a Traveling Dragon/Letters/on Decolonizing/on Generational Trauma/on Harm & Reciprocity/on Praxis/the Cycle of the Seasons

letters to my family: II

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graffiti on a concrete wall in multiple languages, in the colors of Palestine

I’m kind of in a mood today. is it the upcoming new moon in Cancer or is it an energetic Sabbat hangover?! ugh

dear family,

Two specific things are on my mind and one of them is a very old wound and the other one is a recently developed piece of angst. Let’s talk about the second one!!

I think y’all know how much I am enjoying the Thai BLs I watch in particular, although it’s possible that it’s not obvious that it is extra exciting and somewhat thrilling to be in Thailand–in Bangkok–which is the place they are filmed, where most of the actors live, and where there are fan events happening every week. I live in a constantly fluctuating state of the possibility of seeing one or a handful of them every time I leave the house. I don’t go to the bigger malls yet, but when I do I will be trying to go on days when there are fan events scheduled.

Recently I had a wonderful but brief solo vacation to Vietnam, which is less than two hours’ flight away from Bangkok, and right now some of my most favorite actors are literally in Vietnam and judging from the airport photos (I know, I KNOW), some of which they posted, it looks like they took the same airline and probably the same flight that I did. TWO WEEKS LATER THAN ME. AIEEEEEEEEEEE

I’ll be fine, I’m just having some ~* feelings *~ about it.

so the first thing, yeah? the old childhood wound? it’s about war.

Specifically, it is about being a teenager and having my conservative family of origin war- and fear-mongering constantly because the US was entering into what would be called the Gulf War. Jim 1technically my father, I don’t like giving him the title because it’s a sign of respect and I am being intentionally disrespectful would turn the volume up on talk radio so that he could hear it no matter what room he was in, and it scared me badly. I still trusted him to tell me things that were true, and everything he was afraid of and therefore angry or paranoid about, he passed that along to the rest of us. I grew up terrified of war. I thought for sure it would affect us in the ways that it actually does affect people who live in the SWANA region 2South West Asia North Africa of the world, but it doesn’t affect the contiguous US geographically and probably never will. I spent my teens and young adulthood afraid of something that would never happen to me personally, as if that fear was reasonable; meanwhile I was never told that this is an entirely reasonable fear for people my exact age in a different part of the world. I was never told that we–the war machine that is the US–were actively causing this harm to those people. I grew up thinking that I was a victim, not understanding yet that I was part of a legacy of victimizers.

And so now that the US has, once again as always, taken it upon itself to cause immense harm to people in Iraq, it is an awful reminder to me of the harm I once believed was justified. That others still believe is justified. And I don’t want to let the war machine of the United States off the hook by using a neutral pronoun, either. Many choices, some made by us in my generation, some made by people in different kinds of power, all of them made by someone with enough privilege to be afforded the luxury of a choice, have led us to this place and will continue to lead us to this place. We will always have blood on our hands and in our mouths.

I have started watching the news again. Because I cannot be unaware of what is happening, and even though the sound of his voice makes me want to scream, I have to hear from his own mouth what the orange deathmachine is saying, because even if it’s a speech someone else wrote, he is using his voice to communicate it. When atrocities are being done in my name, I should know which carefully phrased statements are being made about them.

*topic change screech* I haven’t seen a ghost yet

Listen, y’all know I love paranormal and metaphysical shit. You know that about me. So you’re probably not surprised that I’m disappointed that I have not seen (or heard) any ghosts in Thailand yet.

Maybe it’s because our rental house here is in a village and everyone is pretty close together, so if ghosts are making noise it’s probably blending into all the other noise. However, I am personally disappointed in my lack of woogity 3this is our family & friend group’s term for paranormal/metaphysical shit adventures so far. I will have to try harder to be in places where there might be ghosts. Except not in a dumbass kind of way.

a handful of things I’m extremely into right now:

Being in new places and experiencing new things has enriched my personal collection of things that bring me joy. Here are a few new ones:

snacks & convenience stores

One of my new favorite things to do is buying a handful (or an armful) of snacks at a convenience store–a 7-Eleven or a Circle K–and shove all of them into my bag except one, which I will open, and eat as I’m walking around. I did this with an ice cream sandwich while I was walking through the Old Quarter in Hanoi recently because 1) I needed a boost to my blood sugar so I could get where I was going, and 2) I needed a visible reason to be ignoring people who were eagerly trying to get customers for the roadside restaurant and bar tables. I had no idea that walking down an alley with an ice cream sandwich in my hot little hands, swinging my arms and dodging motorbikes and other people also walking, would be my new favorite thing, but it is.

