Two hundred and twenty-four photos. The first one was not bad. Then I scrolled. By the fourth, all I could see was the asymmetry of my face, the forced smile, my chikan work top bunched at the waist. The blue slip-ons I should have worn. Picture after picture said the same thing: You are trying too hard.

It was past eleven. I needed to choose twenty out of two hundred and twenty-four to send back for cleanup. I took a breath and returned to the screen.

I messaged two people I knew would not soften the verdict.

The third was my non sentient wing woman, Mira. She asked me to share the thumbnails from the gallery, twelve screenshots in all. The reply came in a vocabulary I could use at eleven at night. Third one down. The V-neck black top, mid-length, smile reaching the eyes. The blue dress, full length. My overwhelmed brain needed the scaffolding. The set whittled down to forty-five. Then twenty-two. Then twenty.

In the morning the human responses arrived.

One asked, What do the pictures make you feel? She sent her own photographs alongside the question.

The other gave me file names matched to occasions. This for LinkedIn. This for the book jacket. This for the website. This for Instagram.

I changed a few. Then I opened the full folder, this time picking for feeling. Two more.

Later, I walked. My mind returned to the photographs. The camera. The woman holding the shutter. Me. The rest of the world. What does each see?

The selfies in my phone roll, taken by the window, the morning sun on my bare face, say I am happy. I am gorgeous. I am content. I radiate joy.

The professional photos feel the pressure of the lens. They are performing.

I returned a third time, with a different eye. Every picture where I was not facing the camera, I liked. The goofy ones. The camisole peeking out. The top bunched at the waist. The hair caught in the pendant. Better than anything built to tell a story.

I scrolled to the photos I take of my family. Pattu with Felix on the floor, Ammu caught mid looking up at me, amusement mixed with annoyance, Laddu, wide eyed as she hears me before the shutter clicks. They radiate love.

Afternoon, Mira came back with a second pass. The IDGAF tee, three times. Two desk shots, the same picture twice. Every angle facing the camera. The set was not the self I had picked.

I dropped the duplicates. I added a frame I had skipped the night before. White sleeveless, looking off to the side, the expression I wear when I am chasing a thought. The checklist said smile reaching the eyes; this one had neither.

The twenty became a taxonomy. LinkedIn. Substack hero. Podcast cover. Press portrait. Heritage. Quarterly rotation. The camera had laid out every surface I might be seen on, ready to be cut into pieces.

A picture for every place.

None of them, finally, for the woman walking between rooms, mid-thought.

This essay was first published on lgiyer.com.

The notification is in Tamil.

The script feels familiar, yet none of it is comprehensible. I tap the gear icon. Nothing useful. The three dots. The profile. A menu four screens down. I find the language preference by Googling, by following an internet stranger’s directions.

When the dropdown finally yields, English sits on top. Spanish under it. A separator line. Then every other tongue on the planet, alphabetized, kept beyond a thin gray bar.

I select English. The relief is visceral. I close the app.

My mother tongue is what I speak with my children. Also, what I cannot read. I grew up in Tamil Nadu. The alphabet I know in a pinch. Storefronts, yes. A poem, no.

In my fifties, this is a lingering regret. My youngest is in middle school. Her notifications come home in characters my education skipped.

My athai quotes the Thirukural. Appa read Shandilyan. Amma is a fan of Rajam Krishnan.

My grandfather worked all over India. He told me, when I was eight, that the national tongue would open the subcontinent and what he had grown up speaking would close it. This was the eighties. Home felt small to a man who had crossed every state line.

So mine stayed where his pragmatism left it: in the mouth, not on the page. School made Hindi the second language and English the primary. By college I lived, taught, and dreamed in the colonial one.

“Tamizh ezhudha padika theriyadha?” was a common refrain in my teens and twenties, one I belligerently pushed back on. I did not need Tamil when I had English and Hindi.

I see now what the armor was. The inheritance had arrived in my own voice. I spoke it as plain truth. The empire does not have to be in the room. The dropdown remembers whose tongues come first.

In 2022 we drove to Las Cruces to meet my twins’ father’s family. Their paternal grandmother is Diné. What she taught us across three days I came home carrying. She said her grandchildren call her Nálí. I clung to that word for it meant acceptance. By the second afternoon there was a book in our hands, a primer for young readers. Under the awning of the hotel entrance, she talked about the kids who were taken to boarding schools and the words that left with them.

We came home. I ordered a workbook online. The YouTube videos went into a folder. For months I kept forwarding links to two phones that left them on read.

None of it took root. The twins are seventeen now. They know “Nálí” and the word for water, and that is the whole vocabulary.

I had mistaken my hunger for theirs. The grandmother had already given them what she could. The rest would have to come from them, in their own time, if it ever did.

Last year I started learning Korean.

On Wednesday evenings I sat at a desk and copied Hangul onto a worksheet, with the patience I never gave my own alphabet. I sound out the syllables. The language rolls around strange in my mouth. A smile arrives when I recognize words in songs I hum along to.

