Enamel Fall Candles in Kitchen Spice (mint) and Pumpkin Spice (orange), $5 each at Target. The apartment is just perfect for fall now, paired with twinkle lights and a few pumpkins. Masks the smell of dog accidents, too.
Stevie Nicks, particularly her single “If You Ever Believe.” Been watching one of my favorite Halloween favorites, Practical Magic. The perfect mood and aesthetic for a magical month.
I have my eyes set on a monogramed vest at Marley Lilly. I’ll be heading out east for a sister weekend trip to Rockport and Salem, Massachusetts, and if there’s not an ounce of prep in my step, the excursion will feel off. For not having anything personalized, I gotta feel fancy.
Confession: I scaled myself over the summer and found to my dismay I’m twenty pounds heavier than what my state ID says. I started walking to work, I hydrated better, and am currently attempting intermittent fasting. Besides morning coffee or tea, I hydrate the rest of the day with just Hint water since my company stocks the kitchen to the heavens with it. Blackberry is the best, the sweetest and most subtle. Forget La Croix, techies– reach for the Hint bottles!
My birthday is less than a month away. To save on Massachusetts, there will be no big celebration at home other than a delightful small tea party for which I plan to wear this flower crown. Get it here on Wish.
Somehow I rediscovered Tuck Everlasting. The children’s novel by the late Natalie Babbit remains as fascinating and magical now as when I first read it in 6th grade. A simple adventure with such a deep and tragic theme about life and immortality that’s really relatable– and still a better love story than the eerily familiar Twilight saga. It’s set in the late summer but the lovely descriptions of the woods and time period make for a relaxing and charming fall read.
I find myself listening to the same music that I had been listening to a year ago. The Colourist, Walk the Moon, Bastille, TATE, Oasis, Elliott Smith. It’s the week before the last of January. January isn’t of any great importance on a given year, except this same time last year I was just coming into the city.
So every time one of these songs come on, everything around me feels anew. And when things feel new, somehow they’re more spectacular than they should appear. The 9 AM trek from my apartment three blocks down to the bus. The stream of dance indie hits that serenade the air of the cabana-themed bar where you’ve crashed Juan’s 40th birthday bash before. The radio hits you subsequently hear on the Jambox of the office parties on a rainy Friday. Or in the Uber heading home from across town. There’s an endless playlist of these these tunes that are hard to name right now as I sit but they’re not just tunes– they’re amazing memories, too.
And when I hear one I compare my current disposition to what I had imagined before the year behind me had even unfolded. I was excited, eager, ready to be out every night and working hard in the day to return peacefully back into the night that was San Francisco madness. But it seems that sadly, the madness wore off. There were times I wasted a day in bed or moods that kept me from actually making out to live shows in the Mission in favor of just sitting warm listening to the radio in the kitchen. I was forgetting that within these comforts of a home in San Francisco, there was more to be done. The worst part is, some of these new songs from this past year will only remind me of those lackluster moments in this time. I hear the music, but there’s no longing to dance.
But almost perfectly, a year after this big move, I was suddenly pulled from my back against the wall. An expedited envelope from Canada on my desk, inside containing one of the most beautifully written and thoughtful letters of gratitude, from one ambitious friend to another. This friend no longer lives in the city but he will return in the spring, and more driven than his last time. Here and now, though, on this desk, he wrote of a funny tale. Of a guy who made it past unforeseen obstacles in school and opportunities to sit atop one of the highest points in a city nearly 3,000 miles from home. His dance was coming to an end, the music seeming like the closing act. But here on this 40th floor there was someone who seemed, despite her own feelings of drab contentment, ready to take the stage. Any moment, any chance to get out there and still prove something.
“She shook me awake from my comfort and satisfaction and reminded me that I wanted more,” the letter proclaims, “Paris Kim is a writer, and great writers inspire.”
