five things #4: better late than never
mea culpa :')
hi! I knew I was already way behind when I started drafting this, but then I did like 60% of the writing and sat on it as I got even busier with work and life. So, apologies in advance! I had a lot of life to live. But as Taylor demonstrated with her pretty lacklustre new album, you kind of have to live a bit more life to make good work — in many ways, the work only benefits from it.
That’s my mea culpa, and I’m sticking to it.
I know this is pretty late on a Monday to send this, but I’m procrastinating on a boring article I have to edit for work. indulge me.
and, I’ve missed you.
I.
The Chinese New Year busyness got me good.
But I suppose it’s dishonest to only blame CNY, especially now that it’s more than eight weeks in the rearview mirror and I’m gearing up for my birthday season. I don’t have a good “mea culpa,” only requests for forgiveness. I can’t even promise that I won’t fall away from the keyboard again quickly — life has been immense and all-consuming, and the empty page even more so. I’ve found myself beginning and not-finishing four different drafts, overwhelmed by how much I feel like I need to say and also unable to say much of anything at all.
It was a fucking hectic opening to the year — I don’t think I remember it ever being this exhausting before. I’ve chalked it up to my big sister being home and having to now partake in the annual relative convoy because after my grandmother died, our family has tumbled down the pecking order.1 We schlepped across Petaling Jaya and Cheras, pilgrimaged to Setia Alam and Subang. There were endless dinners, then clean-up, then mahjong, and people people people people — like I said, it was hectic.
Good, but exhausting.
II.
I wrote this like 3 weeks ago, so it’s definitely out of date, but I’ve been paying attention to the continued massacre. I am thinking in particular about the horrific news coming out about the mass grave found in the freshly-destroyed Nasser Hospital, already on its last legs when the IDF besieged it for the second time. I am also thinking about the fact that the West Bank is being slowly and painfully transformed into a second Gaza, with far fewer attention paid to it.
Last year I binged the first season of the great Empire podcast on the British occupation of India and the gradual destruction imperial power can enact on a people and its culture. Watching Israel do the same to Palestine — with greater levels of impunity and firepower, albeit equal amounts of cruelty — has been stomach-turning. I’ve learned a lot about empire by living in the world left in its ruins; it’s something else entirely to watch it function so blatantly in world that insists that it has moved beyond it. Free Palestine.
I have been thinking incessantly about Gaza, staring long into the night at its ruins. I think images from Al-Shifa Hospital — rubble still hot to the touch and stinking of acrid flesh — are now burned to the backs of my eyelids. Every morning I wake up and I check the same accounts to make sure they are still alive: Bisan, Hossam, Suhail. Then I check on Wael Al-Dahdouh and Motaz, unconvinced that being outside of Gaza means they are safe. I think about Motaz constantly, how he’s now being paraded out in front of a million cameras and speaking events, trying his best to advocate for the city he has physically left behind. I imagine that every night his mind remains trapped amid the bombs and screams, stress fossilising into benign tumours and phantom stomach cramps that doctors can’t seem to pinpoint.
I’m familiar with many of these names now: Deir al-Balah. Rafah. Gaza City. Beit Lahia. Jabalia. Today, I watched a video about the destruction of Khan Younis, Bisan’s hometown. I think about Motaz’s grandmother in Deir al-Balah, and Bassam Youssef’s in-laws living alongside 25 families in a cramped building.
I’ve been trying to think about write about Gaza — I’ve tried before this, but it all felt trite in the face of all this horror.
