holidaze

2023 ✧ 12 ✧ 27

in this post: rabbitholes featuring 2003 pop-punk christmas covers, ramblings on celebrating holidays as an adult child of immigrants and the existential dread and guilt that ensues, and how i'm not looking forward to going back to my Corporate Costume after i stayed up until 3 AM reading the 2019 and 2023 shareholder reports containing salary information and compensation for C-suite executives

on holiday music

On Christmas Day, MP sent this to KR and I:

My primary contribution of un-cheery Christmas music to add to the list¹ was Fall Out Boy's "Yule Shoot Your Eye Out" (2003), written for an incredible compilation called A Santa Cause: It's a Punk Rock Christmas (not on Spotify), which also featured other favourites:

• From First to Last -- "X12 Days of XXXMASX"

  • Bonus points for the scene queens! But seriously, can you believe the reference to Friendster? (MySpace was far superior). This was the song that convinced me that Saucony's were cool (I didn't know what Saucony shoes looked like at the time so had no prior judgements). I mean, this is coming from the MySpace Scene King Sonny Moore himself:
    

    

• Saosin -- "Mookie's Last Christmas

  • They played this when I saw them for the 20th Anniversary Tour which I: (a) was NOT expecting; and (b) felt every cell in my body burst with endless energy upon hearing it.²

I really do not care for any form of 'traditional' Christmas-time music but find myself wanting to participate in other people's happier Christmas traditions, like watching Elf (2003) with my partner. The only holiday music that makes sense to me are the songs instilled with the appropriate angst that I experienced growing up, which I find is likely so potent and epigenetically coded within me that it quickly activates when I return to my familiar environment, the childhood home that is more or less identical to how I remembered it growing up. Last year, MP, KR, and I went to go see Taking Back Sunday at Starland Ballroom, so all of this is very fitting and full circle under this new full moon.

on holidays as an adult child of immigrants

The year-end/year-beginning holidays have long ceased to be celebratory periods in my life, and it's always been something that I have felt (or created) a lot of shame around. It's a reminder of my absent-but-present father, who effectively moved back to his home country (my parents are not divorced) when I was 12 but still visits during these holidays, which actually spans the time period separating our birthdays. It's hard to have to face that resentment during a supposedly 'joyous' occasion (it is, in fact, not joyous but actually disturbing that we can and that we do celebrate holidays with what is essentially being livestreamed on a daily basis from Gaza; it is disturbing and confusing, conflicting, to know that American bombs rained down on your parents when they were younger, and now they eat and drink and don't talk on any level of current events to each other, to their kids, and that the language barrier between you and them only exacerbates it; but I'm a coward because my 12 year-old-self's method of survival in this environment kicked in, I saw how old they were and what they had been through, my mom, especially, my dad, in poorer physial health than I last remembered, though both are able-bodied and physically healthy, all things considered, I wanted to create some happy memories, I can pay the cost of the pain in my soul, I'm already doing it for a salary anyway...)

I don't think the holidays were always complicated for me, though perhaps once I had successfully began to internalise and convince myself that I wasn't worthy of deserving gifts, it didn't really seem necessary to have a holiday, I felt awkward receiving gifts and felt immense pressure in trying to reciprocate but fearing that a bad gift would equate me to be a bad person because of the implied character flaws it would highlight, which may not be completely false -- just part of being human. My perception of financial strain on my family trained me away from being able to articulate my wants to them, marking them off as frivolous; what only mattered was that I maintain the role of the 'easiest' child to raise by any means necessary. In reality, that has cost me a lot in my adult life since it essentially taught me to be a shapeshifting people pleaser in many aspects of my life, especially during my college and graduate school years, and is part of the reason that there is a disconnect between what I do professionally and Everything Else That Seems Like It's Me since the Professional Persona is the "safe" one and the Real Me seems to be in direct opposition to that.

One thing I am trying to be more mindful of in the next few days is to try to build some friendlier moments at home before I go back to my Real World Stress Ball in New York.

Real World Stress Ball in New York

Among the items contained in my Real World Stress Ball in New York:

• My apartment: am I really going to find another apartment? Am I going to put myself through that again, even though I said the same thing last year, and then continued to ruin my mental health by opening every StreetEasy e-mail notification that came my way? Is the noise situation ever going to get better with the bar downstairs? How do I seriously evaluate my budget to potentially move to a place that could be 50% or more than what I'm paying now for the price of sanity? Is sanity worth it? Ha!

• My job: when am I actually going to start seriously thinking about getting my materials organised to start applying for new jobs? Do I really want to stay in this industry? Do I really believe that doing the same work at a different company is going to change ... well, what do I really think it's going to change aside from the obvious point of pay? Do I hate everything, or am I burnt out? It's not that simple -- but it might be simpler for me. How do I motivate myself to keep up the facade so that no one suspects that I'll be leaving? A bigger question: what do I really want my life in the next decade to look like? ³

• My social life: The holidays are when I feel like I am the worst friend anyone could ever know. I guess I have a lot of anxiety around gift-giving. It is definitely at the bottom of my love languages. I have also been actively avoiding updating my planner, which I think is a form of self-sabotage since I know there's a lot of social engagements and events, or the reminder that even now, I still have trouble giving myself permission to reflect, relax, plan, because all of these above worries are getting most of my brain space. I have usually seen this time of the year as precious time to slow down and get cozy, but perhaps over the years, I have not seen that it was necessary for me, or that perhaps maybe I even deserved it, that I should just wing it. I know I have a lot of friends and a lot of love, but I often have the paranoid thoughts that people probably just don't like me (secretly) and there are times that I don't know if I'm genuinely connecting with someone or playing a People Pleaser and I often find myself in thought patterns that reinforce the idea that I'm a bad person, which I should definitely try to work out.

What's the goal this year? Maybe something along the lines of not getting stuck in perfectionist thinking to enact meaningful change in my life? I always have an issue of going from 0 to 100 and then back down to 0 and inefficiently using what energy I feel I have, but logically, tackling the new job to lead to the new apartment could be the optimal order (though not the only one I suppose...)

bonus activity!

By the way, if you want to feel angered and disturbed about the world we live in (re: capitalism), I invite you to look up any company's Form 10-K, paying special attention to the difference from 2019 (pre-pandemic) to now.

For me, I was completely oblivious to the fact that C-suites have outrageous severance contracts -- from 2019 to 2023 for a company, I saw an increase of 3 to over 10X the amount in "Potential Payments" should they need to offer a severance package to any of these people, and it made me think about how hard I worked during that time period, what kind of stresses I had to endure in the workplace and my life, and how it is going to completely wear me down if I don't try something different...

an attempt at ending on a lighter note

I joined my workplace's virtual Kwanzaa celebration this year, and it was probably the most worthwhile event of the entire year for me. (Seriously, fuck work). Here's a link for the seven tenents of Kwanzaa which I've been contemplating since being re-educated on it in my adult life. I guess if there's any holiday tradition I want to attempt to incorporate in an effort to 'take back' the good sentiments that are allegedly felt and shared, this would be the one.

‧₊˚❀༉‧₊˚.

#personal #stoned