Remember to dance, because there is always someone watching your every move. Keep in mind that where you feel lacking, your dreams are more fulfilled than the dreams of others. I may say I am a writer, but for awhile, “great” was a lovely, fleeting dream. A new year begins, and a greater pursuit of the greater things in this city shall commence and not without the sounding trumpets of glorious songs to keep me motivated that the future is scary, uncertain– and for those reasons, the best thing I’ve got.
So I’m listening to all of these songs again, on a Sunday back from Brunch, new ring– and outlook– in hand. The music you move to now was the one that moved you forward from the start and shall keep you moving along to something bigger than now.
A few days before my birthday I had gone to dinner with a Russian guy. In the backyard twilight of Zazie Bistro and just deciding on having a beer rather than wine to make him feel less unrefined, he opened up on a rather beautiful tradition of his homeland. We’d met at a Halloween party thrown at my old startup I’d worked for, and a second Halloween party after, found ourselves seated across each other learning about our mutual acquaintances and what brought him from the East Coast to San Francisco. The beers had just come and we made a toast. Not just any concise, watered-down cheer. I can’t remember what words were said, but he said them with much effort and all heart. That was the way Russians did toasts. To recite good luck kisses through speeches and express ultimate gratitude given this moment for a single, fruitful reflection. Cheers, and to what? Even if you couldn’t exactly wrap words around your feelings, the rambling was enough of sincerity.
Now it’s the day after Thanksgiving, and as I reflect back on the quiet, tame little holiday that was had with my own family back in my old home, here in the cold suburbs of Concord, what would I have said when we’d all tap glasses over the roasted turkey? In all sincerity, that reflection could go so many ways. The obvious: to another blessed year where my family is together and my grandfather is doing better in health (not to mention having Lion, the biggest and most gentlemanly Rottweiler I’d ever been around, present); to the unexpected, for the job I now hold as a copywriter and content manager for a leading Ecommerce startup, as well as the extended stay at the studio in Pacific Heights that I’ve come to love and grow uniquely as a young woman approaching her mid-twenties. And then there’s the unconditional, for those who stick through my weird moods and awkwardness and crazy, sometimes inconsiderate notions. The people who stick around from high school and college and those who came into my life because of those things since feeling my most confident and outgoing at work. In those two weeks since I first thought about serious toasting, I wish still at times that the young man from Moscow had been one of them, too.
It’s because of these events from the year that I shall give this personal toast now to myself, a silly one. Here’s to the most unlikely of motivators that few have the pleasure to experience as I do: the songs about Paris.
Only their titles say my name– to whom they sing about or why they’re titled so is at the discretion of the songwriters. But music has moved me and my writing in ways that other medium hasn’t, and it’s a miracle any songs with my name should exist. It’s still surreal sitting here, listening to these few songs as if I’m alone with my conscience; just as visceral and warm feeling as it had been when the guy I crushed on in high school wrote a song about me called “Paris” too and posted the lyrics to his band’s MySpace page. Granted it was a comical summary of my rejection letter from UC Berkeley, but any nod from your crush is a step in the right direction and ego-boost– you’re doing something right to get noticed by someone… even if that someone wasn’t your first-choice university.
I feel indebted to these vaguely titled songs for being this personal conscience come to life in music. They tell me, every time I listen to them, not to worry, no matter the situation. So for now, maybe I’m alone again, not at my lowest but still feeling disappointed. Nine months in and I’ve found happiness in all ways except for one. But keep going, it’s just one less obstacle that maybe I’m getting closer to overcoming. With my weirdness and supposedly drastically different interests that didn’t work for some, there’s new barriers I must learn not to put up from these misadventures. Maybe it seems like it couldn’t get any worse, but it could be that the worst has passed. And that is where I’ve got Magic Man and Grace Potter, their tunes helping me cope in a way only I can really feel. Songs about me, my personal anthems that belong to no other soul. In their heavy baselines and playful piano riffs at intervals, this is enough to move anyone in need of feeling new and uplifted– not a waste of a date or two, or five.
