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Category: Blog

For blog posts.

  • LESSON LEARNED

    You ever feel like you narrowly avoided something bad happening to you?

    I’ve walked that route back to my dorm a dozen times, but that night was the first time I ever felt like something was wrong.

    I’ve never been scared of walking at night. On guard, yes, but never frightened. That night I was scared out of my mind. Despite there being no one in my immediate vicinity, I felt like I was being watched the whole time. There’s this real distinct difference I’ll get when something has been manufactured by my imagination and paranoia vs. when something is real. I think my stomach started twisting because I could tell it was the latter.

    I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way before. It was a sobering feeling, all at once, I realized how foolish it was walking by myself at night when I had other (albeit limited) options. I started regretting it the second I crossed the street, and for that entire 20 minute walk, the feeling didn’t go away.

    Even two days later, I’m still deeply unsettled by that experience. It was like a weird sensation of alarm bells filled every inch of my body to warn me of my impending demise. I think what made it even scarier was, just that morning, I’d been extra appreciative of my life that day. That would be the perfect kind of irony to end a day on.

    You would be right to assume I prayed the whole time there, asking for mercy just one more time. I’ve done some stupid things but I’ve never regretted something more. Almost immediately I thought of my mom, how she would be devastated if something happened to me, and it only made me pray harder.

    I took the bus back. Even after all that it broke my habit of walking at night. I got scared straight, if you will. Perhaps I should feel some sort of care for my safety, not getting caught up in the complacency of protection time and time again.

    We serve a merciful God, one who sometimes ensures we don’t have to learn a lesson the hard way.

  • I GET IT FROM MY MOM

    My mother, too, is incredibly determined to find things once she gets fixated. According to her, the Lord took her those detective gifts and gave them to me twofold.

    My grandparents, I don’t think, have ever seen themselves young. Not adult young. Teenager young. Child young. I’m pretty sure they’ve never seen any pictures of themselves as children, and for the longest time, the youngest photo we ever had of them is from their wedding-honeymoon, where they were freshly turned 21.

    We’ve definitely tried to retrieve more, though. Often times it leads to nowhere, especially since the public usually doesn’t have the same level of access to archived physical things. Their graduating class even has a Facebook group dedicated to making a yearbook of their own, and you want to know why? The funny thing is, there are entire yearbook scans uploaded on the internet from their time at high school. And the sad part? The Class of 67, sandwiched between the misfortune of Classes 66 and 68, never got yearbooks due to a hurricane. Another subsequent hurricane many years down the line destroyed the beautiful watercolor rendition of my grandfather’s graduation photo. Out of the members of my immediate family, my mom was the only one to see it. We have never seen my grandparents any younger than twenty-one.

    On Friday night, I was browsing the obits for my own reasons, and then from there I get on the mental topic of my grandparents again. Then I’m opening an Incognito tab, and I’m searching for my grandparents again.

    By then, I’d already spent a few hours browsing yearbooks after I’d forgotten what year they graduated, but my heart picked up a little after I did the math. I accessed the yearbooks on that awful Classmates site using a temporary email, because they had a high-quality scan of the yearbook from 1965, the year they would’ve been freshman. I was scanning the names of homeroom pictures and praying that they attended school that day. Everything was arranged alphabetically, so I remember thinking that, if I didn’t see my grandma’s name, then they’re just not there.

    But the moment my eyes landed on her name, they snapped to the exact spot she was in, and I immediately recognized her. All the women in my family have the tendency to look the exact same throughout the years.

    I got excited, and I found my grandpa after that soon after. I literally couldn’t believe my eyes, that we’d be so lucky as to find their class photos- and in such high quality, too- in a perfectly preserved PDF file online.

    I emailed them to my mom as a surprise, and once she managed to find it in her inbox, she got up from the dinner she’d just sat down to eat to show them immediately.

    I wanted to be apart of the fun, too! So I called my mom up, and got to hear the exact moment they exclaimed, “What!” and saw the photos. It was a task we thought impossible, but after all these years, one of us finally managed to find my grandparents when they were still young adults themselves.

    My grandpa was sort of hidden in the dark, unfortunately, so there’s still no clear photo of him, but my grandmother was so cute! And now we can comparatively say that their offspring looks exactly like them, too!