So, instead, I think about Hanna. I think about Hanna, at least once a day, and wonder if she’s living in the West Bank in a home stolen from a Palestinian family by settlers. I think about her husband, who I met once in 2016, and I think about the Bedouin tents where they were married after knowing each other for a year. Some days, I run my fingers over and over the memory of the three of us lying in Molly’s bed, watching the Oscars, and realising that she didn’t think Palestine was a country. I wonder how many children she has now — the last I checked, there were two. Likely there are more now, because I remember how convinced she was of its importance to God. Because I remember that Hanna had an iron-clad conviction in herself and what she believed to be true in the world — how could something as soft as a half-formed friendship and proximity shake that? I envied those qualities, inasmuch as I felt they made her hard to like very much. I think about how when she came back from Jerusalem after leaving university to be married in the middle of the desert, she said, “Not Hanna,” like you’d say “Anna,” with an Americana under-twang — more like “KHAN-na,” like you were West Asian, like you weren’t White from Europe, like you slept in a house haunted by its dispossessed residents.
Once, when I was on Facebook, I saw that she’d shared of paintings she’d made of the view from her window as she underwent whatever the Israeli version of confinement was. This was maybe five years ago now. I had always liked Hanna’s eye for colour and form, thought there was an elegance to her person that I envied — she was the kind of person who made a secondhand duffle coat look effortlessly chic, who had beautiful fingers adorned with thin bands of silver that made you imagine you too could pull it off (be real, you couldn’t). Once, she painted a tablescape, layers of blue-and-white cloth, a bright yellow vase, a mezze of greens, whites and pinks — hands reaching forward. In another image, there was a rolling hill, thin scrub and cloudy bursts of twisting orchards, sky like a blue banner in the wind.
Were these in Palestine? Was that occupied land? Was this a life built from blood and ash and rubble? I don’t know.
III.
While I was away, Iron & Wine collaborated on a new song with Fiona Apple, “All In Good Time.” As regular readers will note, anything Fiona is a big +++ in my books, but I don’t think many (any?) know about the I&W obsession I nurtured as a young woman looking for music to love. I used to listen incessantly to “Passing Afternoon”, lullaby-like and presaging the deep grief of pre-empted loss that I wouldn’t understand until I was much older.
I was discussing music tastes with a friend recently, which got me wondering about what music actually soundtracked my younger years. In primary school, the year-ends were bookended by frenetic “biodata book” sessions, during which we filled our hard-backed notebooks with dossiers on ourselves — name, birthday, birth place, zodiac signs, favourite foods, films, books — before closing out well-wishes to friends for the holidays and beyond.
Thinking about it now, I’m in awe of how such rituals trickled their way down the levels, year to year. How did we know what on earth to do'? What were we even trying to achieve with these books? Inscribing our memory into our friends’ lives, like even at ages 10, 11, 12, we knew how fleeting these connections would be? How friends can fade in and out of our lives? You could do really well or shit in the exams one year, and find yourself in an entirely different class the next, a whole new friend group environment. Losing friends and gaining new ones with a single rotation around the sun. Within those pages, were we trying to convey the entirety of who we were (are?) to our friends in some vague hope of pure understanding, one that would transcend physical proximity and shared class time? Did I give them my email address so they’d continue to reach out even after we didn’t see each other anymore?
Maybe.
The sentiment is not far from the ground I fall on nowadays, striving to be understood by saying too much — saying everything — because maybe then someone would get it. Maybe then someone could look beyond the flaws and bad decisions to see to the bottom of me, maybe see the thing that could be maybe worth loving. Do you see my trick? I’m doing it now. Call it a performance piece. Call it an object lesson.
Biodata books now seem like precursors to social media, more reminiscent of the early days of Facebook than its current Hydra-headed form. Slivers of information, likes and dislikes, a handwritten message board, a litany of bands and books and movies. I liked American alternative emo-rock bands that I discovered on LimeWire like Motion City Soundtrack, but I also liked the tween ABBA cover band A*Teen and Aly & AJ. I taught myself to love Fort Minor because my friends were bonding over it, learning all the words to Switchfoot songs for all the same reasons.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how carefully we can mould ourselves into forms most pleasing to the people we love. We are multitudes, layers of our own delusions and truths, as well as those of other people, beloved and not. Formed in affinity and opposition.