And in the future to come– well I trust myself now backed with these songs to do only what suits me and no one else. Sitting Tuesday night at the twinkle-lit bar of the Buddha Lounge, the bartender Mark stopped his game of dice to serve up my Jack and Coke and raw advice, adding more fuel to these newly-found sentiments. Chinatown’s fairest dive served up the simplest reflection that no matter what choices you make, always be happy you made them. Should anyone else make dictate your life and emotions, you’ll spend the rest of your life blaming them for what you could have avoided; with their choice you come to hate them.
“And if you make your own bad choices,” my uncle, already on a second glass of scotch, went on, “you hate yourself!”
Me, Mark, my uncle’s girlfriend, and my sister laugh. “Not what I was going at,” Mark said, “I say, you make your own choices, that is not hate. No, your bad choice is a lesson that you never forget. That you learn from it.”
I did learn from the shortcomings of these last two weeks. I let myself get vulnerable at the expense of some hope for final complete happiness in all realms of my life. But I shall have to wait. Learn from this. Make a better, reserved decision for whenever the next opportunity presents itself. I feel that it won’t be terrible. And I still have those songs to reinforce this outlook. My name is Paris, Paris is weird and perhaps boring and neurotic. But there’s still something about this little woman, 24 years young and looking for new adventures on her own conditions. She’s not drastically different without reason. There must be someone who’ll be more than happy to resign themselves to these interests of hers, no matter how odd.
“Yes!” My uncle went on. “That’s right. You gotta bake your cake and lie in it.”
As this is the first bright Monday of the new year, nothing perks up your mood like some coffee! But if you’re already over this Monday (and perhaps just any other Monday as well) you might have slept in and coffee doesn’t cut it as you realize the clock’s almost at noon. So, let music be that next best pick-me-up!
Some of the songs I’m sharing here aren’t necessarily new tracks– it is only the 5th day of 2015 after all– but stuff I happened to come across when wanting some fresh stuff to get into. Namely, this is the unofficial playlist I’m writing Boys of America to. Youthful, stupid, and just hopeful sounding to me. Or just plain stupid. I welcome new music you might like to share with me in return!
Bleachers, “Rollercoaster”
Post-punk poppiness is what I get from Jack Antonoff’s project Bleachers. And it’s so damn catchy. I feel exactly like I should be driving on some desert highway or just running down the street as I push trashcans over. Or maybe that should be for the next song;
The Libertines, “Don’t Look Back Into The Sun”
The humor I want to tackle in Boys in America teeters on the lines of serious and The Inbetweeners, and this is the song I imagine is the anthem of these young men out in a new world trying to make it big. Just wreckless and a hot mess, not too far from Pete Dougherty. But having fun all the same! Plus I’ll always need some sort of British band in my life.
Walk the Moon, “Shut Up and Dance With Me”
There’s a pattern for upbeat dance stuff here, but hey, you gotta do what you need to do to get you through Monday and many more Mondays of this year! Why not off to a good start. Plus the music video is pretty funny and tacky. I feel bad for the 80’s era always taking the hit (not).
Hozier, “Take Me to Church”
On a more sober note, this song. I discovered Hozier after a friend in LA posted Instagram pics of his brilliant show a few months back when appropriately, he performed in a HUGE church. It was intriguing, and I’m glad this song’s everywhere because it is kind of cool and hits hard with a melodic chorus.
Nothing new. But it’s always great to latch onto new sounds at any time just to get your mind into a better place!
I’m not a fan of pop music. While I admit tunes are catchy and great to dance to on a Saturday night because it’s the only to song to which you can collectively act stupid with your friends in the bar, it’s meant to do that. Fun. Different from your personal music– more what speaks to you, and on a deeper level that’s an uncharted territory only you as the listener are willing to explore and appreciate.
Maybe it’s cause I’m old or just a bad case of hipsterdom, but I’m rarely finding any new music I like these days. The most I’ll give is to the likes of Bastille and HAIM, but, really, that’s about it. The bands I listened to back in the late 2000s have all disintegrated or taken a more mainstream linear direction (even though this song is admittedly good). And then I’ve realized, it all coincides with how I write lately. Which is, scarcely. Back in those 2000s I wrote practically every day something towards my first big novel at the time, the creativity was just flowing pristine and undisturbed. I wasn’t alone in all of that, because there was Green Day, The Fratellis, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Franz Ferdinand, Muse, and The Bravery. They were all shelling out a shit ton of new albums and I was up and coming in my own musical adolescence to take them on– timing is everything, isn’t it? Their new and inviting sounds of alt rock invigorated my passion for writing, writing stories to which their songs would be the soundtrack. Not just the melodies, either, but the lyrics too, particularly with bands from England which I found to be delightfully full of stories about small-town run ins with the cops and coming home from uni to your best mate’s house party. British indie was something new in music for me I never realized before– social commentary at its simplest and dryly insightful. A young writer’s gold mine.
Now there’s no feeling I get when there is something new, or no particular song from the last 5 years I want to listen to as I sit here now.When all these bands started out, they were quite genuine in what they wanted to achieve, now I feel what they produce now is just something completely different altogether from what made me love them in the first place. The trick is just to keep writing I guess to what you know, what you love. Why try to search for something new from new stuff when you know the old had the fuel? If it inspired me then, it should still do so now–perhaps in new ways. You can’t hold music to one emotion; it’s a fluid and deep abyss that’s just there when you need it, when you need something happy or sad or pissed. It’s not gonna stand you up. That’s probably something I should learn from Matt, who’s such a classic rock junkie and refuses to listen to anything on the radio.
The past is torturous, but ultimately, it’s what makes you happy. Music helps relive those greatest moments intimately, more so than a basic photo might do, because it pinpoints those exact emotions. With any song we’ve fallen in love with, their sounds take us back somewhere, to a somber memory, to that exhilarated feeling that overcame us when we turned up the radio or knew what song the band would perform next when you saw them live in concert. Below is one of those sentiments. Picture the dark, it’s almost midnight and I’m in a car with my sister and her ex-boyfriend driving him back to his college dorm room in San Francisco. I sat in the front seat and somehow I got to listen to Favourite Worst Nightmare in the CD player, this song coming up as we coasted across the twinkles of the Bay Bridge lights and the city came into view.
And now, as I give this song another go, on a foggy day here at my desk at work, I wonder at what else just might spring from this oldie that means much more than a good melody.
WOMEN IN TELEVISION– There isn’t a better time than now to write for a young woman, thanks to two factors. The first, being that this world is now not without a significant variety of (good) coffee, and the other:
It’s nothing to ignore when it comes to screenwriting for television the Now, and especially when there’s an obvious shift in the roles of women on television. Women have become more complicated (and unique) on the tube because of weird and wonderful women writers who have been handed keys to the city and changed everything. As women on the big screen usually become iconic for their aesthetics, women on television have no heirs to put on necessarily– convicts, stressed political figures, machete-wielding zombie fighters, adorkable high school teachers, awkward black women, and broke post-grads. They’re not icons, they’re relatable.
In reading this month’s issue of Elle, which highlights these broad range of female characters and writers, I can’t wait to just write something. I particularly enjoyed the article that discusses the realism casting director Jennifer Euston looks for in her characters on shows like Girls and Veep. It’s the best motivation you can get as a writer– after all the key to great writing is just reading more.
WRITING LETTERS– I wrote letters two nights ago, and this morning. When was the last time you handwrote a letter? Me neither. So to get back in that groove, be patient. In being patient I mean to wait for that right work of art to come along: the perfect, quintessential stationery set for you. Keep your eyes out for one, because when you find it you’re ready to write. It also puts you in a good vibe to write a well-wishing letter for the New Year– clears your mind and all the good intentions you penned out affect you, too. The bitch of it all? Stamps. I don’t even know what the postage cost was or like, how many stamps come in a set to buy (ain’t nobody got time for that!).