    My mom said they just stared and stared and stared in amazement. I wonder what they were thinking of on their trip down memory lane.

    – – –

    It’s not often I get to make groundbreaking discoveries like that, but when I do, they’re always worthwhile! Last time, I found a short video clip of my mom back during her time in school, another one who seems elusive to the camera. I think that’s the familial disposition, though. All of us seem to avoid photography, not always on purpose. It seems to be a privacy thing.

    At least my kids are going to (sort of) have a collection of pictures from when I was a child. I currently boast the most photographs out of anyone in my family, and that’s exactly why I became their photographer, now. When they’re all gone, what am I gonna have to stare at?! That’s why it’s important to take photos in the moment! Now!

    Next up is seeing if I can locate any pictures of my mom back from her high school and/or college slash pre-me days, because she only ever started taking pictures after I was born. And now we’re also undertaking the monumental task of sifting through Air Force photos to see if my grandpa can be located. And I want to make (digital) watercolor portraits for the both of them to replace the ones they’ve lost. We have a lot of preserving history to be done!

  • I LOVE WIKICOMMONS

    You know what’s one of the best unrecognized sources for pictures? Wikimedia Commons. Or, as I like to shorthand it as, WikiCommons. God, it’s such a beautiful resource for images. An entire archive with no BS guessing games; you’re told right away by an indicator if an image is copyrighted or public domain.

    I think what I really love, though, is the nature of the photographs. Oftentimes, they aren’t staged or intentional. They’re contributed by people capturing moments in real-time. It makes everything feel a lot like a time capsule, like you’re viewing small moments across the globe, sometimes in unknown places. It’s all so natural. Plus, all the images are so…aesthetically pleasing to look at. I love it.

    Tonight I was working on an assignment and got sidetracked looking at archived photographs of my city. I browsed every catalogue year like it was going out of style. Sometimes I’d come across an image from 2008 or 2009, for instance, and I’d immediately recall a time where the buildings and everything in them did indeed look like they did on the pictures.

    In other news, I love how you can definitely see where Valve and the Left 4 Dead franchise were influenced from the real life graffiti after the flood. Playing L4D2 always gave me that impression, an article analyzing the storytelling through graffiti confirmed it, and now I can see the real life pictures from when these events were playing out, not just the faded ones that remain today.

    I love public domain materials. Yum.

    This is not an affiliated post. I just love Wikimedia lol ★

  • WHERE ARE ALL THE NORMAL SIMONES?

    This is funny: I used to almost never encounter my name in fictional media. My name is Simone, so it’s a familiar name, but just uncommon enough that you have to be reminded of it.

    The only time I’d ever really heard a character have my name was in the 2002 film S1M0NE (which, funnily enough, also happens to be the year I was born. I also have been meaning to see this film for years). The next time really caught me off guard, and it was while watching As Told By Ginger for the first time, and one of the minor characters featured heavily in a few episodes is also named Simone. That one was a nice, unexpected surprise, since I already adore that show and that gives me a way to connect with it more, lol.

    But lately, man. I don’t know what’s been going on- maybe it’s because I’m scrubbing the indie scene trail a bit more- but I’m getting that same coincidental, déjà vu experience I mentioned in my last post about the city: I’m starting to see my name everywhere.

    Not in recent stuff. That actually would be scary. But in stuff I’ve never encountered before, I’m finding my namesake in the most fucked-up characters in the line-up.

    The first movie was Loving Annabelle (2006). I literally don’t even remember how I heard of this movie; all I know is I was reading the description on Letterboxd, and BAM! Simone is a teacher who gives tongue to her student. Gross?!

    The next one is The Fan (1982). A disturbed girl confesses her love to the pop singer of her obsessions. He doesn’t love her back, she loses her mind! Wanna guess what her name is? You’re right!

    Those two are probably the worst ones. The other few were tame (one actor even had the combination of my and my mom’s given names as her full name, and it was very sweet to see), but mostly just consisted of me being caught unannounced by all these sudden appearances of that name.

    It seems my name has been doomed to be assigned to the most off-the-wall, basket head-cases you could ever dream of coming across. I thought the name was meant to be sophisticated or something!