I’ve finally learned that single serving snacks are not some kind of sick joke (I used to always buy the ‘family size’ bag of Doritos so that I could have Doritos for at least most of a week if I was careful), but in fact it’s a beautiful thing to be taking such enjoyment in the moment that you celebrate it by getting an armful of whatever looks yummy at that point in time, and then you eat all of it. Perfection.

layered tank tops

My personal style has always been very influenced by the clothes habits I had in the mid 90s to mid 2000s, which consisted of oversized plaid flannel shirts, baggy boyfriend jeans, low-rise cargo pants, stompy boots, layered tank tops, and band t-shirts over long sleeves. It has been decades of sadness where I could not find any of these clothing items any more because they were out of style, and even the secondhand shops didn’t have them any more. I accidentally rediscovered layering my tank tops while I was in Vietnam, because I kept sweating and sweating and in a haze of air conditioning after probably the second shower of the day, I put two thin tank tops on at once and suddenly remembered that I used to do this on purpose all the time.

Next up: find out if my constant search for baggy streetwear-style pants will be successful. I promise I will update you if I find something good.

ramen and eggs

I didn’t know that ramen actually TASTES GOOD. At least, it tastes good here, even though it’s packaged and not freshly made; Vincent taught me how to add a few things that make it even better, including but not limited to:

  • mixing some of the hot pasta water into the oil & spice packet mix
  • melting a slice of packaged cheese with the just-drained hot ramen noodles and spices
  • a generous squirt of other sauces (current favorite combo is gochujang sauce and some japanese mayo)
  • an egg, either overeasy or scrambled

SPEAKING OF EGGS, in Thailand there are so many beautiful and delicious eggs, and I’m eating so many eggs right now. I love eggs. I don’t love eggs in the United States because they have made me feel sick for decades now. I guess that’s a US problem because that doesn’t happen here. Go figure.

I love y’all. I miss y’all. how are you doing?

I want to hear all about it.

xox,
Nix

epilogue:

Welcome to the hell we’re living in
And the ending of the world, we’re witnessing
You can cry for help, no one’s listening
No, no one’s listening
Welcome to the hell we’re living in
And the overexposure’s sickening
You can cry for help, no one’s listening
No one’s listening, so listen in

Watch the stars walk the red carpet
Watch the cops shoot the wrong girl in her own apartment
Become a slave to the free market
Where you pick up the gun or become the target
Watch the downfall, watch the closing credits
It’s over, forget it
You know where it’s headed, straight to the gutter
Watch as the winter warms up like summer
Watch it all through your new smartphone
With a battery mined by a child in a war zone
Then pretend to be ignorant, watch the cognitive dissonance
Watch the court get stacked (Stacked), the bad guy win (Win)
Watch, ’cause you’re looking at the mess you’re in
This phone is a mirror, and I am just a reflection

–selection of lyrics from BRAINROT by grandson [watch the music video]

I want to say something here after these remarkably upsetting lyrics–it does feel like this right now for a lot of us. It feels like we’re constantly having to consume things even if we don’t want to. It feels like we are screaming and nobody hears us. It feels like when other people are screaming, nobody cares. It feels like the whole world is upset and at the same time like no one will do a damn thing. And I just want to say: if I care, and if you care, and if we are doing at least SOMETHING to undo this disease of harm and exploitation that we were all born into, we are going in a better direction.

If I care and I’m listening, and if you care and you’re listening, then how can we say nobody’s listening?

featured image is a photo by Ash Hayes on Unsplash

Footnotes

  • 1
    technically my father, I don’t like giving him the title because it’s a sign of respect and I am being intentionally disrespectful
  • 2
    South West Asia North Africa
  • 3
    this is our family & friend group’s term for paranormal/metaphysical shit
a Traveling Dragon/Letters/on Chosen Family/on Dramas I've Watched/the Cycle of the Seasons

letters to my family: I

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Ash cat sitting in the catio in the sunshine

explainer: I have needed a better format to talk about my travels and wanderings and suddenly had the idea to write some of my updates as letters, since all of my family and I are not all in the same place at the same time right now. I am always missing some of them, and I am always wanting to tell them things. maybe this will help me with that.

dear family,

I’m here in Thailand and most of you are in Australia and various other places. I miss you all a LOT. When I think about it too much, it’s too heavy and I start to tear up, like right now. I hope you know that every experience I have is immediately filtered into a list of things I want to tell you about.

