's Son", "The Holiday Song"

1. Confined White — “When You See Me Shine”, “Boy”

Not every band I see live immediately makes me want to look for their Spotify page, but my favourite ones are usually the ones who do. I saw Confined White for the first time a few months ago, during Sunny Spot Festival, and I was captivated by their sound, drenched in a light-hearted type of melancholy that makes sense to me. They were the winners of Penta Super Rookie in 2025 and I was glad they performed this year as well. I only caught the last few minutes of their set, but it was a pleasure, as always.

2. bongjeingan — “12 Languages”, “Know You Did”

I missed my first chance to see bongjeingan a few years ago at KAIST, for free, because I didn’t know much about them. I am glad I could rectify that mistake this time, on the main stage of Pentaport. It was 1pm of the hottest day of the year so far and I loved it. Their music is known for being unpredictable and thriving on their ability to improvise, but they manage to stay memorable. Every vocal melody and riff is a sticky pleasure. You don’t need more than a trio when all three are this talented. Their cover of “Where Is My Mind” at the festival reminded me that they were probably just as excited as I was about the seeing Pixies.

3. Bek Hyunjin — “Into The Woods”

I only caught the last few minutes of his set, on the way out of bongjeingan. Seeing him on stage with his band is a delight. Live music, at its best, is an invitation. Passing by, I felt immediately compelled to stop and dance along. Such things are possible at festivals.

I built my love for music by myself, because I loved it, and I wanted to live out that passion. My own excellent parents, well-versed in various cool things, were victimised by Christian parenting habits when it came down to the things I enjoyed. I was well into my twenties when they started to approach my taste with curiosity instead of judgement. During our multiple family road trips, I took over the aux and mixed their old favourites with songs I thought they could enjoy. A bit later, when COVID hit, with enough free time in their hands, they sat through hours of my favourite music videos on TV. With bottles of wine, a large couch and an endless quarantine, we learned to be a family of grown ups.

4. Noizegarden — “The Wave”, “나는” + “기다려”

During my time at KAIST, I became very fond of the metal bands we had there, and I learned about Korean metals bands because of them. Noizegarden (nOiZeGaRdEn) was formed in 1992, debuted in 1996, and by 1999 they had already disbanded. They are an alternative metal group, with clear influences of stoner rock—one of the easiest ways to get me to listen to something. They released a new song this year, after 27 years. During the set, a man standing next to me and my friend couldn’t believe we knew them. He did know more about them than we did, so he recommended we check out the other projects the members worked on during their break. Thank you, nameless man.

5. TOUCHED — “Night View”

Under the guise of deciding where to stand during the upcoming Silica Gel stage, I dragged Sofi back into the main stage area before our afternoon break, when the sun was still punishing us for being outside. The true reason was that I really wanted to see TOUCHED perform “Night View.” I don’t consider myself to be a huge fan of theirs, but I cherish this particular song a lot. The performance was lovely, the song is bright, warm and vulnerable and I wanted to cry. And they got a new fan, because Sofi also loved it.

6. Silica Gel — “Tik Tak Tok”, “Realize”, “Ryudejakeiru”

I often whine about how my favourite Korean bands are never the ones that get really big, but that is not the whole truth. I think Silica Gel absolutely deserves everything they have accomplished, maybe even more. It was my first time seeing them (notwithstanding Chunchu, as Noridogam) and it was a perfect set, ending with a beautiful clear sunset, everyone singing along to “Ryudejakeiru.” My friend Sofi, who is a much bigger Silica Gel fan, had the time of her life, and redefined what their music meant to her. Generations change, but great things keep happening when four men decide to become a band.

One time, the frontman of a band I really like described me as an “innocent” fan. I welcomed his words because I know he meant well. I am used to being considered a bit too naive because of the way I approach the things I love. Enthusiasm belongs to newcomers, and you risk sounding ingenuous if you behave any other way—once you get far enough, you will see that the road ahead is a place where few hopes are said to be worth entertaining. I am terrified of condescension, so I always try to look for the romantics in every community. The world has plenty of skeptics and cynics.

7. Sultan of the Disco — “Hide Out”, “Ttungtanji”

One of the consequences of finding music through streaming platforms is that it usually comes without context. The first song I heard from Sultan of the Disco was “Hide Out,” which isn’t quite the best representation of their sound and energy. It also took me a while to realise they weren’t active anymore. The Pentaport stage was their first big schedule in six or seven years, after going into an unannounced indefinite hiatus. Watching multiple people wearing headcloths and long tunics to watch their set, under that scorching sun, was very fun. I didn’t think I would ever get to see them live—even after 4 years in Korea, I still haven’t got used to the fact that I may always end up seeing the artists I enjoy the most.

I couldn’t stay until the end of their set (to secure a good place to see the Pixies), but I could still hear it when they played “Hide Out.” I started to sing along and the people waiting around me did the same. It was special.

8. Pixies — “Head On”, “Nimrod’s Son”, “The Holiday Song”

Where do I even begin. I think I haven’t had as many chances to see legendary bands live in my life, but that does not make the Pixies any less deserving of my awe and excitement. When such a big act is playing, the praise we owe them is the easiest way to focus on the wrong things. The set was great, this is not a legacy band. They are still making great songs, and I wish they had played more of them. I wrote previously that I expected the penny to drop when they played “Debaser” (which they didn’t). In reality, it happened by the third song, when they played “Head On” after opening with “Gouge Away,” followed by “Wave of Mutilation.” “In Heaven,” the Eraserhead song, was the closest I got to crying. Tears only came out the day after, when the Age of Band concert recap post came up on my feed.

If I could change one thing, I would like to go back and tell myself they weren’t going to play “Debaser” so I would have enjoyed “Winterlong” and “Into The White” with more attention. We did not get to scream “I am un Chien Andalusia” but we did get to scream “you are the son of a motherf*cker” and I think that’s also beautiful.

They also did not perform “The Holiday Song” but I will include it here anyway.

The first few months after I moved to Seoul were very hard. I was struggling to find work, couldn’t afford to do the things I had always wanted to do, and I resented everyone that seemed to have found a place in this enormous city. After I got a job, I was suddenly working too much to do anything besides go back home. I was tired and still adapting, and saving up for important things, but I was also shutting down any possibility of trying to live any other way. One of the first few times I committed to going out for live music—not for work, and in spite of the reasons not to do so—I realised enjoyment was also a habit to work on. I had to devote myself to the life I wanted to build.

I am a coward with ambitions to which I cannot commit. For that, I will never know true peace. I want to aspire to a quiet life but I love attention and I want the whole world to tell me the things I have known all along, that I am brilliant and truly special, a gift from God to humankind, worthy of everything my parents, teachers and mentors expected me to become and more. But I have been doomed from the start. I wasn’t blessed with the full extent of the ruthlessness and little regard for limitations that would have helped me get a bit further ahead, earlier on.

Social facts are the most solid of the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. The people who change the world are the ones unbothered by that sturdiness.

A few defining moments of my time on Earth. The day I realised I would never be more than human. The day I realised I was not smart enough to be a genius. The day I realised I could be just as bad as my parents at their worst. The day I realised I had missed the right timing to accomplish my dream. The day I realised I wasn’t enough.

For this week's playlist, I am sharing songs for which I feel the type of attachment that can only be experienced when one is relying on music to survive a difficult season. Ranging from early morning gym sessions to late night grocery shopping in the rain, and 3am pub visits to watch football matches, Summer has come to me, at last.

The Summer I made Playlists, #3

1. Tiny Habits — “Anything He Was”
2. Kurt Vile — “Wakin' on a Pretty Day” 
3. Tom Jobim, Gal Costa — “Caminhos Cruzados”
4. DEUX — “여름안에서 (In Summer)”
5. Mekons — “Club Mekon”
6. Pixies — “Debaser” 
7. YIPPEE — “정원영 생일축하 (congratulation)” 

1. Tiny Habits — “Anything He Was”

A good friend shared this song with me a few weeks ago. It sounds right, fresh but melancholic, exactly how I feel about everything these days.

2. Kurt Vile — “Wakin’ on a Pretty Day”

Early July had me taking several 2~3am buses on weekdays to watch World Cup matches at pubs around Seoul. This one came up while I sat alone at a sports bar in Itaewon, holding a huge table by myself, waiting for the rest of my friends to arrive. It didn’t quite fit the atmosphere of that place but I welcomed it with an open heart.

A newsletter came up on my inbox on a Sunday afternoon, titled “Maybe Don’t Do What You Love,” and I think I have read that same story dozens of times. The one in which we realise something someone else has realised, and talked about, before. We might have even read it as well. We feel the need to record the moment when the penny drops anyway because this is what we do. And then, what? We add one more piece to the pile and hope that it will stand out. There are barely any new things to be discussed about in the world except the spirit of the time, but the spirit of our time is to overestimate one’s own importance, sharing things barely anyone has the time to read. The pile is more important than the content.

Not all beliefs are facts, very few of them are verifiable. As a scientist, I search the world for ideas I can put to test. Someone told me once they didn’t trust me a lot because I was religious, so I believed in things I couldn’t prove. I was offended not because they mocked my faith, but because I was wrong about how much respect I thought they held for me. That person had never done any real science anyway, so it’s not like they knew much about it. Those who have done it will tell you, the spectrum of things that can be falsifiable is very narrow, and a full life is filled with things that are out of that scope.

3. Tom Jobim, Gal Costa — “Caminhos Cruzados”

Once I read an essay arguing that love songs exist because they say things that would otherwise sound ridiculous when worded out loud. “Caminhos Cruzados” is the type of song that belongs to thoughts and impressions, the kind of stuff people write books and make movies about, but that may only be experienced through silence and the spaces in between.

4. DEUX — “여름안에서 (In Summer)”

A darling Summer tune. Chasedae performed it recently on their monthly in-house gig, a band version that preserved the most endearing elements of the song. DEUX were a beloved, yet short-lived, Korean hip-hop duo, and one of the first Korean artists from the 90s that I got to know. I wasn’t raised in Korea, but their music also sounds nostalgic to me.

As a writer, I follow different trails of breadcrumbs and hope they land me anywhere near a fresh revelation, about myself, about the world. Sometimes I let the bias of my point of view take the lead, and I hope to end up where my assumptions and prejudices all gather. This cannot be done with the unconscious mind that follows heuristics as they come; like a ghost, you must step outside and let the body lead the way. These days, I like to take a second step back, to observe the ghost as well. The way I think about myself has become just as formulaic as the way I think about the world at large.

A few years ago, I attended an academic conference and one of the speakers, a psychologist, introduced her research about the positive psychological effects of songs by saying that music is some sort of universal language. “Wrong,” I thought, fresh out of a semester studying cognitive science of music, in which I read at least three different papers arguing against that type of statement. I picked up the mic during the Q&A to tell her that her music research background was too anecdotal.

I’m insufferable for good reason. My greatest claim to self-righteousness is how much pride I take in knowing way too much about the things that I love. It is my antidote against feeling like I failed the gifts I was given; it is not ideal, but the ego refuses to be dead at times. I can justify to myself that correcting misleading remarks is an important research duty, but I could have found much better ways to do that. Instead, I took the chance to feel good about myself for a bit. The virtuous and the vicious coexist at all times. It is terrifying to recognise that every good or commendable thing we do conceals traces of control.

Jealousy, envy, desperation to win, the imp of perverse, the fear of losing, it’s not a question of whether you will experience any of that, but a question of when, and what you will choose to do next.

5. Mekons — “Club Mekon”

Such an earworm, so easy to sing along, so easy to dance along, I can’t even bring myself to care about what the lyrics are saying. NPR Tiny Desk said it the best: the world is doomed, but at least we've got the Mekons.

6. Pixies — “Debaser”

I am going to see the Pixies for the first (and probably only) time ever this coming Sunday and I have been tearing up at the sound of any of their songs. Looking forward to the moment when the opening riff of “Debaser” comes up and the penny drops.

7. YIPPEE — “정원영 생일축하 (congratulation)”

I saw YIPPEE for the first time in late June, during a rookie band competition. They didn’t win, but I thought they were absolutely up for it, when this song came up. Currently sitting at #1 on my “On Repeat” playlist on Spotify.

If I have gotten anywhere to be called “far”, it is because I am stubborn, and diligent about my impulses. If I haven’t gotten anywhere farther, it is because I never get the direction right with the times. My desires dictate the direction of my efforts, and I was not born with the wisdom to aspire to things that yield the kind of success and prestige I desire. I am not sure I can contradict myself, and work hard enough to become someone else. This must be my destiny.

I am still cleaning the fridge. Today, I will excuse myself and mix excerpts in Portuguese and English. There are feelings and thoughts I can only articulate in one language or the other. I will honour them as they come today. •

Sempre choro escutando “Só Se Não For Brasileiro Nessa Hora,” pérola da discografia dos Novos Baianos, e lembrança das coisas que eu gosto sobre ser brasileira: o menino que deixa a vida pela bola. Eu tinha sete anos quando a conquista do penta me ensinou que havia coisas nas quais as grandes potências dos meus sonhos respeitavam o Brasil. Significava muito pra mim, que já tinha internalizado todas as diretrizes do viralatismo clássico — na fome de viver coisas maiores, brigava com Deus por ter me colocado na periferia do mundo. Naquele dia 30 de Junho de 2002, eu me sentia uma das meninas mais sortudas da história.

The Summer I made Playlists, #2

1. Novos Baianos — “Só Se Não For Brasileiro Nessa Hora”
2. Tangolo Mangos — “Armadura Armadilha”
3. Fleet Foxes — “Mykonos” 
4. HALCALI — “Otsukare Summer” 
5. Chasedae — “Dusk”
6. Novos Baianos — “Dê um Rolê” (Ao Vivo, 2016) 

1. Novos Baianos — “Só Se Não For Brasileiro Nessa Hora”

One of the most special songs from Novos Baianos, with pretty much no live footage. The kind of stuff that comes on shuffle and makes me bawl my eyes in the bus during commute hours. We used to stand on the shoulders of people in love with the game.

É consenso, entre gente que mora fora, que a distância te revela muitas coisas preciosas sobre o lugar de onde você veio. Aqui na Coreia, aprendi a conversar mais sobre música brasileira que qualquer outra coisa. Assisti documentários e li artigos sobre a Bossa Nova porque não queria ficar atrás nas conversas, com toda gente aficcionada por Tom Jobim e Marcos Valle que conheci. Tinha um projeto pessoal de apresentar mais da Tropicália a quem só conhecia um pouco de Gil e Caetano, fiz várias playlists de recomendações de Novos Baianos e clássicos do forró. Gosto de trocar olhares surpresos com pessoas que não esperavam que eu conhecesse Poet and the Village Chief, tanto quanto eu não esperava que conhecessem Ivan Lins. Se descobrir conhecido, amado e admirado por gente que nasceu do outro lado do planeta. Talvez seja uma vulnerabilidade se lisonjear por coisas desse tipo.

2. Tangolo Mangos — “Armadura Armadilha”

O peso dessa armadura me puxa pra trás
Não quero mais me blindar, me podar, me armar
Mesmo que a flecha me siga, vai atravessar
Ricocheteia no ar

No inverno de 2022, poucos dias depois da eliminação do Brasil da Copa do Catar, participei de um seminário sobre ciência e tecnologia em Macaé, por vídeo-chamada, falando sobre minha pesquisa. Quatro meses depois de sair do Brasil, escutei alguém se referindo a mim como “um cérebro perdido,” mais uma pesquisadora que precisou ir embora. O momento em que me descobri estatística, minha história especial dentro de uma porcentagem de probabilidade de que outros como eu sigam um caminho parecido. Seria hipocrisia da minha parte fingir que não tenho motivos clichês para ter continuado na Coreia, a despeito das dificuldades de viver como estrangeira no Leste Asiático, num país cuja língua eu ainda não domino, e que impõe um teto baixíssimo sobre minhas expectativas profissionais. Minha fome de outras coisas ainda não me deixa ter saudades de casa.

3. Fleet Foxes — “Mykonos”

The first time I went abroad was in September 2015, when I moved to Leicester, UK for one year as an exchange student, through a research scholarship provided by the Brazilian government. My friends and I spent the year saving up for our Summer vacation to Greece, in July 2016. We were in Mykonos for 2-3 days and I was as reckless as my conscience allowed me to be.

During the year I spent in England, I enjoyed the privilege of living in a quiet, walkable city, a bit boring but just a short trip from most other places I wanted to visit. I was a bit disappointed not to live in London, but it turned out to be a very special fate. Attending De Montfort University, my student court was less than 500m away from King Power Stadium, home to Leicester City FC, the year they won the Premier League. Ten years after that beautiful May when we celebrated their once-in-a-lifetime victory arc, they are starting the 2026-2027 season playing the third tier of the English football league system, for the first time ever in over 100 years.

Vou ficar pensando por muito tempo na partida de Cabo Verde contra a Argentina. A despeito dos sentimentos pelo time adversário, até descontando injustiças da arbitragem, foi por testemunhar a vontade de vencer dos jogadores em campo. Acreditavam que tinham muito pra provar pra muita gente. Talvez o Brasil não tenha mais a envergadura de representar a esperança do mundo subdesenvolvido. Tudo se move muito rápido, 24 anos se passaram e já veio o tempo de se falar mais das humilhações da seleção brasileira que das glórias do nosso passado. Conseguimos acumular vergonhas maiores que o 7x1.

4. HALCALI — “Otsukare Summer”

My favourite retired Japanese artists have decided to come back.

É uma vulnerabilidade da humanidade, que precisemos de fábulas e de símbolos para acreditar em qualquer coisa. Seria ridículo fingir que o esporte mais popular do mundo não é uma perda simbólica enorme para uma nação como a nossa, mas ninguém é obrigado a se escorar em uma expectativa ultrapassada. Muitas pessoas tiveram o poder de fazer com que as pilares do Brasil continuassem significando alguma coisa, pro presente e pro futuro. Todos os dias, de várias formas, a gente segue descobrindo que os adultos não existem — muitos mitos, mas há muito tempo não testemunhamos o nascimento de um santo. O mundo muda muito, mas também não muda nada.

5. Chasedae — “Dusk”

I was getting a drink when I heard the first chords of “Dusk,” the last time I saw Chasedae (a week ago). I screamed “NO WAY” and rushed back to record it for a friend. It is a whimsical tune, which they rarely perform. They must have their reasons.

Sofri com a eliminação da Coreia porque gosto muito desse país, e especialmente daqueles jogadores. Sofri com a eliminação do Brasil porque gosto muito de mim, dos meus, e de quem nos fez assim. A gente se acostuma com o fato de que a vida não é um filme, mas preciso continuar acreditando no que é possível. 2002 me ensinou que existiam caminhos. Eu abri vários. Não me levaram ao mesmo topo, mas me trouxeram até aqui. Isso ainda significa alguma coisa.

6. Novos Baianos — “Dê um Rolê (Ao Vivo)” (2016)

Back in 2022, when I had just arrived in Korea, I went on long walks almost every night, to familiarise myself with the campus and the neighbourhood. Those were very lonely days. In the emptiness and weightlessness, the feeling that I was close to disappearing, I heard the voice of God, saying “I am Love, from head to toe.”

Four years ago today, the day after the Winter solstice in the Southern hemisphere, I woke up at 5am to find out I would be moving to Korea in two months. I took my flight in a matching Adidas set in navy blue, with a light jacket, to help me navigate the last few hours in a mild winter. When I arrived in Seoul, 26 hours later, it was hot as hell. All of my memories of the first few weeks in Korea are drenched in sweat, the humidity destroying my beautiful blue hair, recently bleached, whenever I stepped outside. Moving around felt like cutting through the water in a fishbowl.

Still, every Summer I have spent in Korea so far has been a turning point for me. Starting from my arrival, through my split journey in Austria, the death of my last living grandparent, landing my first job after months of post-graduation nightmare. What are the chances something big will happen in the next three months? Instead of counting every major event of the last four years, to decide if they happen more frequently during this or that season, or anticipating any good or bad news, I am convinced I should keep creating the space where things can happen.

Life has been pretty great recently. I have made the time to do almost everything that fills me up. The only thing missing is a bigger plot. I am still figuring out what it will look like, to enjoy this Summer in my own terms. I haven’t made Big Season Plans in a decade or so, always too busy to do more than improvise. The upcoming months are just the same, packed with work and very few holidays. I cannot create any free days, but I can make it a point to fill them up with different things.

The first thing I really wanted to do was to write about music again. The idea is to assemble one Summer playlist every two weeks, enough time for me to move through sets of songs, to figure out which ones really represent the season I am trying to capture.

The Summer I made Playlists, #1

1. Summer in the City — “The Lovin’ Spoonful”
2. Weezer — “Island in the Sun” 
3. NCT 127 — “City 127”
4. Laizer — “Earthworm”
5. Chasedae — “BLUE GIANT”
6. Blood Orange — “The Field” 
7. Eddie — “TURN UP THE RADIO” 
8. The Strokes — “Machu Picchu” 
9. Infinity Song — “Sayonara” 
10. Bauhaus — “She’s In Parties” 

1. Summer in the City — “The Lovin’ Spoonful”

I first heard this song in 2015, while working late-night shifts at pubs in Leicester, UK. I ran to get my phone to Shazam it before it was over. I do not recall paying special attention to the lyrics the first time I heard it — what made me run for my phone was the charming chord progression of the chorus. It is an easy listen to anyone who enjoys 60s rock, and a major Summer anthem to someone who dislikes the heat as much as I do.

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

2. Weezer — “Island in the Sun”

I have never had a big Weezer phase, and I don’t know much about them besides their biggest songs. Still, I have been obsessed with “Island In The Sun” ever since my Instagram Discover Page reminded me this is the song in the adorable party dance scene of the movie Aquamarine (2006). It is laidback, but dreamy enough to be aspirational. It makes me think of Summer trips I took when I was younger. I was never too reckless, but brave enough to have all the fun I wanted.

When you're on a golden sea
You don't need no memory
Just a place to call your own
As we drift into the zone

3. NCT 127 — “City 127”

The opening track of NCT 127’s first album Regular-Irregular (2018), produced by The Stereotypes, “City 127” is the most easygoing song in the “regular” first half of the record. It plays in the back of my mind whenever I go for a walk around Seoul, especially now that I live in one of the busiest neighbourhoods — flashing lights, sounds of people and cars coming and going at all times. Being in a big city doesn’t always feel good or magical, but you never really forget the feeling when it does.

4. Laizer — “Earthworm”

I met Laizer in December last year, when a friend invited me to attend a special gathering to make vision boards for 2026. She is the type of person you cannot help but notice, the moment you walk into the room. I was not surprised to find out she was an artist. “Earthworm” is beautiful and sounds like when you are walking in circles around your own ideas about your dreams and ambitions. Or maybe this is just how I feel about 2026 so far.

5. Chasedae — “BLUE GIANT”

The same day I met Laizer, I left our vision board gathering to go see a band for the first time, with the friend of a friend, someone I had only met once. The venue was small and I was charmed by their energy on stage, and the texture of the drums. I kept going to see them, and finding new things to like about them and their music. “BLUE GIANT” is a song that sounds familiar, the type you can easily enjoy from the first listen. I keep coming back to the feeling it captures these days, the hope and hunger when you are standing on the edge of a memorable season.1

Beyond the waves in your heart
when my voice rings out
stay by my side like an echo
we will last forever

6. Blood Orange — “The Field”

featuring The Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek & Daniel Caesar

One of my best friends sent me this song around a week ago, as she was about to board her flight to Seoul. We did our Master’s together, and now she is in the US pursuing a PhD. We hadn’t seen each other since last Summer, after the semester in which I moved to Seoul while she stayed in Daejeon, after two years being joined at the hip at KAIST — same age, same lab, same classes, amongst a world of other things that are different between us. “The Field” has a strong sense of motion, and it makes one think of car rides, or running freely. It makes me long for the past, and for the future: I miss my friend and this is the price you pay to get moving — for new things to come, that whole season must be left behind.

7. Eddie — “TURN UP THE RADIO”

I saw Eddie and the Bricks for the first time a few weeks ago, when I went to a Hongdae club to see Chasedae, and ended up staying for all the other bands. They ended their set with this song from Eddie’s solo EP MY FRIENDS ARE HIGH (2022), and it left the strongest impression. It reminds me of LCD Soundsystem “All My Friends” in all of the right ways, and Eddie’s live energy makes it sound bigger and more uplifting. I hope to see them again soon, so I can experience it one more time.

8. The Strokes — “Machu Picchu”

Back when I was 18 (in 2013), I used to pretend to dislike The Strokes just to piss off one of my best friends. He had been obsessed with Angles (2011) and posted about it every day on Facebook. I randomly clicked on the YouTube link for "Machu Picchu" once and I was hooked. These days, I have been singing “I’m just trying to find a mountain I can climb” like a mantra. I do not trust lists of “Best Strokes songs” missing that one.

9. Infinity Song — “Sayonara”

This one was a contribution from another of my closest friends, who also moved from Korea to the US last Summer. Ashley and I text most of the time, even over the 13-hour distance between Seoul and NYC. We also constantly exchange music. One of the reasons certain songs are easier to listen for the first time is because most of the enjoyment comes from correctly anticipating what comes next. The opening of “Sayonara” sounds like something I have heard in many pop rock tracks before, but the vocal melodies immediately make it stand out from other similar songs. I guess this is the reason Ashley liked it, and why she thought I would like it as well.

10. Bauhaus — “She’s In Parties”

I have a bunch of very close friends and I talk to them all the time about the things that I like. It is always surprising to me when some random side of my personality comes up for the first time before one of them, and I realise this person who knows me so well has never witnessed it. My love of dark things is mostly represented before my inner circle by my love of ravens and Edgar Allan Poe. Most of them are unaware of the teenage years I spent entertaining the dream of being a gothic queen. “She’s In Parties” makes me think of my 15-year-old self, obsessed with “making dark things beautiful, and beautiful things dark.”

One of the things I had hoped to solve before I published the first of these newsletters was how to share songs without linking them back to streaming platforms, but also without getting into copyright troubles. Maybe the solution is to burn CDs or record mixtapes again. Maybe this is one of the things I will figure out this Summer.

I had promised myself I would honour the 31st year of my life by publishing another one of my essays of the first month after turning a certain age—like I did for 30 of 181, then 30 of 222, then 30 of 283. I had missed the timing to write about turning 30 because I didn’t want to record much about that season. Then, I also missed the timing to write about turning 31. Life felt much better one year later, full of new things I would have loved to write about, but I had no mental bandwidth to sit and get started past the title, or the first few sentences.

The year before, the year I turned 30, was the year my life was upended the way all lives are bound to be upended past a certain age. I think it happens earlier to most folks. It was the first time in my life I was completely on my own, cut off from any institution who took care of things that released me from some of the burden of figuring it all out by myself. I wanted to call it “the year I stopped writing” but that wouldn’t be true, because I wrote a lot of other things, especially for work. But, for a while, that instinct to sit with myself and my own language for hours, to figure the way in and out of whatever I was going through, vanished.