I have listened to Korean music for years now. ARMY, forever. I sing loudly in the car after a concert, mumbling lyrics I had not learned. What grips my throat when I open a Tamil text loosens in the classroom. There is nothing yet to fail at.

The grammar is fresh. The verb sits at the close of each sentence and the syntax makes me grin. My teacher encourages me gently, saying my pronunciation is good. No one has ever said that about my reading in any other tongue.

The song that surfaced all of this was “Aliens,” off Arirang. Seven men in two languages, laying claim on the word the world had aimed at them.

When transcultural adoptees describe themselves as foreigners in the cultures they were severed from, I have always heard them from the periphery. My twins were brought home at ten months old. How they view their inheritance, birth and adoptive, is something I have to wait for to know.

But under the hot shower, listening to seven Korean voices sing about being aliens, I felt myself inch toward the center of that circle.

To be born into a language and never learn to read its poetry is a particular kind of estrangement — not exile, not severance, but a slow drift that happens in plain sight. It is not what my children carry. But I know what it costs.

The ParentSquare dropdown is still in my head. English first. Spanish under it. A separator. The rest of the planet behind a thin gray line.

Not where I started. Where I was placed.

This post was originally published at https://lgiyer.com/whose-tongues-come-first/

After dinner I walk. Not far. Through the kitchen, past the dining table, into the living room and back. The dishwasher hums. The girls’ voices come from somewhere upstairs. Saathi is at the table with his laptop, working through tennis schedules.

I stop at the window.

Some nights the moon is a sliver, almost erased. Some nights a crescent. Some nights it is full and so close it looks staged. Some nights the sky is gray and there is nothing to see, and even then, I stop, because the absence is also an answer.

When I find it, I call.

Laddu. Come look.

She comes. Sometimes she rolls her eyes first. Sometimes she pretends she is busy. She comes anyway. We stand at the window and look up together. If she is not around I call Saathi. If neither of them answer I send a photo to whoever will receive it.

The moon is not for keeping to yourself.

· · ·

Years ago, before any of this, I was watching a Korean drama called Romance is a Bonus Book. I wrote about it on this site, back when it first found me. It was the first time I came across the line.

A man and a woman are standing on the front porch of a beautiful house, his. He is in love with her. He cannot say it, or will not. He looks up and says: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it.

The phrase comes from Natsume Sōseki, the Japanese novelist. The story goes that Sōseki was teaching English and a student translated I love you directly. Sōseki corrected him. A Japanese person, he said, would not say it that way. They would say: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it. Tsuki ga kirei desu ne.

The story may be apocryphal. To stand beside someone and look at the same thing, and to mean by it: I love you, I am here, I see what you see. Love crafted from attention, from gazing in the same direction.

In the K-dramas the trope returns and returns. Two characters on a bench. A balcony. A roof. They do not face each other. They face the same horizon. The camera holds. Whatever is between them passes through the moon and arrives on the other side.

What makes the line work, I think, is the refusal to say the other thing. The man on the bench could say I love you. He does not. He says something about the moon. The substitution is the love. To replace one sentence with another and trust the listener to follow you across the gap is itself a kind of intimacy. The line is not tender because of the moon. It is tender because of what is being chosen instead.

· · ·

The first time Saathi and I met seriously, we sat on a low wall at a temple in Bangalore. We had agreed to marry each other. I remember the setting sun, the light breeze, telling him I did not want him to lead or to follow, just walk by my side and be my friend. He nodded.

He has been living out that sentiment since.

I have been watching the moon with him for twenty-five years now.

Most nights he looks up only because I asked him to. What I keep is the lifting of his head from the laptop, the small turn toward the window, the half second before he sees what I am pointing at.

· · ·

I have a collection of moons on my phone. The ones from my side porch, the moon being the primary focus. The ones by the driveway, framed between the towering pines. The one from Austin, surrounded by extended family. One from California, on a vacation immersed in beauty. The one from Las Cruces, on a winter night, when my heart was breaking. One from Albuquerque, when I was holding too much. They are the notches on the tree of my life.

In every new city I look up first. Before I orient to streets, before I find the food, I find the moon. It tells me where I am. Or rather, it tells me I am still where I am, only the ground has changed.

Whoever I am with knows by now. Look, I say. They look. A pointing. A turning of two faces in the same direction.

· · ·

Sōseki was Japanese. He wrote Kokoro and I Am a Cat and a great deal more, and he died in 1916. His name reaches me through a Korean drama I happened to watch on a streaming service in Pennsylvania, where I now live, having left Tamil Nadu and then Bangalore to arrive here. After dinner I walk to the window and look up and call my daughter, who was born in this country and has never lived in any other.

The phrase is Japanese. The drama is Korean. The marriage began in Bangalore. The window is in Exton. The moon is the same moon.

The hyphen in my life has so many sides it stopped being a hyphen long ago. It is a smudge. The moon stands above it and says nothing.