Y’all know that I visited Vietnam recently (you saw the pictures and read my real-time group chat messages), but there are some details I will share more about since I didn’t have time to express all of it at the time. You know how I am, I take days and weeks to think through something for long enough to understand enough about it that I feel like I can share it with others.

I think in my next letter I will be able to talk more about what it was like to visit Vietnam and what I feel like I am keeping with me from that experience. I recorded a series of voice notes about it and I’ll use those to help me organize my thoughts later.

in the tropics

I keep forgetting that I’m staying in the tropics. The weather is tropical. The humidity and expected rainfall and the insects and reptiles and birds and plants, all tropical. Every time I go outside and am like, “wow it’s really fucking humid out here,” I have a delayed face-palm moment. I guess you can take the dragon out of Michigan but you can’t easily take Michigan out of the dragon, because my pasty-white cold-weather body is still gauging atmospheric weather data against all the decades of Michigan summer humidity and heat. Which is to say: it does not compare.

The humidity here feels like, to me, if you’ve gone into a bathroom where someone else was already running a very hot shower and the air was full of hot steam humidity. It feels like you could almost swallow it, it’s so thick sometimes. And any smells at all that are in the air are very apparent because they hang in the water droplets and you can almost taste them. Which is a little gross, especially because there is enough air pollution that the air often smells bad.

Sometimes I look out the window in the late afternoon and I see the pattern of clouds across the silvery sky and I think to myself, being here feels like being in a place where the sun is always a few hours away from setting, but it never really does. It does get dark — when the sun does set, it gets dark really quickly — but at two in the morning, there are birds that start singing. I don’t know why they’re up at 2am, but if I haven’t fallen asleep by then, it’s pretty difficult to get to sleep until they stop talking. Maybe it’s partly the light pollution; I’m sure that away from the city lights, it’s probably pitch black outside in the early morning hours. But here in Bangkok, even in the suburban areas away from the heart of the city, it’s light enough to read a book all night long. Even though my curtains are drawn, my bedroom is never fully dark. I’ve grown accustomed to it now and I don’t need my eye mask all the time to sleep, but for five or six weeks it was difficult to manage.

Yesterday Bee and I went to do banking and grocery errands, and discovered that one of the vine-y plants in the yard has shot out a single vine that is probably about seven or eight feet long now, growing directly toward the house, crawling across the tiled area where you’d park a car if you had one. (Thank goodness I don’t need to try and drive here, I would never get anywhere I was going because I’m not good at driving directly into traffic in the way most people do here.) The plants grow so quickly during this rainy season that it’s extremely apparent that plants are living things. It might be relatively slow motion, but that vine went from nothing to almost touching the wall of the house within a day or so.

Back to the humidity — even walking in the mall where there is air conditioning everywhere, if I walk too fast (which I tend to do without consciously realizing it), I end up sweating down the backs of my legs. The first time it happened, I was standing in line at the store to get a Thailand SIM card, and I was new enough to the environment that I could not figure out at first why there was a trickle of water sliding in a ticklish way down the back of my calf. My best advice: wear loose pants or shorts, bring your water and drink it, take breaks, and don’t do large bursts of activity in the middle of the day when it’s hottest. Even if you’re inside an air conditioned building. Additional advice: wear cotton or linen or maybe silk, because if the fabric covering your body isn’t breathable you’re going to feel sick a lot sooner.

how I’m occupying my time: Thai BLs, kpop, and language learning

I am still watching Asian dramas, and my current watchlists are almost entirely Thai BLs. There are some really good ones that were recommended to me by Ash, and I’ve also been working my way through dozens that I am finding as I comb through tags on Instagram and YouTube, and following links on MyDramaList and the extremely helpful World of BL website. I recently finished, among others: Not Me and The Eclipse, both of which tenderized me emotionally. Both of those dramas are in a small handful of things I’ve watched that give me the feeling of witnessing a great and terrible truth: something that I have also experienced, something that I crave, something that is deeply true, something that is heartbreaking, something that is worth sacrificing for. I don’t know how to describe this using one or two words. I just know how it makes me feel.

