November Update

Dear Friend,

Hey, how’s it going? I hope you had a great Thanksgiving 🦃 and are looking forward to the holidays right around the corner. November is Birthday month for me and this year’s been pretty chill due to everyone’s schedule. That said, it’s still great to have a couple friends drop by to wish me a Happy Birthday IRL.

Here are the things I did this month:

• I ran 42.08 miles (average 4.21 miles per run), down from 42.45 from October.
• I finally bought an Asian Art Museum membership! It’s been on my wishlist for a minute to find a meaningful way to support the AAPI community.
• Animal Crossing released a big 2.0 update and has once again sucked up a huge part of my morning routine.
• I meditated 13 days in October, with an average time of 21 minutes per session (blame Animal Crossing!)
• Here are some photos I took in November. (Link expires in a month)

Social Gatherings:

• Couple friends dropped by to say HBD and Thanksgiving with family, but that’s about it. Anybody around for December?

Here are the things I enjoyed and would recommend this month:

• 📺 TV: Dickinson (Apple TV+): While everyone’s on the Ted Lasso train, I’ve been in love with Dickinson from the very beginning. The show is about Emily Dickinson, sure, but it’s moreso the things happening in her world during her time that truly captivates me. From women’s suffrage to slavery to the Civil War, this 27-episode series wobbles from weird to woke from one episode to another — all while showcasing how modern women could be given the limitations during this time period. Wild nights, indeed!
• 🎤 Podcast: Invisibilia (Apple Podcast): The latest season is about Friendships and all its expectations, implications, and ambiguities with those who we call our friends. Whether it’s the pandemic or just getting older, I’ve been finding it increasingly challenging to build and maintain friendships these days. So it’s been comforting to hear from others’ unique experiences with their friends — from getting ghosted, to making friends under the vow of silence, to going to therapy with friends and of course, to exploring Friends With Benefits. Friendships can be so vague and ill-defined, yet it bond us all together such meaningful ways.
• 📗 Book: Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (Goodreads): So here’s the thing, I didn’t love this rom-com of a book for its plot or character developments. But for me it was very refreshing, almost in a foreign way, to read a book with LGBTQ characters and seeing them just experience gay joy without compromise. Unlike most of the LGBTQ media I grew up with, there’s no plot lines related to suicides, AIDS, drugs, family abandonment, or gay trauma or any kind; instead this book is just a rom-com story about two characters that happened to be queer. It’s a marker that I’m from another time and perhaps wow, we’ve indeed arrived.
• 🎧 Music: Long Ambients by Moby (Apple Music): So this recommendation is less about my love for it than how it helped me recently. For whatever reason, I’m again having sleeping issues and this playlist (comprise of both of his Long Ambients albums) has been part of my remedy. Apparently, Moby also has sleep issues and couldn’t find any music that would help him go back to sleep, so he made his own. He made two albums and I combined them into an Apple Music playlist here.

My next book will be A Little Hope by Ethan Joella, recommended by Book of the Month Club (a bday gift from my friend Rebecca). Please reply and LMK if you have a book recommendation for me! I’m currently trying to read more fiction.

And that’s about it for the month of November! I hope it’s interesting for you as it was nice for me to recap for the month. How are you doing? It’s kinda sad I had mentioned “With Covid calming down…” last month only to see there’s a new Omicron variant in the horizon. Stay healthy and safe, and have a great holiday in December! Let me know what you’ve been up to please — it seriously makes my day 🙂

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Love wins