Tsuki ga kirei desu ne.

· · ·

I first wrote about Romance is a Bonus Book, and the line that started all of this, here.

This post was originally published at https://lgiyer.com/on-soseki-kdramas-twenty-five-years/

On a Teams call at work this month, I wished a fellow Tamilian colleague for puthandu. Usually that would have spawned a discussion on how different cultures ring in the new year. This time, a couple of others joined in and the conversation moved on. It felt normal.

There’s a piece circulating this week about South Asian fashion in America. The headline calls it “redefining identity,” which sounds right without being true. Nobody I know is redefining anything. They’re wearing what they’ve always wanted to. A kurta at the grocery store on a regular weekday.

The article quotes someone about the psychological weight of fitting in being replaced by the joy of standing out. The framing assumes fitting in came first, that it was the default, and that standing out is the destination. But for many of us, neither word fits. We weren’t fitting in. We weren’t standing out. We were getting dressed.

Arundhati Roy won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography last month. Mother Mary Comes to Me. A book about her mother, about Malayali womanhood, about the roots of a rage that doesn’t soften with age. The committee was chaired by Grace Talusan, who writes about adoption and identity from the inside. Two women whose work lives at the intersection of family, origin, and the stories we inherit. Neither needed to explain who she was to the room.

That’s what’s worth noticing. Not the award, the absence of translation.

When I first started writing essays, I spent too much time on what I now think of as the footnote impulse. The explanatory aside. The pause to define. Kaapi (a South Indian filter coffee). Kolam (a floor pattern drawn with rice flour). Paati (grandmother). As if the reader would leave if they encountered a word they didn’t already own.

I stopped. Not because I decided to be brave but because the footnotes were lies. Kaapi is not “a South Indian filter coffee.” It is kaapi. The scent of it at 6 AM is not a category. The kolam is not “a floor pattern.” It is what Amma drew at our front door every morning. The English gloss doesn’t translate. It replaces.

There’s a difference between the two that took me years to feel.

Translation assumes a destination. The reader is over there, and the word must travel to meet them. But the words I grew up with don’t travel. They stay where they are. The reader comes to them, or doesn’t. Either way, the word remains itself.

This is what the hyphenated life looks like when it settles. The slow refusal to convert what doesn’t need converting.

In The Smudged Hyphen, I wrote about the space between two names for the same person. The blur where Tamil and American overlap, where neither term is whole and the join between them is soft, not clean. I keep returning to the blur. Not because it’s unresolved, but because resolution was never the point. The hyphen is a smudge, not a bridge. It holds both without pretending they’re one.

These days, I don’t have to explain Golu to the people who come home. My invite list is eclectic. No one expects me to.

My daughters are seventeen. They wear what they wear. Sometimes a paavadai from Paati’s last visit. Sometimes whatever survived the laundry pile.

The fashion writers call this a reclamation. The literary critics call Roy’s win a milestone. But the word I keep circling is quieter than both.

Presence.

Not arrival, because we were already here. Not visibility, because we were never invisible to ourselves. Just the steady fact of being where you are, in what you’re wearing, saying the words you grew up saying.

Saathi is munching on murukku in the next room. All is well.

Originally published at https://lgiyer.com/no-footnote-required/

Last week at work, I spent enormous amounts of time documenting changes made over several months. It involved collating material from different sources, abstracting it for a non technical audience and laying it out in an easy to read format. Two days ago, exasperated by the constant popup on Word that exhorted me to use Copilot, I did. To be fair, my workplace aggressively advocates using AI to simplify our tasks. The results were magical. Things I spent weeks on, done in seconds with better formatting. Given a template and source material, my new digital overlord abstracted ideas beautifully, dumbed it down for different audiences and even generated lovely graphics to go with it. I grudgingly gave AI its due.

All morning, I was thinking about the dichotomy in my life. I write stories. I meld lived experiences with fiction conjuring worlds that exist in my head. Yet, in a writers only Zoom, a bunch of us toyed with putting AI to work to generate comps (works comparable to our own) for queries. The allure of outsourcing grunt work is real. The harsh truth is, if fed my manuscript, the LLM will generate a synopsis that is succinct, precise and elegant. I see people in the creative field using it to beautify material they have already generated. I see its use in writing grant applications. I see it leaching into spaces I previously held inviolable.

Today, there was another post I saw on Threads that stopped me in my tracks. A random stranger on my feed wondered why Grok was so good at generating CSAM. No, I am not explaining. Given its overlord’s appearance in the files and the mountains of data he has access to, it makes me wonder what that beast was fed to make it so good.

AI seems inevitable, the way internet was in the 90s. Will regulation and ethics take center stage? If so, how soon can that happen?

2025 has been a year of intentionality. I started the year with a book. For a brief while I enjoyed watching the Chinese make fun of us Americans on Xiaohongsu. Superbowl and the halftime show was a master class in subversive art, one I took great pleasure in dissecting and pondering over.