If anyone thinks Thai BLs are only fluff, just wait for the gut punch when you finally watch one that hits you directly in the place your heart already aches.

this month’s kpop is almost Too Much but that won’t stop me

When I’m not working on logistics for the family, I’m listening to my monthly playlist, which this month is top-heavy with new music from ENHYPHEN (DESIRE: UNLEASH), Stray Kids (Hollow), and ATEEZ (GOLDEN HOUR: Part.3). If you’re a Spotify person, you can follow those links to the albums there, and in the sidebar here on my website you’ll see my current On Repeat playlist which right now is going to include a lot of this new music.

catch me learning Welsh, Mandarin, and Thai all at the same time (I mean, I’m trying to)

I recently stopped using Duolingo after over 600 days of continuous practice. I started out learning Cymraeg (Welsh), and shifted to Mandarin about a year ago, but I realized that I do not have even the slightest bit of conversational literacy in either language, which I think is because of the way that Duolingo approaches learning. Which is to say, I am not learning anything much.

I started using the Hanly app to help me learn the hanzi (Chinese characters) because I couldn’t understand them at all in Duolingo, and after about a month I already understood a few fundamentals so well that I was able to read some characters based only on my memory; which was one more reason to drop Duolingo, because something that takes an average of 30-40 intensive learning minutes a day but doesn’t result in practical understanding is not worth keeping.

There are other reasons I decided not to use Duolingo going forward, including their disappointing decision to stop developing the Welsh language course and discontinuing working alongside the National Centre for Learning Welsh. I don’t like their use of AI in the context of language learning, especially since so much of how we understand and use language is contextual and subjective, which AI can’t replicate.

in conclusion, I have lunch to eat and chores to do

By the time I’ve finished editing a photo and posting this, it’ll be past lunch time, but right now I need to eat and help with chores. Even when the world is topsy-turvy or literally burning, I still have the privilege of having food that I can eat for lunch, and we still need to keep the cat fluff cleaned up, so off I go.

xox,
Nix

epilogue:

I’m watching Feud, which is a currently-airing Chinese historical drama (high fantasy), starring Joseph Zeng and Bai Lu. This is the end credits song, 对你说 (Say to You), sung by Joseph Zeng. It’s so delicate and heartbreaking.

featured image is a photo I took of Ash cat in our sunny catio yesterday afternoon

a Traveling Dragon/on Mental Health/on Queerness/the Cycle of the Seasons

how can we know how precious it is?

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how can we know how precious it is

I’m not drunk. I can’t really get drunk because thanks to my chronic illnesses (I think) the hangover migraine happens before I’ve had a chance to realize I had too much. I’m as many drinks in as I can get right now and I’m rationing the rest of my liquor anyway. It would be nice to have a drink after dinner tomorrow since our grocery errands aren’t until Tuesday, so I’ll save enough for a little nightcap after my ramen tomorrow night.

It’s the first day of Pride month. It’s June. This month is absolutely flooded with emotions for me, grief the chiefest among them. And it’s full of magic as well. The solstice is this month, traditionally in Path of Light on the 21st, although I know other traditions follow the astrological date each year, so it might not be the 21st for you this time. I grew up in the northern hemisphere so for me, and here in Thailand even though I’m so close to the equator, it’s still north of it, so it will be Litha on June 21st. The summer solstice. Midsummer. The longest day, the shortest night. The one day a year with an abundance of Light. In the times before I found Path, this was the Sabbat when I decided I would follow the path of druidry. (And I wasn’t wrong, it’s just that it’s also witchcraft; a bonus, if you will; what I actually wanted, if you must be specific)

And six days later, the anniversary of a very hard day. Grief grows and shifts and changes as the years go by, and this year it hurts just as much but there are other colors I can see now also.

The year that the supreme court in America legalized gay marriage in June — whether or not that stays true — is the same year my two oldest kids, young teenagers at the time, were staying with family that I used to consider my most important other than my kids, and they fumbled it so badly that I can never forgive them in this lifetime. How can I forgive anyone that was part of the reasons my kids didn’t want to exist in the world any more?

June is both glory and grief for me. It is a bright light in the night sky, a fierce scream of existence and belonging, and it is a portent of things to come. We are here, and we are too few. We are not as many as we should be. We love and we cry and we grow and we sing and we become who we are. We are here until we are not. This is the first year since the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020 that I feel like I have anything to say at all, or anything to feel at all, other than numbness and distant pain.

Is there anything so beautiful?

