Lexical Gap No. 56: Shturmovshchina
October 2024 summary
I am in a liminal space.
I just spent the past ten days traveling throughout Korea and Japan with my mother (our annual trip) and my body doesn’t know what time it is. (It has also unfortunately been riddled by my usual post-travel plague.) I’m fortunate in that I sleep well enough to avoid jet lag for the most part, but until my true circadian rhythms catch up with me, I am lost in a bit of a hazy daze.
One of the joys of growing older for me is realizing that I am not just my mother’s child, but her friend. I am an adult now with my own life and no longer need to be actively parented, and when the pressure and friction of asserting personhood against parental guidance is gone, I find that I not only love my mother, but actively like her as a person. We have fun, the two of us. We travel well together; we seek the same experiences, we laugh, we give each other grace. We seek the novel and the new—her through food, me through visuals. Both Bear and my father would rather travel at a more leisurely pace than either of us, preferring the contemplative meditation of natural beauty rather than the constant stimulation of the unfamiliar and the unknown.
This time, my mother and I toured the east coast of Korea on a rather whirlwind trip through the Gyeongsang and Gangwon Provinces for GUARDIANS 4 research before jetting off to Tokyo. I let my mother guide me through Tokyo, our itinerary determined by the places she wanted to eat. We mostly stayed in Ginza and Shibuya this time,1 riding the Tokyo metro or else walking our shoes off, getting by on my mother’s schoolgirl Japanese. My mother grew up in Seoul and I spent my formative years in New York City, and both of us thrive in an urban environment, but the size and scope of Tokyo as a city is simply astonishing. The population of just Tokyo itself is bigger than the entire state of North Carolina (where I live now); if you include the population of the Tokyo metro area, it is practically the size of a small country at 40 million people and nearly 5200 square miles.
I miss big cities. I miss the scale and the people and the things to do and places to see. I moved to North Carolina for love, but I don’t know if I thrive here. I have a life here, and one that I love, but do I thrive? I don’t know. Sometimes Bear and I wistfully think back to our youth in NYC and London and dream a little about moving back (in the hypothetical scenario where we have fuck-it money), but then we joke about Castor and Pollux being too country bumpkin to live anywhere else.
But that is the nature of being an adult, I suppose. Our jobs and responsibilities must be balanced against our wants.
In this issue
1. JJ’s magical world
2. Lexical gap
3. This creative life
4. What I’m watching
5. What I’m playing
lexical gap: shturmovshchina 🧩
I am feeling incredibly called out by this right now.
this creative life ✍🏻
I never remember how essential travel is to my creative process until I am actually traveling. It is an immense privilege to do any of this, and I don’t take it for granted. As much as I despise tedium and boredom, I actually seem to flourish in the liminal spaces, when I can’t do anything but dream. Bits and pieces of GUARDIANS 4 shimmered before me as I journeyed through Korea, vivid in ways they had not been before. I am never more present or more creative than when I am simply experiencing. Not everything must have a purpose, nor must I always be productive; there is joy in being witness and simply being.
what i’m watching 📺
I was on two very long flights to and from Korea and Japan, so I had a lot of time to watch movies. One of my favorite things about flying is that time seems to exist outside of its usual flow, and something about being in a liminal space without access to internet allows me to consume media in a different way.
Suzume. Makoto Shinkai’s work can be a bit hit or miss for me, but when I saw my flight had his latest film available, I knew I had to watch it. I didn’t love it as much as Kimi no Na Wa (although no movie of his may live up to how much I loved that one), I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t about a romance in the way I had feared. It’s a story about an orphaned young woman finding herself and coming to terms with her mother’s death. I even got a little sniffly.
7 Days War. A cute little coming-of-age anime movie about a group of teens squatting in an abandoned mine processing facility (I know, I know it sounds weird). I found this one a little shallow, but a pleasant enough way to spend some time.
Citizen of a Kind. This is apparently based on a true story of a South Korean woman who brought down a Chinese voice-phishing scheme. I really enjoyed this one, which was equal parts thrilling, funny, and heart-warming.
Paprika. I love Satoshi Kon’s work, but I had never gotten around to watching his last film. It is trippy af but in a way that’s very much up my alley.
Inside Out 2. I was admittedly a bit skeptical about Inside Out needing a sequel (and I maintain it doesn’t), but this was a cute little look into what puberty is like for young girls. It doesn’t reach the emotional heights of the first film, but I liked it.
Late Night with the Devil. This movie had a lot of things going for it I liked—the aesthetics, the stylistic choices, etc.—but I frequently have problems with horror rooted in the supernatural in that I rarely find it actually frightening. The buildup in the first two acts was a bit too slow and the ending, while pretty good, didn’t pay off in the way I wanted.
what i’m playing 🎮
After TEN LONG YEARS, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has finally been released. RIP my productivity. I haven’t decided who to romance yet; I tend to let myself see who organically catches my interest on my first playthrough. To my surprise, I’m leaning toward Harding, who gets adorably flustered when you flirt with her. If nothing else, the Dragon Age franchise has shown me that I have a type—awkward with absolutely no rizz. Broody? Nah. Blustering? YEAH.
Dareth shiral,
Last year we traveled to Japan with Bear and my father as well, and we went to Kyoto and Osaka as well as Tokyo.