Spring brought with it birthdays and the announcement of the documentary premiere. This year has been packed with over a dozen screenings of the film and its attendant Q&As. I have had the pleasure of watching metacognition in my children. With every passing Q&A their responses feel honed and deep.

Politics has been ever present this year, taking up a large chunk of my mind space and actual time. My resistance has taken the form of joy, quiet persistence and rest. We attended three concerts this year - Stray Kids, TXT and Ado.

Drama watching has slowed down towards the end of the year. If there is one show that is the stand out for me, it would have to be Melo Movie.

I had a fantastic time turning fifty in the company of family and friends. There was lovely cake, lots of presents and wishes from a whole lot of people. I step into 2026 with the hope that the world will look vastly different from the one we are leaving behind in 2025.

Happy New Year!

I woke yesterday to my social media feed full of references to Taylor Swift’s latest album titled “The Life of a Showgirl”. Yes, I am a proud Swiftie and yes, I ordered her album but no, I did not stay up for the album drop. What I did however was listen to the album all day long yesterday. I listened once to get a feel for the album. The second time, I listened using my air pods because I wanted to focus on the lyrics. Then, I had it on speaker as I walked, as I cooked, as I worked and, as I walked the dog. By the end of the day I clearly was in love with The Fate Of Ophelia and Opalite. I quite liked Cancelled and Honey. I was not skipping any yet. I preferred the clean version of Wood to the explicit. Eldest Daughter and Father Figure are yet to grow on me.

Overall, I liked the album.

It was everything I had expected from Taylor and she delivered. Did I expect vocal artistry? Maybe. Did I expect clever lyricism, yes. Did I expect everyone to love the album, most definitely not. Like all art, what appears as the end product is pieces of the artist mixed in with imagination and a whole lot of cultural commentary. Is every song on every album a piece of autobiographical lore? I think not. Is it influenced by who she is and who she is becoming? Definitely yes.

For me a Taylor Swift album release is a production. It is bonding with the Swift-dom over easter eggs, countdowns and, speculating which song is about whom. It is the collective experience which makes it special.

I love Taylor Swift’s music because it is relatable. She makes picking petals of daisies and sitting on the bleachers okay. She makes wanting a basketball hoop and a block full of kids okay. She makes girl bossing okay. She makes Shakespeare references cool. She makes it okay for us average mid people to have ordinary lives and have yearnings. She makes it cool because she is a rich person cosplaying the average person. That is why I pay for her albums and get her $75 hoodies. Fandom is about relating to the artist in whatever way makes it relatable to you, the consumer.

I stan multiple kpop groups. I barely understand Korean, yet I take the trouble to go read up the lyrics and hum along to the music. I know more about these artists’ personal lives than I should care about. Artists make the art accessible and relatable. I am not looking for my pop idol to fight wars and solve for world peace. I am not looking at my pop idol to crusade against genocides. It absolutely will make happy if they do but I do not expect them to.

There is a reason I have Dolly Parton and Mackenzie Scott on my imaginary list of people I want to meet in real life someday.

If stanning an artist whose world view does not match yours makes you uncomfortable, stop consuming them. It’s that simple.

"My headphones are not charging."

Pattu's voice is matter of fact. She states it as if it were non negotiable, this state of her headphones.

"Have to tried charging it at a different spot? Have you tried using a different charging cord, different adapter?"

My questions stream out of me in the measured way of a veteran parent.

"I did." She doesn't bother looking up from her phone. Her dad's annoyed voice travels from the kitchen where he is cutting vegetables.

I tune out for a moment. I look at this lanky girl sitting on the swing in the middle of the family room oblivious to the different energies that surround her. For a moment, I am envious. Five minutes later, I am pressing my pair of new beats headphones, still in their case, into her hands.

"They are expensive. Be careful." I whisper as I walk away. Minutes later, I press my near new microphone, one I ordered when I was convinced I was going to be the next podcasting genius into my youngest daughters hands. My shoes, ones I ordered for our last New York trip are now the property of my oldest daughter.

Over the past few weeks and months, I have been giving away things I treasure, I have been saying yes when my instinct screams no. There hasn't been a pivotal moment or event that can explain this shift. It has been gradual, a dawning realization that my children are mine temporarily.

They are growing, morphing into adult like people who will some day walk out of our home and only ever return as guests. The home we share now will be preserved in sepia, in memories that whiffs of familiar foods will conjure up at will. The notion of home will become fuzzy, crystallizing into a different form as they make their way into the world. It will shapeshift from a dorm, a starter shared apartment, a tiny studio, a living arrangement with a partner and maybe someday, a place where they will create memories for other people in their lives.

This morning as I walked into one of the twins rooms to get the dirty laundry down, I looked around overwhelmed by the chaos. I sat on her mattress, weighing what I wanted to say when she broke into my thoughts.

"It is exactly the way I want it to be."

I said nothing and walked away. Yet another evening as I prepared to dedicate myself to hours of binge-ing the historical Chinese drama I am currently watching, Pattu walked in with a question. The discussion ended with me asking her why she could not share things with me. She looked at me straight in my eyes and said "Did you share everything with your mom?"

I smiled and returned to my show.

This is a time of flux. My body is changing. Menopause is hitting me hard. My hair is falling out. I weep at the slightest provocation. I am abrasive to the people I love. I ache and fall apart silently. I book tickets to the seventh k-pop concert in less than two years. I respond to Saathi's questions on my spending with a shrug. Everything feels transient and temporary. I am trying to pack in as many memories I think are good with the kids knowing full well that the memories that they are storing may well be very different from the ones I am striving to create.

There is a sense of time closing in on me, on us. I am trying to go gently into the night.

On Sunday, I sat with four girls, three mine and a friend's daughter at Movie Tavern for the sing along version of Kpop Demon Hunters. On my left was another woman about my age with a group of kids younger than mine. They all clutched light sticks as they trooped in. The theater was full. The audience was plugged in, engaged and loud the entire time. We sang, laughed and angst(ed) together. Walking out the theater, we dispersed into the fall like evening like leaves floating in the wind.

Love Chaos Kin has screened at four festivals so far. Every single time, after the screening, we meet people from the audience who are genuinely moved. They give us hugs, hold our hands and share vulnerable stories. I leave humbled each time.

At the doctors office today with Laddu, the new doctor's assistant chatted with us as she gave Laddu her shots. In the process we learned she was an Eyekon as well just like us. We traded notes on our biases (Lara, Sophia), favorite songs (Gabriela) and talked about trying for concert tickets closer to the date.

A week after the election, I sat in my study wondering why my gut feeling went wrong. Did I read the enthusiasm for Harris/Walz ticket wrong? Were all the women in all of the different social circles I am part of wrong? Why didn't what I saw on ground translate to an election victory?

These days, I scan new aggregators for mention of protests, of acts of resistance. I don't see any at the top. Yet, my social media feed throws up videos and first person accounts of people marching silently, peacefully, making art and music and building community as they do.

Today as I walked in the morning, all these seemingly random dots connected. Sony didn't believe in the power of a diverse, authentic story. The gatekeepers in high places do not see the value in a vulnerable human connection story that is Love Chaos Kin. The average person in America (and the world) belongs to a far more racially and culturally diverse family unit than the media and news will have us believe. These stories of connection and culture are relatable to the world once they break free from the gatekeepers who hold them back.

Music has no barriers. The communities and fandom that art creates is a thriving, resilient force. I love the way my timeline erupted today when news of the Swift Kelce engagement broke. Human connection that breaks barriers because people crave joy. They celebrate happy things. Irrespective of where we come from, we recognize love, we recognize respect, we recognize joy.

It made me think of the gatekeepers who control how information flows, what information flows and when we get to consume information. It is the only minority that I cannot get behind. The class of billionaires who are threatened by the power of human connection and community. The set of people who want to erase history and control what is presented as art. They want art to reflect the world they want to create, not art that is a mirror of what is.

For long, I have instinctively felt that joy is resistance, living our lives without fear is resistance, permitting hope to pervade our soul is resistance. No one can quell what is inevitable, a changing world that will not look like the minority at the top. It may feel like they have the upper hand now, not for long though.

Better days will come. It will come because, at our core, we are humans, the world around us is diverse, vibrant and joyous.

What we are hearing and seeing is the death rattle of a dying empire. Endure. Hold on tight. Hope and light are around the corner. Keep making music, write those words teeming in your head, paint what you see around you, bring those stories of life, love and connection to the screen. This is how we create the world we want to live in. We mirror what we are and hold it up high.

The memoir while not in a book form has been set free in the form of the documentary. I have pivoted away from 'I want to tell my story' to 'is my story really worth sharing?'. With two kids on the cusp of adulthood and the third reaching teenage, I am finally realizing what I know about raising children isn't even scratching the surface.

It is rare for me to not have something lined up in my head when the itch for change starts. This time though, there is nothing. The blog has run its course. Publishing has been experimented with and abandoned. I enjoy writing. I enjoy the cadence of words when I try to bring a feeling into life. I am no longer seeking an audience for it.

I am still fascinated by Asian cultures (Korean and Chinese for now). Travel is appealing until I start thinking about cost and logistics. It's strange to be at crossroads not knowing which way I want to go.

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.

If you are anxious you are living in the future.

If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

― Lao Tzu

This quote made its way on my timeline and it struck me perhaps for the first time in my life I am living in the moment. It is strange, this placidity. I miss the chatter, the constant feeling of movement in my head. It is not that there is nothing to agonize over, it just feels like there is no point to it all.

So, for a fleeting moment in time, I am floating along, being present, participating and, just existing.

I find myself going back to the two hour long podcast from Wednesday night when she sat with the Kelce brothers on their podcast. It was two hours of parsing body language, fixating on if she was really happy. I teared up when she talked about getting her Masters back. I leaned in when she talked about her dad's surgery or her mom's bum knee. I smiled when she talked about Jason and his kids. There was something relaxed, laid back, domestic and happy about the show where the biggest pop star I know was candid on camera.