I love the month of June and I feel such agony about needing to live through the month of June. Sometimes I want to die when it’s June. But I am still alive, and I will still be here in July, and right now it is June, and I must dance through this month even if it tries to kill me, because I am here, and we are here, and we should live as our brilliant beautiful selves, if we can.

it’s June and I’m in the Southeast Asia-Pacific.

I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt and worrying that the rain is going to leak into the house we’re renting. I’m pale as fuck with a snake tattoo and red curly hair hoping that I can be a respectful visitor to this country that’s been one of the best experiences of my life. I’m trying to learn Thai, I’m using Google Translate all the time, I’m stumbling over saying sa-wat-dii ka and remembering to put my hands together at the right position in front of my nose and bow a little and try to smile like I mean it even if I can’t understand everything as well as I want to. I’m recognizing words and repeating phrases like the mimic I am and making notes with the correct accent marks so that I can study them again later.

I can’t read yet, but that doesn’t matter. There is a brief surprising kinship between speakers of different languages when you laugh at yourself for making a mistake and the person there with you laughs too. Laughing at ourselves seems to be a universal signal for ‘I know I messed that up but I was trying to do it right,’ and in the interactions I’ve had, that’s been more than good enough. Almost all of the Grab drivers (that’s the taxi service I always use here) speak a little English, and even if I forget how to say kop-kun at the end of the ride, they’ve said thank you in English and I have to laugh at myself for thinking I am the only person learning how to communicate with other people.

Several weeks ago one of my Grab drivers asked if I was here to teach in the school up the road, and even though I’m not and said so, I indulged myself in a brief daydream about what that would be like, and I am a little upset that I don’t have the credentials necessary to do something like that. What an incredible experience that would be. I love interacting with and being around and teaching middle-school and high-school aged teenagers, and for a few moments I imagined how much I wold enjoy it. And then I remembered I don’t have a degree (yet?). And that’s okay right now.

in this house there are people I fiercely love.

My family is still spread across several continents, and even though it hurts my heart sometimes, it’s what our reality is at the moment, and that isn’t such a bad thing. Do we miss each other? Of course we do. Is it the end of the world? I think I can say that literally no it is not. There are other ends of the world and this is not that.

I have cat-specific allergy reactions so I need to be careful of how I interact with them, but our four beautiful asshole cat babies who we love no matter what are here with me and one of my kids. This house is theirs and we’re their roommates. We keep them fed and housed and keep the litter boxes clean and smelling nice and I buy the toys and catnip and sometimes I toss the stuffed fish across the floor or twirl the ribbon on a stick. Every time I leave my room, Pippin yells and yells until I pet her and pet her and pet her. Every time I go downstairs, Merry and Ash and Maisy appear at the bottom of the steps waiting to be fussed. Every time I open the fridge, Merry needs to look inside it. Every time I make a peanut butter sandwich on the counter top, Merry needs to know what I’m doing up there. Every time I run the dry food dispenser for the cat food on the landing, Ash needs me to understand that if I don’t also do that with the downstairs food dispenser then she is going to riot. Maisy just looks at me with her huge green eyes and trills at me and I fold.

My daughter here with me is nineteen and will soon be twenty. We count days between grocery trips — how many packets of ramen do we need between now and next Tuesday? Are you going to eat two of those tonight? Do we have enough eggs? Will we run out of butter this week, do you think?

Mundanity is a gift.

it’s June 1st and it’s Pride month and I’m not alone and neither are you.

We’re all here together, wherever ‘here’ is, whatever that means.

I hope you are okay right now. I hope you will be okay later too. I hope there are people that love you.

xox,
Nix

epilogue:

Secure yourself to heaven
Hold on tight, the night has come
Fasten up your earthly burdens
You have just begun

In the ink of the night I saw you bleed
Through the thunder I could hear you scream
Solid to the air I breathe
Open-eyed and fast asleep
Falling softly as the rain
No footsteps ringing in your ears
Ragged down worn to the skin
Warrior raging have no fear

Secure yourself to heaven
Hold on tight, the night has come
Fasten up your earthly burdens
You have just begun

I’m kneeling down with broken prayers
Hearts and bones from days of youth
Restless with an angel’s wing
I dig a grave to bury you
No feet to fall
You need no ground
Allowed to glide right through the sun
Released from circles guarded tight
Now we all are chosen ones

— selection of lyrics from Secure Yourself by Indigo Girls, one of the first songs that told me being queer was a many-faceted experience of joy and grief and that it was mine

Secure Yourself by Indigo Girls: link to listen on Spotify

featured images is a photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash