i typically title these blog posts based off of whatever i’m listening to at the time i write them, so that’s why this one’s called nothing. or maybe it should be called “white noise” or “fan whirring.” i’m not sure. maybe that’s stupid. maybe it’s not. maybe it’s worth thinking about; maybe it’s not.

i’ve been back in my home state for just shy of two weeks now. i still don’t have a job. i interviewed at one japanese restaurant (they said they’d text me about training a few days ago; they still haven’t), have an interview at an upscale american restaurant next week, and am still waiting on scheduling an interview at a third upscale restaurant. maybe i was naive to assume i’d be hired faster than this, but my brother was when he was my age, and he had even less experience in the food service industry than me. my resume isn’t terrible, so i can’t help but feel disappointed. shouldn’t this be simpler? shouldn’t this be less painful? i don’t know. i wanted it to be.

i applied for an internship that my mom wanted me to do and didn’t get it. i am a little sad about this because the internship seemed like a good fit for me, and a lot sad because i think my mother is disappointed in me. or maybe i’m reading too much into things. it’s hard to tell with her. we’re around each other again consistently for the first time in four months and it feels—vaguely—like i’m living with a stranger. i’ve always felt like that around my father to some extent, but experiencing it with my mother is odd. experiencing it with my older sister is even more peculiar. she and i are not the people we were in high school, which means we don’t get along as well. the other day she said “i miss you!” to me, the way she always does, and i couldn’t say it back because i didn’t like the way the words felt in my mouth: all flimsy and fake.

i’d like to see the barbie movie. i’d like to see the new little mermaid. (they fumbled the bag by not casting an asian prince eric. fumbled!) my mother and i started watching american born chinese on disney plus and while the show isn’t amazing, there are some elements of it that i really like. it’d probably appeal more to me if i were in high school or middle school; the latter is when i read gene luen yang’s graphic novel by the same name, of which the show is based on. i remember reading that book in my stuffy humanities classroom and thinking, for one of the first times in my life, about what it meant to be asian american.

in one of the three stories within the book, the main character jin “turns” into danny, an all-american, white (washed) boy. i only learned this after reading the summary of the book on google. i don’t know if i realized the plot point the first time i read the graphic novel in seventh grade and forgot about it, or whether i never really processed it. either way, it makes me inconsolably sad. american born chinese is not a great show, but i feel like i owe it to my younger self to watch it. does that make sense? i feel like i want disney to see that asian american stories are worth producing.

speaking of asian american stories, it’s aa&pi heritage month, and typically i post something about it on instagram, but i haven’t yet. i haven’t written many poems about it either. i guess i wrote about my dad, which maybe counts. he taught me how to cook yasai itame. my mom taught me how to cook miso shiru and tofu steak. the other day at the gym i started thinking about the years i spent in gymnastics and suddenly felt like crying. instead, i wrote a long tweet about it on my phone in the parking lot. the tweet ended up being so long that i turned it into a poem / vent piece / prose piece / whatever the hell you can qualify my writing as. i tweeted it and it got less than twenty-five likes. that’s okay. it was cathartic more than it was pretty.

now, speaking of writing. i have a little trigun vashwood fic that i’m editing the third draft of tonight. it’s little because it’s only 10k, and most of my stories end up being closer to 15k or 25k usually. it’s also little because i wrote it over the course of month. this is good for me. sometimes stories take me two years. (read: your best american boy.) lol. but almost no one follows me for trigun, so i’m not sure whether it’ll get any traction. it’s also nsfw, and i’m worried that might bog it down too. i think i’m getting too caught up with stats lately. it’s hard because once you write this quote unquote big story, it’s hard to top it. and i’ve made peace with the fact that i’ll probably never top liminal spaces but some nights i’m just like damn. i’m forever gonna be known for my fifteen-year-old writing. i’ll be nineteen next week and that’s still probably all i’ll never be known for. maybe that’s why i wanted to try writing something nsfw so badly. maybe it’s because i wanted to show that i’ve grown up.

i have more to say, probably. i watched happy together (1997) and got the hype, but also found it a bit too slow and some of the shots too long. i need to start self-studying in japanese. i went out to thai food with my parents tonight. i hung up my old art from high school, as well as postcards from college, photos of family and friends, and old medals, on the walls of my childhood bedroom. i got a gym membership. i saw one of my best friends from middle school and high school and thought about how some things don’t change. i watched kung fu panda 1 and kung fu panda 2 and cried at both. i did a lot of other things i can’t remember. oh, i started watching crash course in romance and it’s very cute.

sorry. this probably wasn’t a very profound or beautiful update for the like, fifteen of you who subscribe to this newsletter. i guess i never promised it would be though. miss you guys. hope you’re doing well.

and this is where i leave you.