    This post was typed up after midnight the day it was posted, as apart of the “After Midnight” series ★

  • I JUST CAN’T ESCAPE

    Lately, no matter where I turn, I keep encountering my hometown in some way.

    It’s all coincidental and, at first, unwanted, though now my feelings are conflicted. I’ll read Wikipedia summaries and find out the movie takes place there. I’ll read further down and find out it’s filmed there. I’ll open a video up and get jumpscared by the very distinct picture of the skyline. Earlier today I opened up a video on the inside of an in-flight Boeing 727-200 in 1992 for research and heard over the intercom that my city was their final destination.

    God, I just can’t leave. I’ll leave physically but it’s still there everywhere I turn, haha. I keep getting reminders of it everywhere I go. Even my college town architecturally resembles where I hail from. I didn’t even get the weird, disorienting feeling of being in a new environment back when I was a freshman. I just felt right at home.

    I’m not from a small town, so it’s not like I harbor any resentment for growing up in rural nowhere where you need a car to get around, but I understand what those small town kids feel when they say they want to get away. I wasn’t kidding when I said I want to move away for good.

    I have a deep disdain for this place. When I was younger, I always said I’d come back to give birth, visit my family, and die, but now I don’t even want to do two of those things anymore. I’ve even told my family repeatedly I’ll gladly relocate them to wherever they desire so they don’t have to deal with the city’s antics either. It’s like some weird caricature of itself, like some gross fleshy creature who’s heart is barely beating because of the beating it takes.

    Not like it’s even gonna be there to go back to, anyway. They predict the whole thing’s gonna be underwater by the time 2050 rolls around, so the place I used to call home may not even be around anymore. Good riddance.

    So I consider this just me getting a jump on things before they go all Atlantis. The only thing that’s ever going to drag me back to a place like that is the love I have for my mom. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even bother going back.

    I’m not the first to leave either, and I definitely won’t be the last. Every year more and more residents leave as tourists and transplants are favored by a corrupt city hall that would rather destroy homeless camps during high-volume seasons so tourists don’t have to know how bad it is. There used to be blatant favoritism to the transplants, but that place is engorging itself with so much greed that it doesn’t even listen to them anymore. It’s starting to treat them like the residents. You won’t get any real opportunity unless you either have money, or you leave. And that’s why so many locals opt to leave. We’re a dispersed, dying breed.

    I know I’ll miss it, in some weird way. We always do. I’m not the first to compare it to an abusive relationship, where you can’t recall any good but you still feel something for it, you know? I think it will move me at times, and it does. I miss the idea of it, more than anything. But what it used to be, back before it was transformed into the grotesque, caricatural pest on life-support it is today, has been gone even before I was born. I think it got washed away in the flood.

    This post flew way off course from where it was supposed to be. At first I was just going to joke around about my repeated encounters with my city everywhere I go, but I realize I never properly wrote this post up. I’ve had this in mind even before this blog was a thing. Maybe instead of trying to ignore the pattern of coincidences, but recognizing it for what it is, the random encounters will finally go away! A girl can dream!

  • FIRST WIKIPEDIA, THEN THE MILKMAN

    Do you ever go down ridiculous Wikipedia rabbit holes? I treat that page like it’s TV Tropes sometimes.

    It started off with an innocent enough search- I think I was searching up uphappy movie endings?- and I immediately got distracted by the title of one particular film, and then started reading about my city’s history (where the movie was filmed), and an hour and a half later I suddenly had several pages open on infamous mobsters and, somehow, milkmen? Between discovering John O’Hara and his obsession with Yale after learning about the Appointment in Samara parable (with his novel of the same name), to finding out who Starr Faithfull was, I correctly concluded that I need to stop getting distracted during times I’m supposed to be researching for my projects.

    Oh well. I’ll be off to watch some Twilight Zone.

  • The Sweetest Thing

    Life is so pretty when you get little glimpses of people enjoying their lives. People eating their favorite food. People walking with their dogs. People laughing with their companions. How could you not be happy too? Personally, the sight of it moves me to tears.

