Shy Em


I'm a Boston-based writer. For a while, this was mostly about my life in South Korea. Then I forgot to post for a long time. Now I'm back.

shyemblog@gmail.com

random post

for your ears

the state of my brain

Last night a big group of us navigated the slush and ice and chanted “What do we want? The bus! When do we want it? Now!” until the bus arrived and our night began and didn’t end until early this morning.
It’s usually true. Nothing good happens after two in the morning.
     
For some reason things don’t seem very funny tonight. I’m watching the most recent Parks & Recreation episode, the one with the subplot of Andy and April and doctors. Apart from the occasional z-pak, I haven’t been to a doctor in any meaningful way in years. I have an alarming number of aches stored up and I bet that my quality of life could be drastically, easily improved if I wasn’t so scared of exam rooms and authority.
  
I took a tour of the DMZ a couple years ago. There’s too much to say, so I’ll just share this. After one of the first security checkpoints, you have to stop and transfer from a large tour bus into a smaller, DMZ-approved bus. Next to the parking lot, there is a place to buy snacks and a small amusement park with a viking ship ride called the “Super Viking” and two merry-go-rounds. There is also a Popeye’s Chicken. I think about that a lot, the Popeye’s, why it’s there and how fucked up it seems. And I think about incongruity and the tourists’ children circling round and round on plastic horses and the whole isolated, forbidden land just a few kilometers away. I eventually got a peek of North Korea that day, through coin-operated binoculars.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Wintersong - Blake Mills

Took a listen or two but damned if it’s not on repeat

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Ho Hey - The Lumineers

where I’m at as 2012 begins:

still quoting Mean Girls every single day

There’s something really great about seeing all kinds of people on the left come together. Kind of like all the races of Middle-earth coming together for a council against Sauron. overheard near Occupy Boston
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Horses - High Highs

lyrics are whatever but I like what happens around 28 seconds

A few months ago,

a while ago, more than half a year ago by now, my friend’s father passed away. It still breaks my heart to say that. There was nothing fair or okay about what happened, and I know her family will always be hurting, no matter how many times people tell them that he is “in a better place” or that “it will be better with time.” It still feels like a bad joke to me, an outside observer, so I can’t even imagine how surreal it is to the family. 

I never cry. I envy the weepers. I wish it was that easy for me to release my grief or anger or frustration or sadness. I try to cry, think about sad things and scrunch up my face and probably give myself terrible wrinkles, but nothing happens. At the funeral and the wake, my friends were sobbing, and it wasn’t till the ride home, staring out the car window, no one watching me, that I could even let out a few tears. 

My friend, the one who lost her father, doesn’t cry either. I mean, she cries, but only when she’s by herself. If she starts to cry in front of other people, she leaves the room. She hides her face, tries to stop, doesn’t want anyone to see her crying. And she was an unabashed weeper before all this, the one who cried when we watched any movie or read a touching news story. Now she is ashamed of her pain.

I hate seeing her like this. But the worst of it is, sometimes I just wish I had my friend back. The friend who was happy, who wasn’t grieving. I know how ridiculously selfish that sounds, and it isn’t like I’m not there for her. I’m there. I’m there whenever she needs me, to listen or bitch or drink or laugh. I’m there to spend the night and watch shitty movies, or vent about the friends who didn’t come for the funeral, or look at old photos from her childhood. I’m fucking there.

But it’s hard. How selfish am I? Hard as it is for me, it is a million times harder for her. But still, I just want everything to be back to normal. I wish I didn’t have to monitor everything I said in case a stray comment upset her, wish I could vent about something in my own life without feeling bad about how trivial my problems are compared to hers, wish that under her facade of “I’m fine” my friend wasn’t so empty and unhappy and alone.

It makes me so sad that her father, a man I came to know and respect and admire very much, is gone, and it makes me even sadder to know that my close friend will never, ever, be the same.

i love

when people awkwardly trail off while “pronouncing” sauvignon blanc then hope nobody noticed.

“yeah I’ll have some sahv..in…umm….wine.”

upside of wearing pajamas all day

you don’t have to deal with the inconvenience of changing clothes when it’s time for bed.