As I type this on my phone, on my Notes App, it’s 9pm, Monday, in late May, one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in months. It’s hot and I have one last work schedule until 10.30pm. I did not think the desire to write for myself would make a comeback on a day like this. You need to be driven by some sort of greed, to drag yourself past the point of having nothing else to give, and you can’t always predict when it’s going to hit you. I have to do it, I tell myself, and I have to believe that I do, if I hope to get this one out of my drafts.

What am I going to call this season of my life? I collect titles as if I could gather enough of them, eventually, and trade for a good idea, one that I am hungry enough to pursue until the end. It is a running joke that writing is akin to a glorified form of punishment. I remember this post I saw on Twitter, about making movies, but it may apply to plenty of other activities: I hate every step of the process of writing; the only thing I hate more than writing is not writing. Whatever the outcome, I am bound to feel a little miserable about it. I write down my title ideas to placate some of that dreariness.

“Wasting Time on Lessons Learned” was the one I liked the most, for my expired essay about the first 31 days after turning 31. It’s the outro of a George Ezra song called “Stand by Your Gun.” “How long will you go and waste your time on lessons learned?” like a threat echoing in the back of my head. Very few things are as terrifying to me as the thought of wasting time. This is a very unproductive fear I have, because I understand the reality of building a life with meaning; there is no optimal path, the detours and delays are just parts of the journey, the way there is the destination. The wrong turns that define a timeline of wasted potential are nothing more than a necessary feature of variability in life courses. I create opportunities for good timing and luck to come my way, and they may still skip me if they please. I am past the age of believing that things may still take a turn for the better. My only hope is to come to believe that this life is good enough.

I miss the illusion of upcoming completeness that used to underlie my hopes and expectations. Peacefully entertaining the idea of a final state to be pursued, totally within my reach, not too far from the present I was experiencing. I was convinced I would have figured it all out before I was 30. I cannot believe I used to live like that, even though I know exactly why I did, and why it took so long for the penny to drop. Young people are entitled to make honest mistakes, the kind of stuff that is rooted in one’s lack of experience with reality at large. You cannot hope to discern the substance of time until you have held plenty of it in your hands.

As I got closer to turning 30, I often caught myself measuring how much my perception of the accretion of years had changed. When you are barely twenty, ten years are half of everything you have ever lived. But now I am 31, and I have spent the last decade trying to understand how to live my own story. Shouldn’t I have figured it out by now? It feels like I have had enough time to do so, considering how long I have known I am not headed towards the future I envisioned. The person I have become is not too different from the one I expected to be, but the path is unfamiliar to most of my aspirations, and I never know what to make of it. Ten years have not been sufficient because I am still cluttered with ways of thinking about life that do not apply to me.

There are days in which I rejoice in the privilege of building a life where I get to define the meaning of everything. There are days in which I imagine every person crossing my path is unburdened by the things I struggle the most with, and I envy them, so I can cast my frustrations onto some flesh and bones.

I feel permanently disoriented, as if I am moving through life as a perpetual stranger, encountering the world for the first time at all times. Is this an accurate definition of living? What do I make of the symbols, references, myths and the stories of those who came before? I struggle to devise plots to make sense of the world because the right narrative eludes me, time after time. I do not possess the ability to pretend, and that is the skill issue I am willing to admit. I am not familiar with the challenge of finding words to describe things, and I cannot bring myself to lean into a handful of delusions, the kind of stuff that could help me entertain my own way of seeing reality, something that needn’t make sense to others to persist.

The only essay I published in the second half of 20254 was about a writer’s block that stemmed from problems that no longer burden me, not as much as they did back then. The seasons did change, but the horrors have persisted. I concluded one of the issues back then was that I couldn’t be honest enough with myself, to access the heart of the matter. I still think that was an accurate assessment, but I am not sure it still applies. At any moment of the last year, I could be very honest about the way I felt, but I didn’t want to write about it because I was just being repetitive, and it wasn’t interesting to me. I am disappointed with the scope of who I can be, and the things that I can do, however hard I work, however much I read, study, watch, listen to, practice, work towards. I can’t find the right way to try to break out of this box I think I am in. I am stuck being myself and I can’t seem to be satisfied by the possibilities ahead of me.

In spite of everything, I have been working with things that I quite enjoy, and developing new hobbies, meeting people I am grateful to be friends or work with. I also got featured on a Vogue Korea photoshoot about foreigners living in Korea (I am serious). Instead of resting, I am dedicating all of my free time to doing my favourite activities. One of them is going to loads of live music gigs, and enjoying the indie music scene in Korea.

Abstract Excerpts That Never Were

Between media features and academic works, the unprecedented characteristic of BTS’s success can be expressed, or interpreted, as hopeful or stigmatising. The goal of this study is to move away from media interpretations, and focus on the subjects that actually perform the voting, streaming and promoting that makes this context possible — the fans themselves. Stuck between cycles of receiving way too much and way too little credit as consumers and creators, we aim to investigate the thoughts and emotions of fans about the ongoing phenomenon they have experienced.

We explore hypotheses stemming from the idea that BTS’s success in the West changes the standards of what is achievable to Korean stars, setting up a landscape of irrationally high expectations for both artists and fans. These high expectations, in return, inhibit adaptive preference mechanisms, setting all parties up for bigger frustrations and disappointment, and growing resentment towards the validation structures that they once tried to benefit from. We pose a question: what if the grapes are actually sour1?

An Introduction Passage that Never Was: the Narrative that Everyone Knows

Many of BTS’s achievements come with the prefix ‘Korea’s first’ (Lee, 2019, 11)2. So, how does a Korean group of Korean artists, singing in Korean, achieves the status of the biggest boy group in the world, reigning even in the hardly gatekept American market? This is the question that has prompted countless articles, think pieces, YouTube videos and books about BTS and their powerful fandom, trying to assess what’s the secret behind the ‘BTS phenomenon’. Critics from different media outlets and countries almost unanimously agree that the main factor in BTS’s unprecedented global success was their highly interactive use of social media - more specifically, how, through their personal and creative uses of platforms, the group has managed to establish a bond of reciprocity and intimacy between themselves and their fans (Chang, and Park, 2018, 2703). This ‘horizontal fantasy’ has over time nurtured a perception of members as “close friends”, instead of distant celebrities, that created a sense of solidarity between fandom and group which ultimately pushed both parts to a intense state of mutual support and growth (Lee, 2019, pt. 1, ch. 24).

Wishful Thinking5

(after Jon Elster6)

Even though scholarship has made strong efforts to frame and reframe the Korean Wave in terms that don’t privilege American hegemony (Kim, 2021), the project of K-pop has always, in a sense, sought to eventually break into the American market, as the ultimate goal of expansion (Shin, 20097). “Wishful thinking” would have us hoping that K-pop’s global expansion is more than an American-centred project, but artists, companies and fans repeatedly find themselves mobilising their status “within the system of western standards, values and ideologies” (Kim, 2021, 10728).

When we think about “success” in the music business, there are several different metrics that can be employed to measure it, such as sales (for albums, singles, concert tickets), engagement (such as radio spins, streaming numbers) and influence (such as number of followers, number of mentions). In this scenario, charts come into the game to combine these different metrics into different ways of assessing the popularity of songs, albums and artists in the industry. Charts have played a fundamental role in shaping the perception of fame and popularity of artists over the years — for example, discussing the Beatles’ true global popularity, Lebovic (2017)9 mentions how they had already topped charts in Austria, France, Holland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and Hong Kong even six months prior to their American success (2017, 51).

My Favourite Part of the Story: BTS’s Numbers before the 2017 Billboard Music Awards

BTS’s nomination to Top Social Artist came as a consequence of their placement on the (now inactive) Billboard Social 50 chart. On 18 October, 2016, they were announced as the number 1 act on the chart, debuting for the week of 29 October, 2016. The new achievement came one week after their second full-length album, “Wings”, reached 1 on the World Album Chart and scored 26 on the Billboard 200 Chart, surpassing the previous highest Billboard chart rank for a K-pop act - 2NE1’s 2014 album “Crush”, which reached no. 61. After ending 2016 in the 34th position on Social 50’s Year End charts, the group rose to #1 the following year, and they held the No. 1 position for a total of 201 weeks, until the chart became inactive in December 2020. Entering the Social 50 chart earned them a nomination to the Top Social Award at the BBMAs for the 2017 edition, a fan-voted award (that had been won by Justin Bieber since its creation in 2011), achieved with a massive 300 Million votes from Twitter, against less than 25 Million for Bieber.

Several K-pop acts had appeared on the Social 50 prior to BTS’s own debut in October 2016, such as PSY, CL, GOT7 and boy group VIXX – the first act from a non-major agency, and previous record holder for longest charting group. BTS suddenly appeared at #1 for the week of 29 October, a week after the release of their second full-length album, ‘Wings.’ Even though, in ARMY circles, ‘Wings’ was called “the album that broke all records,” the group was already extremely popular before — in 2015, they were ranked as the 6th most trended hashtag on Twitter for that year (albeit still behind EXO and GOT7), and scored South Korea’s “golden tweet” of the year with a picture posted in November that generated almost 3 million impressions (back when they still had under 2 million followers). Additionally, the fandom had been showing consistent signs of increasing global appeal since before ‘Wings’ - Kim (2019)10 writes that the crowd’s response to BTS at the Music Festival KCON in July 2016, in Los Angeles, was “so wild that almost made me confuse it for BTS’s solo concert” (Kim, 2019, pt. 3, column 04).

‘Wings,’ the album that “broke all records” - a Reddit post compiled 37 new milestones over the course of its first month. To name a few, it debuted at. 26 on the Billboard 200 Chart, surpassing the previous highest Billboard chart rank for a K-pop act - 2NE1’s 2014 album “Crush”, which had reached no. 61. The music video for the title track, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’, had the most views for a K-pop boy group in the first 24 hours, with 6.347 million views, and it also became the fastest video to hit 10 million views, in 41 hours - surpassing EXO’s ‘Monster’, with 4.48 million and 73 hours, respectively. It was the first ever Korean album to chart in the Canadian Billboard album chart, at #16, and in the UK album chart, at #62. ‘Blood Sweat and Tears’ was the highest ranked K-pop single on US iTunes overall Top 100 Songs Chart. ‘Wings’ charted #1 for Overall Albums Chart on 27 different iTunes Charts around the world on the first day of its release, and all of its 15 songs were #1-#15 on the South Korean music store and streaming service Melon as soon as they came out, with previous single ‘Fire’ coming next at #16.

All of these achievements highlight the fact that, in spite of their prior accomplishments and feats, BTS was not regarded as a major player in the K-pop industry until they were inserted into the American market, in a way that no other group had been before. This trend is observable even in the academic context — the number of studies about BTS grew dramatically between 2016 and 2018. This indicates something that William J Goode calls the “distinction” of awards (Goode, 197811).

Another Dismissed Introduction Passage: a Discarded Approach

Based on this framework, we interpret these discussions as driven by a categorisation issue. In social network theory, categories are important constructs that order the social structure, grouping different roles and their different sets of expectations according to meaningfully distinguishing terms (Fuhse, 201512). The structural role that they fulfil implies that different categories have different types of connections; if we consider BTS’s ascension as a process of embedding into a different structure of status, they no longer seem completely structurally equivalent to their peers in the K-pop industry. It has been long contended that the relevance of a certain topic to the functioning of a group affects how often it’s discussed and whether members are expected to manifest themselves, and to conform to the dominant opinion (Festinger 1950, Festinger 195413). Since fandom’s collective sense of identity is dependent on the object of fandom — in this case, BTS — , we analyse the existence of our discursive vector, and the terms associated with them, as evidence of uncertainty from switchings, highlighting discursive practices that are intended to resolve ambiguities in the system of meaning — i.e seek consensus upon situations which disrupt the expected script and affect the predictability of interactions (Mische and White, 199814). Including insight from fandom studies, and literature about the Korean Wave, we suggest three ways in which ARMY could feel prompted to try to solve the ambiguity of BTS’s stance:

1. It disrupts the predictability that sustains their ontological security as fans, because there is no precedent to their case, so the future of their artistic career doesn’t have a clear set of expectations.

2. It disrupts the scripts of the codes and behaviour norms that guide their collective action, which are related to BTS’s identity as a K-pop group, and fans’ identity as K-pop fans, operating by K-pop fandom codes.

3. It affects how fans are perceived, by others and by themselves, because fans are already highly subject to stigmatising accounts, which is aggravated by BTS’s status as a boy group, and as a K-pop group.

The Conclusion That Never Was: Very Personal Thoughts (2023)

In light of this, we believe that the growing process of disillusionment with Western standards and legitimacy tools within K-pop fandom might eventually strengthen what Kim (2021)15 calls the creation of an “alternative global culture” (p. 1072). The further developments of this process will be highly dependent on how the industry negotiates their own placement in the American context in the coming years. Companies, ultimately, serve their own financial interests, and the fact that their actions might be framed as reinforcing a certain desirable position at a certain moment in time has more to do with their expected capital gain than any sort of ideological ground. As Kim (2023)16 points out, there is a strong trend, from a joint initiative of the public and private sectors, of continuing the expansion of Korean cultural exports towards transcultural, universal values, to help facilitate the adoption by foreign audiences, reinterpreting the sense of Koreanness according to the logic of the global market, and selling it as K-culture with a repackaged sense of authenticity.

It is also impossible to ignore that fans, too, have their own personal interests in choosing fandom, even their own agenda, which might not be necessarily financial, but still seek their own personal gain, whether we describe it as “soothing existential anxiety” or “increasing social capital.” It is, however, truly a feat that these different, individualistic and collective, decision-making processes have conflued, and disrupted expected social and cultural flows, and it’s not surprising that they evoke feelings of optimism and hope in those who still believe in the possibility of moving towards a better future, and a more equal society.

Between 2019, 2022 and 2025, three years passed between the start of my research and the start of my Master’s, and three more years until now. Unless you are doing something similar with your life, it might be hard to grasp the extent of the work I have carried out about a topic that, more often than not, draws laughter from others, when I tell them what my research is about. Once in a while, I get annoyed when I talk to people who can’t maintain their attention on something for longer than a couple of weeks, because I need to feel better about all the time, energy and resources I have put into having something to say about BTS’s global stardom with a degree, a thesis, backed by data that no one else bothered to gather.

Looking back, all that I had in 2019 was a vision, and enough confidence and support to go for it. The fact that I have got this far makes me feel like I can do it again, as long as I have something to shoot for. This journey has been nothing like I expected, I am nowhere near the path I thought I would carve, but I look around, and I feel like I have got enough to keep going.

In recent years, acknowledgement of large-scale implications of internet-based political activism led researchers of civilian engagement towards fandom paradigms to better understand facets of the phenomenon that were harder to approach with traditional frameworks of the public sphere. Recently, there is a growing tendency towards studying online political partisanship as its own form of fandom as well (Sandvoss 2012, 2013, Dean 2017, Stanfill 2020, Hinck & Davisson 2020, Barnes 2022)1. One of the reasons for the emergence of political fandom works is the explanatory potential of the affective, passionate dimension of fandom practices (Reinhard & Miller, 2020)2.

As Matt Hills (2002a)3 discusses in “Fan Cultures,” academia and its system of value are driven by a “rational imagined subjectivity” which is thought to be diametrically opposed to “the passions and commitments of ‘irrational’ … fans” (2002a, p. 20). In his understanding, fans were (or have been) the “epistemological other” (Somers, 1993)4 of scholars, the imagined opposite that consolidates “a cohesive self-identity and collective project” (1993, 1). In this sense, the process of recognising fandom in academia, and making room for fan-scholars in research, was confrontational in not only revealing gaps in this absolute imagined subjectivity, but also accommodating the inability of consolidating this illusion of absolute rationality, even in research.

Scott (2019)5 argues that fandom’s original “political project” — of empowering marginalised groups — should be preserved because the so-called “turn to fandom” of convergence culture industry has been engineered to depathologise and affirm the fanboy. Which is not to say that culture has completely and unrestrictedly embraced fandom for all its worth, and moved past mocking stereotypes, but that mainstream culture defines the (new) standards of good, appropriate and “authentic” fandom — or “normative fandom” (Hills, 2005, p. 45)6.

Identity distinction is one of the foundational ideas behind fandom studies—the definition of the boundary that distinguishes the fan and the non-fan. This categorical distinction, albeit helpful, has proven to be insufficient to account for all the different forms of differentiation that fan communities have been observed to give themselves to—fans vs. stans, fans vs. anti-fans, fans of colour vs. (white) fans, etc.

The phenomenon of specialised/high-performance fandom is also a site of distinction. Fans leverage their educational background and their professional credentials to self-empower (Wang & Ge, 2023)7 with distinct property to assess their favourite artists’ merit, implying their elite taste as proof of idols’ superior quality.

In a study about collective identity and self-defining hashtags on Twitter, Barron & Bollen (2022)8 found that there is a high level of coherence between how K-pop fans self-identify on a local and global level. To put it comparatively, the paper finds that being a Texas sports fan doesn’t necessarily indicate a global level of being a sports fan, whereas a local K-pop identity “drastically reduces the uncertainty we have on their global identity membership” (2022, 3). The highest self-defining hashtags in the study were #bts, #army, #exo and #got7 (for the time window 2017-2019).

Although these results concern X/Twitter, a rhizomatic platform characterised by its high context collapse, which is diametrically opposed to the adequateness of Reddit for the present study, these results still hold some relevance when considering the level to which membership as an ARMY has been tied to general membership as a K-pop fan.

