251010 - The Friday Five

[llonkrebboj]

  Name five…

 

1. ... things you can't live without.

Water, stories, air conditioning, the internet, my phone. In that order!

 

2. ... of the best moments in your life.

(1) That day in P1 when I was staying back for after school activities - they had just ended and I was sitting on the blue bench before the standalone wall with the school name on it, looking out across the carpark and the clouded sky. The wall separated me from the cafeteria, and there were other pupils there, but their noise had nothing to do with me. I don't know how long I was sitting there for, but it felt like a lovely moment of peace... until my form teacher walked by and asked if I was okay (LOL). There were many moments like this one throughout my life, but this was the first that I remember clearly.

 

(2) Not a single best moment, but a collection of them: In primary and secondary school after I figured out the meta of buying takeaway in the morning (like a pancake, begedil, a packet of meji biscuits, seaweed or other snacks) inhaling it as soon as the bell rang, and then spending the rest of recess in the library. 

 

(3) One of the last days of my first internship, and a group of us (all the interns in my department) and couple of our bosses went out for a farewell lunch. The interns and I decided to walk back to office because it wasn't far away, but the skies were already grey and it started RAINING while we were at a traffic light. We took shelter at the entrance of another company and had to call this other boss with a car to rescue us. Within that ten to twenty minutes of sitting there, chatting and waiting to be rescued, there was a moment when they were all talking and I was mushrooming in the middle, just watching them and thinking: I'll remember this forever.

 

(4) The time I spent reading Langya List for the first time, finishing it at 4am and spending the rest of the night staring at the ceiling. It was a bit of a struggle to start and I was skipping maybe 5-10% of the words and/or guessing their meaning from context, but it completely rewired my expectations of cnovels in a few ways: [1] You can have a period setting, plot driven story without a romance line and still fill it with love. [2] You can have characters that don't appear on the page but are present throughout the story anyway. [3] Your sincerity and love is given of your own free will, it would be wonderful if it were reciprocated, but if not there is nothing to feel bitter over and nothing to regret. [4] The main character may die and it can still feel like a triumph.

 

(5) That whole day I set aside during the Apr 2025 Japan trip with friends for a solo trip to the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum. Early start, lazy Mcdonalds hotcakes breakfast, the whole morning and afternoon spent there and two hours of starbucks reading with a strawberry tea to end off the day. But my FAVOURITE moment that day was sitting in The House of the Tenmyo Family, with the scenery framed in the windows and sitting on the tatami floor in the corner of the room with a cool wind blowing in. It felt so much like being a part of the world but apart from it at the same time. Hmmm this is the latest example of the same feeling in (1).

(Readers of No. 1 Pretty Boy of the Immortal Path can probably tell why I love it so much at this point xD)

 

3. ... celebrities you can't stand.

Esther Yu in her faked baby voice era (no it isn't natural 🤣 there are vids of her in variety shows from an earlier period in her career proving it xD). 
Chen Xiao for a while because every (literally every) drama I'd watched him in, he was acting as a character I *hated*; his face got blacklisted by association. But recently I briefly saw him in The Ingenious One, and he was fine in there! 

 

4. ... books you enjoy(ed) reading.

Recently? Relatively recently anyway (within 2024 and 2025), I enjoyed The Murderbot Diaries, the Imperial Radch trilogy, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China, 直播写纯爱文的我在虫族封神 | I Became GOAT in the Zerg World Writing BL Novels on Livestream and 唐代基层文官 | Low-Level Civil Officials in the Tang Dynasty

 

5. ... items in your purse/backpack/on your desk.

Outing bag: Water bottle, umbrella, eReader, lip balm, fan (and loop earplugs!).
Desk: Glass water cup with straw, tea set, wireless mouse and keyboard set, digital clock, supervising stuffed toy.