Why did I hate Taylor Swift when I was a teenager? Because K and T thought she wasn’t cool. Why do I love Taylor Swift now? Because K and T think she wasn’t cool, and Nicky taught me that what you love shouldn’t matter to anyone else but you though it does help to find friends to weave academic treatises on the nature of time in her discography. Why do I love romances? Because they spoke to a quiet longing inside me, but also because I loved loving something other people found trashy. I loved fun. in their odd, left-field “Walking the Dog” era, and hated them when Glee began incorporating their songs into their show. We love what we love, and often we love to love what other people hate.
Sometimes it’s fun to be hater.
IV.
I initially started writing some thought about the “Tumblr circa 2012” vibes of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, but it’s hard to describe it. You just kind of had to be there. I started writing it as a think-bit about how much Swift is a product of that by-gone site, one that does still exists though it’s missing the frenetic (and, frankly, insane) energy that fuelled the young, intensely nerdy and terminally online. But, again, I sat on it for so long that the album came out and now I just gotta say that I don’t like it. Maybe it will grow on me like Reputation did — it’s become probably my second favourite Taylor Swift album — but I have my doubts. The writing sort of holds up, but the music is so one-tone that I can actually write to the sound of it. Smooth brain nothing music.
So, anyway, I saw Taylor Swift in Singapore in March 2024, and it fucking rocked.
Concerts, I’ve come to realise, are just one BIG KARAOKE SESSION, and it was a deeply intense experience. I’m not pleased about how much money I had to spend to make this happen, but I’m glad I went. I couldn’t see anything really, being the height that I am, but being surrounded by that much joy was amazing. My throat hurt by the end of the night, sweat-dampened and grinning. I’m shocked by how many Swift lyrics are hanging out in my head — my mouth shaped to the words even before I could process what I knew. We dance-jumped until my hair ties snapped and I clambered up on a chair to get One Good Photo.
I cried so many times, something I really didn’t expect. Cried when she did the heart hands to “Long Live”, SOBBED my way through the entirety of “All Too Well (10-minute version)”, teared up during Reputation.
Midnights is not a Swift album I love all that much (it’s good though) but I do love the pain-ache of “You’re On Your Own Kid” — and when she paired that with “Fifteen”? Swift gets a lot of flack for never quite growing up beyond who she was when she became famous — “So High School”, I’m looking at you — but I think it’s not so much a problem of perspective than of vocabulary. Swift’s lexicon is deeply informed by those dynamics, and for good reason! They’re handy, they’re immediately legible to her mainly-American core demographic (though this is ill-conceived given her international influence) so they’re just convenient (and, admittedly, thin) tools for illustrating character. But it’s ungenerous and myopic to boil that down to simply a stunted point of view, though I can understand why that might be the case (it also reeks a bit of paternalism).
The “Fifteen”/ “YOYOK” mashup suggests to me that Swift does actually have a really layered, adult understanding of experience and time — time, to me, is Swift’s real thematic preoccupation, but that’s for another … time … — one that aches with the knowledge of growing up. There’s real pathos there. “YOYOK” is, to me, a really bitter song, despite its triumphant musical underpinnings, and I think you get a lot more of that in Tortured Poets. The music Antonoff gives her fails that mature sense you get in the writing, though the writing itself needs a lot of work (and a strict editor). Paired with “Fifteen”, “YOYOK” acquires the sweetness of nostalgia that’s always been a signature Swiftian motif — looking back in time to a period when you were constantly casting your mind forward into the future, even as you’re forever lingering on the past. Sweet and toxic. Swift is constantly consumed by remembering, and the inevitable loss of time. “Envious and calumniating time,” Shakespeare writes in Troilus and Cressida. A “great-sized monster of ingratitudes,” collecting cash for oblivion. (What a great speech, what a great play!)
V.
The cats, as ever, are doing great.
Much love,
Sam.
My third aunty is now the official “head of the family”, which means everyone else pilgrimages to her house.