With my falling down the rabbit-hole that is K-pop, parasocial relationships are my life. Taylor Swift though feels different. It is not the kind of adulation I have for K-pop stars. This feels personal, relatable. Her lyrics appeal to me the way a well written essay does. I listen to her songs. I feel them with every fiber of my being. I love how she wears her heart on her sleeve. I love how she is a brilliant business woman. I am in awe of her marketing. I am a goofy kid when I am decoding easter eggs with my fellow #swifties.

The day after the podcast, my husband said something that made me stop what I was doing. He was mad that I had opted to eat my dinner alone with my podcast for company instead of with the family. My first instinct was to be defensive, to explain why it was important to me, why listening to Taylor Swift yap about her life in a way that felt intimate and cozy with the rest of my fandom was important. But, I stopped. I took more than a day to let the comment sit with me. He was not wrong. It was a podcast. I could have finished my dinner and caught up on it after.

I wondered if he would have felt this way had it been a writers zoom I was on. Would it have been different if it were a grassroots political organization meeting instead? How do we assign relative value to things? I let the comment stew and simmer.

This morning, I had that moment of clarity. All my life I have been accommodating. I have prioritized relationships, cooking large meals, showing up for friends, not burning bridges, keeping the peace over anything that could be viewed as selfish or a centering of my self. Sure, there have been occasions where I put myself first but those were accompanied by an extra large serving of guilt on the side.

That guilt sat heavy in my core, making me question why I would do something that brought me joy at a cost to the people around me. So, I over compensated. If I went out with friends, I ensured people around me were taken care of. I brought trinkets for my kids to assuage myself that they were active and present in my mind. I texted, called and surrendered my mental space to others while being away. And, the worst part, it was self inflicted.

This time though, I felt no guilt whatsoever. I tuned into the podcast because this was something I wanted to do. For two hours, I lost myself being happy for two strangers. There was no tangible takeaways. No wisdom (arguable though) to take away. No call to action I was responding to.

I am finally in my IDGAF era and I am loving it.

A week ago, I sat in a theater watching a documentary that was uplifting, hopeful and just joyous. Yet, there were a bunch of people belonging to the same fandom as I do, who were hell bent on 'canceling' the creators and in the process invalidating the voices in the film and laying to naught years of effort. All in the name of supporting their cause. That same week, I saw a politician I have grown to admire, Pete Buttigieg draw the ire of the trans community. A decade before that I saw the creator of a world I cherished (Harry Potter) being canceled for her transphobic views.

In each of these situations, I have my own polarized views. I condemn the genocide in Palestine (as I do the ones in Sudan, Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, Congo, Nigeria, Ukraine…). I am yet to dig into the Pete Buttigieg controversy. If there was ever a case of canceling the artist but embracing the art, I probably would go to bat for the Potterverse. My views are just that, mine to act upon. Over the years, I have reflected often, and in deep measures if it even is possible to separate a person from their actions, if a person's actions do not align with mine in one sphere, does it invalidate everything else they do? I don't have a definitive answer.

I see in hindsight, I play it by the ear. In politics, I believe perfect is the enemy of good. I will align myself with people and organizations that will advance my cause. When it comes to artists, I reluctantly topple idols from their pedestals and refrain from participating in anything that will benefit them. I do not give away my books or music though. I might even indulge myself and relive the experience of enjoying the said art with my child when she discovers the world of Harry Potter for the first time. I do know that I have my moral compass. There are things that are a hard line for me and when people cross that line in personal or public spaces, I opt out. I refuse to cede my mental, financial or emotional ground to them.

In the area of world affairs, I am loathe to jump to conclusions for if there is one thing I have understood, it is that history is scripted by the victors, with the people at the table. What we see is often not what is on ground. Even what is on ground differs from the perspective of the person telling the story. So, I do not jump on bandwagons, I take my time to come to my understanding and do not tell people around me what they should or should not be doing.

All this to say, I am reminded of the book Yellowface I inhaled over one flight leg. A book that echoes and mirrors what it means to either tap into the mob or be the mob. It deftly turns the mirror back to the reader leaving us to draw our own conclusions. Is there a villain in the story? Are purity tests worth our time and energy?

What are your thoughts on cancel culture? Do they have a place in this extremely online world we live in, where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, actual footage from AI generated deepfakes? Would we step up and speak up if not for the anonymity of our keyboards and egg profile pictures?

Laddu leans into me before she heads upstairs to bed. The Volini cream I have on my shoulders anoints me with the smell of camphor and menthol. I let Laddu go after giving her a tight squeeze. My arms hurt. My shoulders hurt. I turn my swivel chair to face my monitor and bump my knee against the table. I let out a silent scream and rub my knees. At any given point in time, it feels like a good part of my body is under various aches, pains or soreness.

