collections: a weekly reset
It’s February 15th. We are one-and-a-half months into the new year.
- all stories have a beginning, middle, and end: to all the boys: always and forever ends as a love letter to endings and how hard it is to say goodbye.
- we were both young: love story (taylor’s version) collapsed the years between middle school and adulthood.
- something like chasing stars: the american narrative is obsessed with space movies and sending astronauts on interstellar adventures
💌
all stories have a beginning, middle, and end
to all the boys: always and forever ends as a love letter to endings and how hard it is to say goodbye.
I don’t think I fully understood myself as a person, as a young woman shedding the relics of her teenage girlhood, until I realized why I love to all the boys so much. It’s something that transcends a lifelong appreciation for romcoms and aesthetic staples of the tried and true teen experience. It is deeply personal in a way I have spent so long trying to articulate. I am working on a draft of it, borne from the genetics of a movie review and personal essay.
I have watched the final to all the boys installment a few times since it was released this past weekend and it leaves my half-empty rather than half-full. I had waited so long for this final film and it was finally here. As soon as it was here, it was over. There will be no more to all the boys.
I was struck by the sudden dread and fascination by the timeline: that I have spent the past two and a half years of my life waiting for this adaptation. That I had eager, but relatively low expectations when the first film came out as an adaptation of this cutesy YA series I had first read as a high school summer; and it had transcended my wildest pastel-pink daydreams for what this series could be. How I had spent the summer of 2018 re-reading the trilogy during my internship commute, and I found myself sympathizing with our teenage protagonist when I was decidedly no longer a teenager in her shoes. That span of time since has been spent waiting for this final release in earnest, of the best and most emotionally satisfying part of this series.
It reminds me how precarious and delicate happiness can feel if it is measured by the yardstick of arbitrary milestones. How we will be inevitably be disappointed and confused when it doesn’t go according to plan. It’s not like there wasn’t a plan, and what good is a plan when it’s never put into place?
we were both young
love story (taylor’s version) collapses the years between middle school and adulthood.
Taylor Swift is re-recording her old albums. She is reclaiming ownership of her sophomore album, and every other album that is an artifact of her artistic genius, whimsy, and imagination. Fearless is Taylor at her most wide-eyed and naïve, committed to storybook endings and fairytale romances before she had to grow up.
so before i say anything else, let me just say that it was a real honor to get to be a teenager alongside you.
Thirteen years have elapsed, such that Fearless is practically a teenager by this point.
Listening to “Love Story” again through more mature ears doesn’t make the song any less lovely and magical than the first time around. This was the song that catapulted Taylor into the stratosphere for the first time, and it was the kind of inescapable song about a forbidden Romeo and Juliet-esque romance that made any middle school girl recount her most fanciful romantic plots.
So much time has passed since the original that it’s updated iteration feels tinted through Taylor’s memory and the parallel track of my nostalgia. It’s a weird feeling that will only compound when the full Fearless album is released in April.
something like chasing stars
the american narrative is obsessed with space movies and sending astronauts on interstellar adventures
The Camelot era “Space Race” adapted by Hollywood blockbusters is gilded in American exceptionalism. Hollywood puts movies about the moon landing or Apollo missions into the remix machine in hopes of reclaiming a narrative about the best and brightest minds embarking on a perilous journey; some Uncle Sam-spiked cocktail of reckless bravery, blind optimism, and pure patriotism.
For the most part, sci-fi gets a bad reputation unless it involves astronauts. There are no government agencies and institutions with the name-recognition and prestige as NASA and JPL. We all think space is cool. The idea of making to far-distant lands and seeing beyond the galaxy is a fantasy we have entertained in real-life and in the movies. It is a self-aggrandizement of the human condition that we were always destined for more than the Earth we call(ed) home.
I can name a bunch of space-esque movies in rapid succession, their plots similar and ambition limitless: Interstellar. Gravity. The Martian. Ad Astra. First Man. High Life. These one-or-two word titles are about a man who has been launched into space; a man vs. nature conflict where the man is an astronaut and the nature is the impenetrable mystery of outer space. Note: the male astronaut always seems to get first billing.
Until science catches up with fiction, we should expect to see more space movies hitting theaters. Each a riff on an old problem and new adventure, with familiar references to scientific concepts rendered down for an everyday palette. They are unified by this ominous doomsday plot that Earth is no longer untenable and the miracle of human grit and tenacity is the only thing preventing the apocalypse; rather than remedy the Earth, we seek more. A test as old as time about the limits of humanity at the edges of the universe.
this past week
- watched: to all the boys: always and forever
- read: the martian by andy weir
- listened: floodlines (the atlantic)