  • MOVIE DISCUSSION: THE HOLDOVERS (2023)

    Title: The Holdovers (2023)

    Runtime: 2hr 13 min

    Rating: ★★★★★

    Oh man, what a movie! The Holdovers was something we’d been wanting to see since we saw the trailer of it last time we went to theaters. And indeed, it was worth the wait! This was the last possible showtime we could catch (it leaves theaters on the fourth). I’m glad we did. It was one of those films that was made to be seen in theaters.

    This was maybe the first time I’ve walked out of a movie in recent times without a single complaint. It’s a literal technically perfect movie! The writing is incredible, the humor sticks the landing. The cinematography and color grading is immaculate, and all the characters are lovable pain-in-the-asses that eventually warm up to each other, and to you. All the performances were A1, too! I’m excited to see more of Dominic Sessa. I think I was distracted by him the whole movie because he’s a few days older than me, haha.

    Honestly this movie made me really happy to see. It was so good! I hope this starts a trend of higher-quality, well-written films being put out, because boy, that would be so exciting! I hadn’t been a big moviegoer before, but now that I’m a young adult with the (eventual) funds to spare, it just might get me out the house again!

  • GOT MY PHONE BACK

    It took me a solid week to get my phone back, right? It wasn’t lost or anything, at least not in the traditional way. I lost it to the clutches of a device repair store. My poor, busted cell phone lying in the back of some cold, clinical workbench, out of sight from prying customer’s eyes.

    You know what’s the worst part, too? Wasn’t even repaired. Poor bastard’s beyond the means of saving. I think it came corrupted. The OS, that is. They had to reinstall it like four times and then did some last ditch effort, Hail Mary attempt to fix it in the form of some repair I’ve forgotten the name of already. Unfortunately, no dice.

    It’s in great physical condition, though. No cracks in the glass or screen. There’s like two little small dips in the back from when my keys snagged the paint my second week of having it.

    Sigh, I’d give anything to go back before the time of constant crashes and reboots and overheating. I’m honestly surprised this thing’s gone this long. For the longest time I couldn’t even update the thing. That’s the whole reason why I bought it in to be repaired in the first place, to brute force the update. Which, well, they did. So yippee! I got my money’s worth (and since they technically couldn’t even repair the thing, I got the work done for free ;)!)

  • A LITTLE SUPERSTITION

    You know what’s a tragedy in its own right? I have a very unique name. My first name is pretty familiar, but my surname is so rare that only about eleven other people in the United States share it with me. It’s the kind of combination that would make anyone looking for brand recognition envious, and I can’t say I disagree. Too bad I’m not pursuing a career as an actor, because I wouldn’t have to fight other SAG-AFTRA members for my right to use it. And I would’ve gotten a laugh out of the Emmy presenter struggling to pronounce my name.

    But sometimes it’s a little too individualistic. You’re going to know who I am. I’m not going to be granted the same grace of anonymity that my Jane Doe-esque named mother has. Even now, if I search up my name, the only thing that pops up are school-affiliated pages, my LinkedIn, and my lonesome little one IMDB credit (for a production I technically didn’t even work on, but that’s a story for another day). I have no privacy online, and even when I was eight years old and browsing the internet regularly did I understand that.

    For everything I’ve ever done, I’ve never used my name. Never for social media. Never mentioned online. Even my professional email was something I only created in 2019. Hell, my online friends didn’t even know my real name until two years in. My overly cautious tendencies means that the only thing out there that involves my name are things that I want to associate it with.

    But here comes a problem. It seems like everything I’ve ever used in my name is destined to be some of the worst things I’ve ever produced. If it’s directly associated with me, it’s destined to fail. Even this blog is my first real venture into associating something with me by (partial) name. I could get all the immediate recognition I desire if only I wasn’t scared to take a chance with it.

    I noticed the repeating trend a few years ago. It’s true. The more distanced it is from me, the more suppressed the identity, the more successful it becomes. I’ve had several projects and blogs under hidden identities that have always achieved some form of recognition that I can’t scrape up with my name.

    In a funny way, I kind of like it, though. Even with the immediate association my name would bring, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about using it in a professional capacity, anyway. The feeling of separation gives the illusion of a barrier between my life and my work. That, and I just like having no one know a single thing about me. But I have developed the subconscious bias that in order for something to work out in my favor, it just can’t be in my name. Maybe it’s a trend I’ve noticed, but I like to deem it as my own little superstition.