I still exist.
Sometimes a competitive high school dance team serving pure 80s gives you the will to live.
Tomioka Dance Club, ladies and gentlemen.
Almost never listen to Western music anymore, but I'm pretty well obsessed with this MV and song. Super super super gorgeous video.
I basically decided to forfeit 2017. It was a despondent blight of fire and tears.
Trying to get things moving forward now. Or just... moving.
Following the solid week of crying grief over Jonghyun I rubbed my eyes lightly, exhausted, awake too long. Got a crazy after-image burst in my left eye that stayed with me for almost two weeks. Accompanied by a continuous headache. Probably a mild posterior vitreous detachment according to the internet. Could've been a stroke or aneurysm finally coming for me... wouldn't know. Still can't think about being out in the world enough to deal with seeing a doctor. I fully appreciate the depth of this foolishness.
Illness makes a fool of me on the regular.
I did some reading. Ready Player One was a miserable shock. I had heard so many good things about it. I was genuinely startled to experience how poor it was. It's just... yeah... it's just not good.
Got through John Green's Turtles All The Way Down with difficulty. Had to take breaks for a few days at a time because I was crying through so much of it. Then Jonghyun happened in the midst of that and I didn't come back to it for a while. It's very good. But extremely challenging to get through for someone who has OCD and mental illness on-par or worse than the protagonist. It was so damn real to my own experience that it could only be a painfully anxious ride. If you ever wanted to know what it's like to have OCD, read Turtles All The Way Down.
Saved The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage for the last of my reading stint. Figured it would be the most fun. I was right. Pretty harrowing tale. Pullman is such a beautiful writer. Effortlessly vibrant. His Dark Materials is a very important book series for me so I'm thrilled to have more stories within that universe. Eagerly awaiting the next installments.
Mostly I've been escaping into BTS. Bangtan Sonyeondan. Which is also foolish. I thought my Kpop group fangirling days were behind me. I'd never again follow a group as closely as I followed DBSK.
But BTS... is an irresistible force of nature.
They had impressed me early on with the steady pace and quality of their promotional periods. There was a clear difference between the dozens of other groups I see debut and disappear yearly. Their WINGS era at the end of 2016 really reached a critical mass of attention. Finally recognized with big awards. Then their unprecedented grassroots worldwide fanbase voted them into a Billboard award and all of the press, hype, and collaborations that came out of that launched them into the stratosphere. Completely wild to witness that happening in real-time.
The sheer mass of their content online is simply insane and it's the easiest thing in the world to fall into and luxuriate. Foolish because investing emotionally in such a thing has gotten me into trouble before. Grief-stricken, physically ill, trouble... when things have gone tragic or criminal. Namely DBSK. As I said, I thought I'd never let myself be sucked in again.
But here we are.
I've never seen an entire group be as tightly bonded as these seven are. A lot of circumstances around the creation and development of the group are unique in the industry, so it makes sense. The culture of affection runs deep.
They have a large body of socially/politically conscious material. Much of it written by them. Hard to not appreciate that considering the environment they're in. They have a category of material I refer to as their 'Hey, try not to kill yourself' songs. Lost, So Far Away, Not Today, 2! 3!, YNWA, etc.
My favorite of which is 'Tomorrow'.
I find them to be helpful, personally.
Comforting.
Anywhoozle, just popping in.
2018, have mercy on us.