TALKING TO STRANGERS is visibly the best bet for any story inspiration. Well, if a stranger is wanting to talk to you. And you shouldn’t be disinterested or obviously cold– we’re human beings, not robotic and apathetic. Even if you’re pissed, chances are strangers have been for a long time too, and they found someone who they think gives a shit about them or what they have to say. Of course it can be scary, unpredictable, unexpected– invasive. But believe me, you’ll both depart happy.
And the new Franz Ferdinand album is terrific! I had their last one on CD but I lost it. If you are attracted to someone, don’t lend them things.
I also stumbled upon this little musing of a quote:
stop for just one second.
think about all the people you’ve secretly had a crush on. all the people you’ve found attractive, but never said anything to. every stranger you’ve temporarily fallen in love with on public transportation. all the people you’ve dreamt of and thought of in the early mornings.
and now take a moment to realize that you have been this person for so many people… and you have no idea.
— Tumblr user spookyphoque
Near-midnight intrigue of this though means one thing: Valentine’s Day is approaching at work, and I’m starting to feel the sentimental affects of it.
These people can go die. In all their being, waiting around with T’s of Oasis and Jarvis Cocker to the Strokes in order to signify this hierarchy of taste and experience in line—it all means nothing, not to me. They’ve all paid the same amount, drove the same distance (I’m pretty sure of it), and all have no exception to the head of the line—ahead of me.
I’ve died and resurrected myself again, in every wandering thought I had in classes counting down to this moment and too weird that knowing now that this is the moment. It’s real, no longer an idle thought. It’s not even music anymore.
This is going to be a night.
Never could ask for a better birthday present, and I didn’t ask for Alyssa, Melissa, and Cat to be a part of this. But with three extra tickets in the package, had to put them to use. Had to make those girls’ lives worthwhile, too.
I’m not so mad once the line’s moving. I’m elated, grinning, my mind all over the place—my eyes scanning the passing cheap luggage hole in the wall or that gritty-looking strip club for some reason called The Crazy Horse. I’m feeling crazy, but not for the sights of the voluptuous. I’m feeling crazy amongst my friends, that close-knit crowd around me of people who only relate to me in the same mania—I feel it in the cold air that’s telling me someone’s just lit up a joint.
This isn’t just going to be a night anymore. I come to see this, just as I’m already in place to see one of the most significant bands in my life. At age sixteen, there’s not much room for definitive role models or icons—save those for the college conferences where they’ll be your guiding light. But you like to think you have role models, and cool ones at that. Arctic Monkeys were crazy. They were English. They must’ve been cool. The masses of shaggy heads and skinny jeans reaffirm this conclusion of mine.
I was always told a live performance was worse than what the CD already fed me, and I couldn’t argue back due to my inexperience with any. It would ruin my hearing if anything. I realize I am fine though, only burdened with a plump pair of yellow ear plugs Mom bought for each of us. I don’t want any more burdens, and I’m only sixteen. I want to lose everything. Lose myself. And I am feeling it, as the lanky bodies tighten around us and I lose the other girls in seconds. I get Cat back. If I wanted to lose myself I sure didn’t want to be alone with strangers!
The delightful smell of tequila floods the fresh air above, masking the dense sweat pouring from the masses as the lights dim. Is this a coincidence? All the senses turn upwards, to the air, the glowing electric stage, to the drum intro of “A Certain Romance,” the last song I played before the car took off from Concord hours before. I know it too well—it was a comforting sound to the new experience around me and my friend.
I don’t want these people to die anymore. I want them to live, jump, sing horribly along to the tracks being performed by four considerably hot English rockers before my eyes. Who’s really cool here? Them? These people I wanted to do away with not that long ago? I smell the tequila again as I turn my nose up for fresh air. Something here is fresh tonight.
A Week by the Bay 