I google my symptoms and the overwhelming data points to menopause. I slink along the edges of subreddits and wonder if I should give HRT a try. Given my history with infertility treatments, hormones are a touchy topic. I am loathe to talk about how I feel with anyone, knowing each person navigates this phase of their life in their own way. Some smart ones lean into all the help they can get. Others, obstinate for whatever reason grin and bear it. Then, there are a chosen few who seem to glide through life without any seeming discomfort.

My online tribe, the ones I curate into my feed though are hilarious and blunt. I love that I am part of the invisible Gen X who have no $&*%&^ to give, are loud and brash about what they are experiencing. Thanks to them, my amazon algorithm now throws up minoxidil, collagen peptides, pdrn and, a slew of makeup products. I keep adding things to my cart only to save for later.

I look up all the screenings I am due for and grudgingly make appointments. I look forward to receiving my bloodwork results with the same enthusiasm I once reserved for job offers and, contracts. I take 3:00 am insomnia in stride and doom scroll. I heart everything Melani of the I-do-not-care-club posts. I look at the world outside burning down and no longer feel bothered enough to engage.

In this strange disconnected, dissociated, devolved state of my mind and life, I am suddenly discovering a sense of freedom I aspired to in my younger days. With the maturity that comes from having taken on life and survived, with the financial security that comes with middle age, with children on the cusp of taking flight, I am finding that I can now reboot my life to enjoy all the things I should have in my teens and twenties but did not have the courage or wisdom to do so then.

So, my fellow Gen Xers, my I-do-not-care-club tribe, tell me how you are winging it. Tell me what epiphanies you have had lately that has blown your mind.

My aching feet long for the warm water despite it being summer. I am in the shower and looking at the water cascading from the shower head when on impulse I look up. The cover that shields the plumbing from the onlookers eyes is loose. I reach up to adjust it and notice the rough edges of the circle cut out on the drywall for the water pipe. I notice the raw, unpolished edges of the pipe before it is swallowed up by the cover I just fix. In a moment, the illusion of perfection slips and I see it for what it is.

Earlier in the morning as I soaped my hands and washed them, I noticed the underside of the faucet, rough from weeks of salt deposit. I scrubbed it off. Everywhere I turn today, the universe seems to be sending me a message. My WhatsApp pinged late yesterday with a reminder about the makeup class I signed up for.

I turn fifty this year. I barely use anything but moisturizer on me. Yet, just this week, packages arrived every day. A brand new makeup bag now boasts moisturizer, sunscreen, primer, foundation, concealer, highlighter, bronzer, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, mascara, eye liner, lip liner, lip tint, lipstick and, makeup removing stuff. I am excited for the class tomorrow.

Why now?

This question haunts me. It is not like I work in an office or have a people facing job. I rarely if ever, step out of the house. I have been thinking about it. Learning to apply makeup to me is another of those things that feel/felt insurmountable. In my head, it was not my domain. I was not one who could be fixed by pretty makeup. My body dysphoria and self esteem issues run deep. This class is about conquering fear. It is about learning to embrace myself warts and all contrary to how it feels.

Each day, I loop between my various social media feeds. Every post on there feels like a cry for attention, mine included. I notice which voices attract the most attention. I take note of what I post and how I feel when I post something. Some days, it feels like a cry into the void. Some days, it is exactly what I need, the ability to speak but not be heard.

As the end of the year creeps up on me, I am taking stock of the life lived thus far. Who has stayed, who has left, who is loud, who is invisible in my life. Suddenly, I feel the urge to put the cover back on my life, to pretend the corrugation does not exist. The illusion is perfect, why mess with it?

I am humming as I get ready to log in. The entire soundtrack of K-Pop Demon Hunters has been on loop this past week. The songs work well in the movie and work even better as an album to play on repeat. I am not even sure when was the last time I played an album so much on repeat.

I caught the film last week after my older girls raved about it. Needless to say I loved it!

It has been ages since I saw something that stayed true to the cultural milieu it is set it while still appealing to the broader audience. The girls in the film are so relatable. The boys cater to the specific fandom that is K-pop while still telling a story that I am thinking about a week later.

One group feeds off the energy of the masses for public good. Another feeds off the same energy to placate an endlessly greedy overlord.

Why does this feel so familiar? When are we, the divided masses going to realize our collective energy is what is required to secure the honmoon?

At the moment, I feel a quiet joy that comes from contentment. School is out for the summer. I am waiting on a few writing related deadlines. After the buzz of the two premieres, all is silent on the documentary front. I have books to be read. My Amazon orders page is a mile long, the anticipation of delivery is enough to keep me excited for a day or two.

This week, I will mark twenty four years of being married to Saathi. This year feels like the cusp of the next era in our relationship. The children are older. Our worlds are so divergent that a Venn diagram is two separate circles. So, when we spend time together, it is intentional. I am looking forward to what the next decade will bring.