For K-pop fans, the issue of stigma and stereotypification is particularly pertinent and resistant, especially due to the relative recency of the rise of Korean contents to mainstream (or else American) global culture. Lyan’s (2023)9 study of all New York Times articles concerning the Hallyu over the years found a lingering sense of stigma permeating the corpus, suggesting a permanent state of shock at not only the popularity of cultural exports from a small East Asian country, but also directed towards fans (2019, p. 31). In addition to the usual contempt reserved for fannish expressions, and the misogyny reserved for fans of boy bands and romance TV dramas, Western fans of Korean culture are also further stigmatised for their consumption of non-Western culture, a practice that is framed as “improper” and “unnatural” (Hills 2002b, Lyan 2019)10.

Maros, Basek & Nadia (2022)11 investigated the feeling of belonging in K-pop fans from different countries in Southeast Asia, and they found that the activity of streaming videos and songs is seen by as a fundamental aspect of membership, along with affection for their group (also extending into trust towards the group), interacting with other fans and being knowledgeable about the idols and the community (such as knowing inside jokes). The study also specifically sought fans who had been involved in fanwars, revealing a link between a desire to “protect their idols’ names and reputations,” based on the aforementioned trust, articulated as belief that any accusation should be “censured and criticised” (2022, 293).

Choi (2020)12 calls the relationship between idols and fans “theatrical interconnectedness” to the extent that both parties understand and agree to keep a performative intimacy (p. 101). This framework of interconnectedness is important to make room for all the ways that idols and fans mutually influence each other. For a network approach, Choi’s concept accommodates how, in idol-fan relationships, the myriad of fans are flattened into a single entity, called by their fandom name — ARMY, in BTS’s case.

However, her study is a reflection concerned specifically with Korean fans — which she differentiates from International fans on the basis of the opportunities for direct interaction (p. 20). In that regard, there is a case to be made about whether Korean/domestic fans, and international fans can be all flattened together, or if the different dynamics of their relationship asks for different nodes and types of ties in a network.

Feel free to come and go as you please in between the passages. Some of them have dates.

Old Jewish traditions assumed a connection between the raven that Noah sends out, during the Flood (in Genesis 8), and the ravens that fed Elijah, when he fled Jezebel (in 1 Kings 17). The text in Genesis isn’t clear on why Noah released the raven before the dove; they assumed he probably just hated the bird and would rather have it gone for good. The raven flew to and fro until God sent it back to the ark. Noah wanted to get rid of the bird, but God had a plan; thousands of years later, during a time of drought, He needed them, to nurture one of His prophets. Several other saints and prophets going through a desert—St Paul of Thebes, St Anthony, St Benedict—have been cared for by ravens as well.

It is 2 October, 2023. Over four years ago, my parents decided to go on a trip to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, and that’s one of the many chance events that aligned to produce the current scene: sitting alone at Incheon Airport, waiting for a flight to Vienna, the second I’m taking within the span of two months, and not the last before Christmas this year. There are multiple other twists and turns involved in the path that brought me here, and I never get tired of thinking about them, acknowledging them, and agonising over the fact that I have no control over what is the best course for my life to follow, since I am not the one in charge of articulating the story.

“you live the surprise results of old plans” — Jenny Holzer, Survival series (1983-85)

History tells us that, when the Portuguese were getting lost at sea on purpose, trying to find some of the new land they had heard about, they eventually spotted, from afar, what would come to be known as Brazil. On 22 April 1500, they first caught sight of a mountain to the south of Porto Seguro, and they called it Monte Pascoal (because it was Easter). Days later, they changed it to Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross), before eventually reaching the coast and realising it wasn’t an island, renaming it to Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross).

It sounds absurd that they named a land they had just barely caught a glimpse of, from a distance of days. Maybe there is something to be said about the sense of entitlement that they felt, what those men thought to be appropriate or acceptable. But there is something a bit less contextual, and a bit more on the inevitable side of what we do as people—splitting reality into manageable, digestible bits, making sense of the mess by classifying things, whether we have a good grasp of what they are, or not.

If you think about it, the Portuguese giving names to the mount they could only see from afar seems like the culture of giving names to constellations. We are drawing up abstractions out of our inability to see the whole, because our vision is limited, because our scope is too narrow, but we are aware that there is more, we just cannot fathom it. So we name it. As much as constellations are just a conceptual model of what we get to see of the universe, from the ground, the science of things that are too small to the naked eye also started as a labour of abstraction. We pretend that it makes sense for as long as we can. And that could be a long time.

The architecture of fate is one of the greatest, probably The Greatest, topic of my existence, since the day I first acknowledged some sort of geometric precision in the twists and turns of human life on earth. I haven’t done much with my life yet, but every little decision, successful or not, has been driven by the purpose of learning how to see the world from the Architect’s perspective, looking for the traces He has left for me to find. The longer I walk this path, the more humbling it becomes. It’s easy to make this about myself, so He always shakes the table whenever I seem to be overconfident on my ability to understand what He is doing, lest I think I have become like Him—not in heart, but in mind.

The history of science should, on the most basic level, act as a reminder of how much more there is to happen, to be discovered, to come into existence, to cease to have relevance, in the times that come after what we call "the present". One may argue about the observable effects of "the end of history" in shaping the neoliberal mind, but it seems that the illusion of a final state to be pursued—and which is "closer than ever before"—has been the real drive of humankind, way before we even articulated the modern idea of progress. There is something to be said about the different levels on which it operates, and the fact that I, a person of no importance at all, feel like I have not only a say in it, but that I also move in the same rhythm as the history of outstanding people and outstanding events.

Hindsight is a game of rewriting memories with the weight of all of our biasses as a scale. It will never be an accurate picture because there will never be an objective-enough point of view that can do justice to how differently we see and feel things, because we have lived different lives, and we have different standards for everything, and I do not feel as empowered as I did to accuse you of falling short of mine (even if other people agree that you did).

Honesty is the willingness to share the things that sound reasonable and real today, and tomorrow, even if they change, and it takes the humbleness of admitting defeat when they do. I have not been the same since I first realised I was me, this is the way I see things. The only thing I am sure about is that whatever feels righteous, loving and sincere to me today will be the most important thing in the world.

6 February, 2024

How far into the past should a thing be, before we call it a memory? It is more a question of framing than a question of timing. In Korean, there are two different words for "memory" — 기억 (gi-eok), any sort of thing that happens and which we can remember, and 추억 (chu-eok), the ones which are worth remembering. By definition, not every 기억 merits being a 추억.

All of the time that I have spent in the last 18 months has been mediated by the thought that this is a season that I will miss dearly in the future, to which I will look back often; in the same way, all of the time that I spent in Austria was regarded by me as a season worth keeping. At some point, it’s hard to say how much of it is just my disposition, and how much of it is what I really felt, as the weeks went by. I wonder if, sometimes, things become memorable just because I want to remember them.

There is something of a Job complex1 in every human being who has ever yelled “why me!” during a particularly complicated season, and that’s the most pressing dynamics of my relationship with God—the yelling, the crying, the roar of thunder, the humiliation that follows, the harvest, and then another desert, when I seem to have forgotten that I am not the one in charge of playing the cards in this game.

I used to get very overwhelmed at the thought of all the lessons that had already been learned by others, all the mistakes that I should bear witness to, to live wisely and walk dilligently the same road of those who came before. Isn’t it a lot, to figure it all out? I have sometimes longed to believe in multiple lives (because I don’t); the thought occurs to me as beautiful, not for the hope that we get to do this one more time, but because of what level of happiness would push one to crave the possibility of living again.

The unknowable is an open door to mystery and a gateway to everything that makes us wonder. There is a large space of possibilities that I can fill up with my inventive mind. There is the chance of self-discovery. The source of my anxieties and sleepless nights becomes the reason I can start to dream again.

23 July, 2023

I take pictures of everything, because I want to have something to remember how happy I was when the angles of the great design of the universe brought our paths together. I sigh and I wonder, for how long. If it will go sour before other things pull us apart, or if we will just be taken away by our own cravings and dreams. We are both chasing that vision and I wonder where it will take us next, and I can see that it might not be anywhere as close as now. Maybe in a few years I’ll hate you, and be glad we went our separate ways, but I hope we’ll eventually love each other enough to be happy, and look back fondly on the good memories, when the time comes.

17 October, 2023

This is the fourth or fifth time within the space of a month that I’ve attempted to write a metanarrative about why I became a writer. It is not even the first time I set out to do such a thing, in the first place, trying to use words to articulate the urge to resort to more words when I suddenly fall short of them.

Maybe the reason I feel this need to constantly check the reasons why I write has to do with the life-long accusation of wordiness that I have been a victim of. I want every single person that has ever accused me of speaking too much to read it. I want them to read it, and understand it. I want them to read it, and realise.

Notes:

• reasons to resist the impulse to detract

• fighting the urge to use optimism as a weapon of detraction.

• sitting with the discomfort of loss, and uselessness of hurt.

• forgiving the debt of the unwanted side effects

• letting go of the urge to over-explain the unforeseen by-products of the things that we do

As a Christian, I was raised to conform to the idea of being second in everyone’s life—Jesus was supposed to be first. But this was different. We were talking about work, like we always did, like we always ended up doing, and he was just sharing something he was excited about. I think he got distracted scrolling through the pages of someone else’s work, and for a split second he forgot that I was there, and for a split second I realised a wall between us. It was just a fraction of a realisation, a flicker of an intuition, but it was very clear. I could never aspire to be anything more to him than his ambitions. There was just not enough room for me to be better than second.

