Scribble scrabble.
#2053 | Watercolor girls
I was invited to write a piece for No Contact Magazine, and I did, to which my girlfriend said: I can’t believe you wrote about deviantartists and one of my boyfriends said: the sad thing is nobody takes watercolorists seriously, like compared to oil painters and such and I said: I cant believe no one got the joke that when you use too much watercolor the paper tears and the artist is perpetually crying and my other girlfriend said: but jem your jokes are not funny.
Tough crowd.
Anyway, I do have a favorite watercolorist, thank you for asking. His name is Marcos Beccari and Shane who is far more cultured than I am introduced his work to me.
I personally have no artistic talent, information I feel compelled to lay on the table, because someone read Watercolor Girls and reached out to ask if i were depressed, at which point I had to explain the difference between fiction and non-fiction.
x
Jem
#2052| haze
I got sick, real sick the last week, which thickened the cloudy haze of my mind to the point where I wasn’t sure where the line between dreaming and waking lay. Of course, then I got better, and it became all too clear that reality had taken a definite turn for the worse.
There are so many resources floating around the interweb right now, but here is one specifically catered to Southeast Asians, with language/culture specific resources further down on how to open and frame a conversation about racism, especially given existing misconceptions and shifting ways of thinking: The Southeast Asian Anti-Racism Toolkit.
xJ
#2051 | dirty
A few things:
1. Corona has messed with my hair real bad, not even going to pretend this is a look anymore so much as it is a sign of the times.
2. All i wear now are various sets of pajamas – I now have a rotating wardrobe of fancy pajamas, chill pajamas, and i’ve-given-up pajamas. This old star wars t shirt and pj shorts are basically part of the last category.
3. the other day, as i was working in the living room, my dad looked at me and asked why i type like im fighting enemies off in some video game. so i guess i know now why my back hurts all the time. it’s because my posture sucks and i left the orthopedic love of my life in new york.
4. i was sick all weekend – not pandemic sick, just stress sick i think – and so hibernated nonstop, essentially, and just emerged from the haze of slumber to the very happy news that i’ve been awarded the Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship at Columbia University, which is the first time i have been a fellow of anything, except for maybe when i was 10 and sorted into Yellow house in primary school, and all my friends in the Green house laughed at me for being a yellow yellow dirty fellow. Well, now i am the dirtiest fellow of all, so jokes on them.
x
J
#2050 | Athena: A whole mood
My cat is doing a very good job of channeling the grouch in all of us right now. I suppose one can get accustomed to anything: frustration, exhaustion, misery, claustrophobia, the like. For example: when I got back from New York over a month ago, I was at Peak Depression, a total nightmare to be around, not that anyone was, you know, around, since we were all on lockdown and I was quarantined, squirreled away in solitary confinement for two weeks. But my friends showed up magnificently, like Harry Potter’s friends who sent him cake and letters when the Dursleys locked him in without food, and to be honest, the misery was quite cushioned with love, at least for me. Slowly I have graduated from plain and perpetual wretchedness to my current state of fluctuation – ping-ponging between optimism and total incapacitation. Is it like this for everyone? I imagine it is, worse, better, who knows. The problem with despair is that it is myopic. The problem with me is I find this unacceptable. I cannot fathom a situation I cannot muscle my way out of with sheer pigheadedness, though of course when you come up against an invisible enemy there’s not much you can do. Instead I have thrown myself into pantomimes of productivity, doing exactly three sit ups then curling into a ball, reading voraciously to make up for my inability to write, cursing people who are quite happily writing and posting about it, cursing myself because I am not. Everything is so slow. My brain, my body, the world. Except for time, which goes, without regard for its occupants, spending months of our year frivolously. And my cat, for whom at least the world has caught up to speed, finally meeting her on her wavelength of irascibility.
x
Jem
#2049 | Word of the Year
I am so sick and tired of the word unprecedented. Who would have known that when history arrived, it would look like this, take this shape, coagulate into this slimy, stale form. Who would have known that the war of our generation would have come so quietly to arrest us like this. Here we are, facing down the invisible enemy; it has arrived, we are tense, our backs ache, yet we cannot move.
Here we are, waiting, waiting, locked in this neverending game of chicken.
J
#2048| I am not a robot
It’s been a very odd and solitary month, you guys, one spent mostly closeted in my room in Manhattan for two weeks, then, punctuated by a brief interlude in the air, in a temporary service apartment in Singapore, under quarantine, and now, back home, shuffling between a makeshift study and a makeshift bed, living underwater in new york time as the rest of singapore continues on GMT+8.
It was with this sense of cotton mindedness that I came to the sign-in page of my blog today, thinking to myself that i must write something, but not knowing what. For some reason, a few websites refuse to keep me signed in, the new yorker, the new york times, the paris review, and my own website, this page, jemmawei.com. All websites i pay to access (or in this case, host) and all of which boot me out unceremoniously after the session ends, requiring me to sign in again, and again, and again..
Anyway. Every time I come to jemmawei.com to sign in and write a post i need to verify my human status, tick the innocuous i am not a robot box, which i’ve never thought much about, but today i came to it and thought, what if instead of wallowing in this grumpy haze, this pandemic panic, i opened my mind up and sharpened my attention to every microscopic detail, saw each question posed as an opportunity for a prompt?
I am not, of course, saying that the same grey i am not a robot box is what inspired californian based writer Minyoung Lee. On the other hand, what a perfect balancing clause – i am not a robot, but make me one.
All of that to say that I read this wonderful short story today on Monkeybicycle, and now you can, too.
Make Me a Robot by Minyoung Lee
x
Jem
Camera Info
I shoot on a Nikon D750 with a 35f/1.8 lens, a Fujifilm x100v, or my Samsung Note 20 Ultra. Pictures are edited in Lightroom Mobile or VSCO