Love begets forgiveness to thrive. I keep resisting the urge to hate, in the name of my mental stability. I shake, and tremble with despair, and I hope that, at the end of these pains, I will have learned to live a little deeper than before. Letting go not because I have called the grapes sour, but because I am resolved to sit with the discomfort of my own inability to reach out and taste their sweetness.

After months of circling through my feelings, thoughts and theories, and performing all of the hermeneutic labour that I keep as the oath of duty of my role as an overthinker, I came back full circle to the same things I recall thinking, saying and writing on the first few hours and days after things came crashing. But now, after reading in-between the lines of every good and bad thing you had done to me, I was sure that those were the correct answers.

31 January, 2024

The only way I know, of seizing the moment, is to push hard towards as many things as possible. Looking back to myself at the start of this journey, I see how desperately I tried to use the last five months to overcompensate for things that I thought I had missed out on. As if exhausting my body would forcefully bring to my hands the reality of the life I had dreamed for myself. The end of this cycle feels like the end of a big movie, that I obviously wasn’t in charge of scripting. Everything turned out much better than I had anticipated, and nothing like I had envisioned, but if this was really a movie, if I were truly a main character, I would have learned my lesson, I would be savouring the full sweetness of the surprise results of my old plans. Isn’t it unfair to admit that all of the great things that I gained do not make up for what I seem to have lost along the way? There must be a way to accommodate loss without thinking in binaries, but I still don’t know how to practice it fully.

Still, in spite of everything, I have never felt happier and more content, more grateful, that I get to live my life as it is. This will be the last year of my twenties, life is very different from my childhood imagination, but I’m doing all of the wonderful things I had always wanted to do — going to new places, learning amazing things and meeting people that change my life. The price I pay for being stubborn, reckless and extremely sensitive is the burden of being overly methodical and still living at the catastrophic edge of doing it for myself and letting things be. What remains the most challenging is not giving into the impulse to detract and accelerate beyond my limits. The time that it takes cannot be fast-forwarded, not for the things that are worth the wait. And, so, we wait.

In December 2023, I posted a text on my blog, titled “like a polaroid.” The idea was roughly the same as the leftovers—releasing some of the accumulated pressure from writing publishable things. I was inspired by something that Matt Healy had said about the process of creating The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022), about reducing the scope of how much he had to say and do with every new release. It sounded productive. After over a decade of blogging, I felt constrained by my own expectations of what my writing should cover, with my essays getting increasingly longer and harder to put together, with reasonable results.

It didn’t go far. After a rather satisfactory inaugural post, I ended up deleting my second attempt at a polaroid piece, because the conclusion was embarrassing in a way that I couldn’t stand to re-read (something I do often, to internalise my writing and think harder about how to improve it), let alone to leave it there for everyone else to see. À la poubelle, it went—the post, and the premise.

the second polaroid piece contained this playlist that I made to convince myself I was doing fine (I wasn’t)

The polaroids were supposed to capture thoughts and feelings of the moment, without the long periods of rumination to which I like to subject my experiences, before I write publishable things about them. When it comes down to big events—moving to a different country, breaking up—, I am always suspicious of my immediate thoughts and feelings, embarrassingly extreme, the kind of thing that gives chills to any regulated by-listeners. Even if it takes as little as 10 or 15 minutes, I need to deliberately carry myself to the place of more nuance. Before that, my first reaction is drama, seasoned with misplaced biblical verses or Kierkegaard quotes.

There is value, even a type of beauty, in the anxiety-driven tantrums I throw the moment something really good or really bad happens. It is raw, honest, and acknowledging ups and downs is the reason I have learned to give them less credit, move on and let go more easily. But the other problem of recording immediate thoughts is that they rarely lend themselves to conclusions. Or else, I would rather avoid drawing conclusions the moment something happens, and ideas and impressions start to form.

The polaroids didn’t work well because I wanted them to be essays that ended somewhere with complete sense. Like writing about the middle of the ride, and describing it as the destination. Sometimes you are mistaken, sometimes you change your mind, with more time and reflection. But writing essays about the present—the way I am used to writing essays—felt like a deliberate lie, as a writer. As naturally as the first half came, the latter part dragged, and I ended up with something akin to that horse drawing meme, starting out strong, finishing off poorly.

When the ending doesn’t come naturally, you can force it out, or let it simmer. As much as I complain about my pile of unfinished pieces, I am way too proud about what I put out, and I prefer the shame of what is incomplete. There are not enough situations in life about which I would happily say “done is better than perfect” except, of course, drafts.

The point of the leftovers wasn’t just about unfinished stuff, though. I wanted a channel to experiment with ideas that felt like dead ends. Sometimes I come up with a very good thought that produces a paragraph’s worth of internal monologue, and my immediate response is “this should become an essay.” I write it on a post-it and stick it to my desk and then it never happens. Much like telling people you are writing about a topic is the easiest way to kill it, the idea of doing something is usually a lot more terrifying than the actual process, like the negative anticipating of ripping off a band-aid.

And it does hurt. When the thought process doesn’t come easily, finding the right thread feels like looking for hay in the pile of needles. There are infinite pathways I could take to talk about it, and I am stuck figuring out which one will truly take me to the treasure. Walking around in circles in the dark finding the words is part of the reward. The editing, like digging right where the big red X is marked on the map. I am at my most productive when I am desperate to find the gold. Only people who talk about writing without writing a lot sit and wait for the Perfect First Draft to come down like a black swan a-swimming.

There is one piece in the back of my head lately, that I have been resisting setting into motion. A reflection about the meaning of gratefulness, in this season of being nurtured by ravens. It started as an essay about Easter, the feast of firstfruits, and an album released by a K-pop idol. Now that I have said it, I might never write about it. The most likely outcome is that this idea that feels very large and productive now will become a paragraph or a brief reference in something else I will only have the willpower to write in a year or two.

Why not both? Maybe I don’t want to document a difficult season before I have found a way out. Things that feel completely out of my control are at the centre of my most prolific writing seasons, when the problem at hand is the kind that can only be dealt with through rationalisation. I am not there yet; writing is really like a puzzle, and it feels like a chore when I am not working hard to bend some narrative. Call it a skill issue. We overcomplicate things when we don’t want to do them.

I could blame it on the pile of cover letters I have written over the last few months. I have another handful before the end of this week. A timely reminder of the reasons why I refuse to write professionally; I hate playing the game of guessing what is in the reader’s head. I am the one in charge here.

In retrospect, the idea of the polaroids was optimistic—I wanted to keep a record of my instant thoughts about the world. The leftovers feel like a confession in the other direction—I don’t want to eat them. But it’s not garbage, it’s just drafts, writing that goes nowhere I am very happy about. Publishing is still the most hopeful thing to do, in such cases.

I am no longer living with my friend (she will have to clean her fridge by herself, now). It’s been a week since I moved into my own place. Very small, my unopened suitcases and boxes take up most of the space. I am using my latent architectural skills to make more room for my mood swings to sit comfortably on the furniture. The raw material is a great start: the wallpaper is tasteful, there is a large window, the lights are well-placed. I knew it was the one the moment I walked in, when I came to visit.

My approach to interiors is akin to breaking in a new pair of boots. To make myself comfortable, I need to experience the raw space, let the spiky corners rub against my skin, imposing themselves on my new routine. It takes a while for me to understand how to get what I want out of the new room, from what it affords. The first night was a struggle, and I woke up feeling frustrated and missing my house back in Daejeon. Most of the things from my old house are in boxes—three large ones, schedule to arrive tomorrow, with no plans of opening them in sight. This is a temporary place.

Adjusting to a place you are supposed to leave soon is burdensome if you think about it too often. Every accommodation I make must be simple, and easily disposable. But the limitations make it more fun. I demand a lot from the space, but I am familiar with countless ways of getting what I want, to build myself a home. I like to keep everything within my reach, but not crowding every corner of my field of vision. Objects are arranged with geometrical precision, and I spice it up with things that are good to look at, to make happy in between the things that upset me about work these days.

When I work from my own desk, I reorganise things all the time—pens, papers, cables, pots and cups, nothing stays out of place for too long. It is akin to the urge to bite into something, the thing that makes me snack uncontrollably when I’m working on something challenging. From a café or the library, it’s harder to have much at hand to move around, so I compensate by checking my emails or DMs every 3 minutes, changing into a new ASMR video, tapping on the table, biting my tongue.

If my brain fails to map out an immediate venue of a coping mechanism, the urge revels itself as the impulse to run away from the creative struggle, in its purest form. When I can’t get a sentence right, when I can’t figure out how to disentangle some twisted up thought process, my entire body wants to pull away. The untrained reflex is to simply stand up and leave. I bite into a protein bar or a buckwheat cracker, go for a walk, do the dishes or clean my pen holder to release the tension build-up. The effect is temporary. There is more to come.

I am biting my tongue as I write this newsletter, wondering if it’s too late to get another cracker, if just going to the kitchen for a glass of water will help. I stop mid-sentence to look around, to admire the postcard I bought last Saturday—a tiding of magpies drawn against a background, in the right shade of light blue. I covered the mesh of my bedside table with a semi-transparent white cloth, to make the interior less visible. “That looks really good,” I congratulate myself, and let out a deep sigh.

There are things I can do without squeezing all of my anxiety juices at once. I can enjoy a good book for hours and forget about the world outside. I can go for a run and it might take 3 to 4 kilometers before I decide to check how much farther I have to go, to satisfy my goal. Once I catch steam onto a particular thread, I can spend hours drawing, painting or working on a design project. But writing is always a bumpy road, which explains why I am always so anxious, because it is what I do the most these days.

Even when it comes naturally, when paragraphs spring out of the tapping of my fingernails against the keyboard, my chest burns like an engine powering up right at the centre of my heart, wrapped up and ready to go. And I need to type faster, with more violence, to let go of some of that steam, to make sure it won’t ignite, that I won’t set myself on fire. I remind myself to breathe, straighten my spine, to avoid cutting this disquieted flow state short.

So much drama, and I am not even that good of a writer. I put out sappy writings about having way too many feelings and the reader cannot fathom that the words burn like fire when I write them down, more than the feeling ever does. And it persists, as if I am supposed to keep doing it until it kills me, with no special honour or true genius to profit. My fourteen years of blogging, my dozens of journals, even this newsletter, all stand as proof that I cannot help but do it when the urge comes, chasing the next sentence and evading the impulse to run away from the task.

Some days, it sounds like a personal tragedy. Today, it seems more like an inconvenience; the itch doesn’t feel that much more disagreeable than this tiny room. I quite like it here; I know I can get what I want out of it. I am familiar with countless ways of making it work for me. Maybe if I slow down, pick up a pen instead of trying to match the speed of typing, it might help. I know I can make it more bearable, more comfortable. I can make it feel like home.

Four days ago, I broke down sobbing at a yogurt shop, because of Phoebe Bridger's "Waiting Room." She wrote the song when she was 16; nowadays, she looks back on the desperation and rawness and wishes she could tell herself she would be okay. The song was written, nonetheless, and it brought me to tears. But it took less than a week for the things that I wrote that day, with teary eyes, to make me shiver with embarrassment.

[top comment on the video: “Sometimes I think to myself “how could a teenage girl write this song” then I realize that only a teenage girl could write this song”, user @Behshhaisown2973]

This is one of the perks of growing older—you haven’t only heard about the other side of things, you have been there before, you know firsthand that no feeling is final. People like me make it a point to squeeze everything out of the process, anyway. I used to think that the best use of past data was anticipating and preventing problems from happening at all, and that insisting on past mistakes was a skill issue. But that would only be true if being perfectly rational was the norm; as it often happens to ideal states, it is more of an exception. Or else, it is only one of the ways of going about life, handling problems and navigating challenges. After much deliberation, I have decided that I am no longer striving to become a robot.

I am suspicious of anyone that weaponises the logic of historical processes against people going through the present for the first and only time, ever1. I, too, used to believe that the recurring structure of revolutions and innovation should teach us how to navigate them, but the past only tells you that things happen. And they will happen again, but they are not the same, and each generation will have to figure out how to handle them. But we have been thoroughly convinced there is a way to bring the world under rational control—we just haven’t found it yet. In the meantime, people who stand to gain the most will call the inability to adapt and conform a skill issue, to shame you into just accepting the terms and conditions of the new world they are trying to create, at the technological frontier.

Once, in late 2023, I decided that I wanted to write about my illusions. The title was “just like in the movies,” in honour of the bright neon sign gracing the windows of this movie screening café in Daejeon, where I used to live. It looks particularly appealing at night, and no one who walks past it can resist the urge of taking a picture. The first time I saw it was on the way home of a memorable night out, the day I met someone, and it seemed like the start of something special. In the mental space where I keep my projections, I envisioned us becoming the kind of stuff people write scripts about.

Stories exist because we need to order the world as it stretches over time. Aspirations exist because we need it to be desirable. Illusions exist because reality often falls short of our desires. The ability to dream and the ability to fail and lose do not coexist peacefully.

I have been told off for making it too obvious that I believe in the stories in my head. It is in the way I talk about things, making every little event seem like a fateful design, every single part of it pointing towards the ending I envisioned. Once in a while, I run into people as delusional as me. It sounds more pathetic if you believe you know better about how the world works. People react more strongly when they don’t think the delusional other is good enough to get what they are dreaming of.

It doesn’t happen very often but, sometimes, I write a very good story in my head, and watch it come to life as events take place. People do exactly as I thought they would, consequences unravel just as predicted. Even when it’s the worst-case scenario, it brings a sense of accomplishment. When my movie started to go off script, the fatalistic part of my imagination was quick to articulate the most likely path towards the trainwreck. I wasn’t completely right (things were a bit worse than I expected), but I got pretty close. I am more skilled at devising how situations go wrong. In things that are only supposed to work out once (or very few times) such as job applications and romance, there are more missed shots than optimal moves. If you meet enough people, and read enough stories, you might succumb to the inconvenient truth of case studies—time is unlikely to serve you the same way it served others.

"My mantra is "the most valuable thing you can contribute to a conversation is your attention" and I forget it almost every time I talk to someone." (random user on YouTube @Fredreegz2)

I am trying to get used to the inescapability of the survival strategies that I dislike the most—seeing people as ideas, nurturing stereotypes, building expectations, comparing ourselves to others, feeling lonely and incomplete. Chasing ideal states belongs amongst these things that are productive with reservations. Expecting to eventually get rid of the ghost of comparison (for once and for all) can be just as useful, or useless, as reducing complicated things to general characteristics, for classification purposes. How much we do it, how much we believe in it, how often we switch gears and pursue a different strategy, might affect what we get out of it.

Accepting the inevitability and raising the concerns go hand in hand. You are still allowed to resist change, to dislike circumstances and to protest that reality falls short of your expectations. The consequences will be yours to bear. Many of our issues have answers we are not interested in entertaining, and the reason for our disinterest is far more worthy of any inquiry.

Before you gain perspective, make something out of your distress and sorrow. Write brokenhearted poems about parting with someone you will be glad to have left behind a few years (or weeks) later. Journal through the struggle, keep a detailed record of all the extreme things you have felt, before they fade away. Get comfortable with having feelings and experiencing reactions. Let the voice of insanity speak a bit, before reason wraps it up and stores it where you dare not touch it. The importance of things cannot be determined until you get far ahead, in retrospect, so keep going.

Leftovers are occasionally inevitable, and surprisingly hopeful. There is a hidden promise in keeping what is left of food that fed you once, that it might feed you twice. But the time window during which such a thing is possible is so short; you ought to do something quickly, lest they lose their purpose, and, expired, start to take up the space of food that might actually be fit for consumption.

I have a few leftovers myself, not in the fridge, but in my notes and archives. So many thoughts and feelings that I sought to resolve through writing, without making it to the end. Not everything is ready to bear all its fruit at once, but then, does everything have to yield a full harvest, all the time? I suppose not.

Room for Leftovers is a venue for me to channel things I need to get rid of, before I move onto other things, hopefully better ones. It is a bit like a garbage bin, for drafts past their expiration, stuff that doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore, but maybe it’s also like a snack, doing something about the last piece of cheese left from the charcuterie board we had over the weekend.

The idea clicked after I found a playlist I made for someone, right after we met. We agreed to introduce each other’s musical history like this. I spent weeks preparing mine, but we never got to share it, for various reasons. It is still there, with the description—“warning: don’t play on random.”

But no one played it.

Sometimes, we make things just for ourselves, to keep a record, to cherish the memory of a precious moment at a later time. Sometimes, we make things because we want others to see the world or a particular situation the way we do. We attribute meaning to objects or circumstances and then we hope that others may feel the same. Sharing is a very hopeful thing, and I could use a bit more hope right now.

The ethos of the internet is sharing and, like many adults my age (30, apparently), I have been leaving digital traces for a long time. I got used to making things and sharing them online, to package thoughts in shareable formats, for an imaginary audience. But it felt very natural to do it as a younger person. Nowadays, it feels heavy. There is some guilt about adding to the flood of content. There is a sense of pointlessness as well. Besides what I have been doing for years now—devising a very long essay every two months, for my long-term, still-standing teenage blog—, I find it increasingly harder to justify doing anything else.

What changed, now?

To deal with a semantic crisis, some recommended tools are silence, solitude, introspection, contemplation. But I still believe it is worth nurturing alternative spaces, smaller clusters where we get to define the meaning of things we create.

This is an invitation, is what I am trying to say. It’s a channel where I dump the things I couldn't transform further, so that hopefully they become something else, once I put them out there. The comments are meant for you to share—an unfinished thought, a playlist no one played, an idea that fell out of style but is still cherished. You don't have to make it make sense. After all, we're just cleaning the fridge.

• an are.na channel, to start the conversation: room-for-leftovers