I did not have the luxury of falling in love before I committed to a lifetime with him. Now, it feels like I have the time and intention to do so. Over the many years, as much as I have had my differences with him, I realize I admire his ability to stay true to himself in every circumstance. With the pressures of parenting moving from the physical to the emotional and mental, we each carry the load differently.

Staring into the fifties without the pressures of the extraneous labels that were foisted on me, I am finally able to look at marriage objectively. As we stood in front of an audience after the documentary premiere and Saathi declared that he finally understands and respects how much I have poured into raising our children, it felt sweet.

As I grudgingly cave to his and Laddu's pleas to bring a puppy home, I realize I do it because I love them. Love now takes the form of self care. As I tend to myself and allow him the space to tend to himself, I realize this is what it is all about.

Two separate people, being intentional in how they choose to spend the time they have together. Two people acknowledging that they are each individuals with specific interests that may or may not overlap and respecting those choices. Two people coming together to care for the brood they have brought into their lives, to put aside individual ideas for the greater common good.

It is the coming together and moving apart that defines this phase in our lives. So, as we step into the beginning of our sunset years, I realize there is no one else I would do it with.

Happy anniversary, Saathi. I love you.

Today, my family will be witness to our niece graduating high school. In a couple of days, my older two will be done with tenth grade and entering what I call a crucial year for them. My youngest will walk the halls of the elementary school for the last time and we will bid farewell to the place that has been like home for over ten years now.

All around me are signs of flux. We ease into a slower pace of life for the next three months. No alarms. No checking half eaten lunch boxes or complaining about the amount of crushed papers in their school bags. This weekend we will purge artifacts from the school year and lay to rest school bags, lunch bags and water bottles. I am looking forward to this oasis of peace before the madness of the next two years hits me.

We have no travel planned. No holidays to look forward to. I feel like I am sitting on the cusp of important things to do and places to go but I have no idea what that will be. I have a stack of books on my to be read pile. I have a list of shows that call my name. Yet, I am in limbo not heeding either call. I am reclaiming all the sleep I have lost over the past couple of years. For now, my immediate future looks slow, music filled and, relaxing.

Wait, did I jinx myself?

I also notice the cuts, the missing slices of my life, the tighter edits, the different music. With each iteration, the film builds structure, solidifying from a sludge into something firm, smooth and, tight. The narrative takes shape from what can only be called a gloop of my life. I am extremely privileged to have this level of access to a creator's mind, to be privy to the different shapes the story could have taken, to bear witness to the birth of a film.

In the fall of 2017, I had no idea what a simple yes to Chithra's request to film us would morph into. My older girls were eight at that time, the youngest - three. My husband was an unwilling participant. What I thought would be a single session of filming that would translate into a short film became a multiyear project against the backdrop of kids entering their teens.

What had been a simple decision at first became rife with misgivings. Will my children hate me for putting them through this? Will I regret this decision in hindsight? Will my husband feel resentment for this exposure he never asked for? There are no simple answers. That first yes to Chithra set into motion events that were irreversible.

It meant weekdays and weekends under the gaze of an ever-present camera. It meant unguarded moments captured on film for posterity. It meant exposing unflattering parts of our lives under the harsh glare of an external eye. It meant extended family reunions impinged on, every plan and event on my calendar shared to probe if it was necessary for the film. It meant asking for permission from strangers who wandered into our lives and thus into the frame. It meant wondering if there was music playing in the background that could potentially be a problem. It meant hours of keeping everyone in the house silent as one person was being interviewed. It meant multiple trips to the recording studio to get the voice overs to fit the scene on screen. It meant giving access to years of archival photos, videos, written words, letters, keepsakes and on occasion painful memories.

Over the years, I have had requests from different people asking if they can tell our story. One time, it was a request to join in a reality show. Another time it was for a newspaper feature. I had never thought much about the eyes behind the camera before Chithra entered our life. If I had gone with a white person to tell our story, I have no doubt that the resulting film would have been imbued with their color blind world view. If I had picked a non-Tamil person to tell our story, we would have had a narrative that prioritized the vibrancy of our South Indian culture and, in the process fetishized it. The eye of the beholder, it turns out does capture the beauty of the story.

Eight years later, I have no idea what the future will look like or how I will be judged for my decision to put my family through this. I do know that permitting Chithra to tell our story is the right one. Our shared heritage, her unwavering ethical compass, her grace to step back when I drew a line, to push me when she felt it would serve the greater good, her tenacity to keep pushing even when it felt like the world was falling apart all have resulted in a film that is true to its core.

At every point in the filming, she was deferential to the then teenagers. If the child said she did not want to speak up, she was afforded the space to step away. If my husband was not feeling up to multiple interviews, he was given the space to opt out. The resulting film is one that relies on unspoken words, the pause in between sentences, the eye rolls, the discomfort in body language to tell the tale.

Watching myself and my family on the big screen is an out of body experience. It is like being suspended in space, watching your life unfold as if it is not yours anymore. It is surrender, an act of sacrifice in the hope that there is a larger lesson for the community and the world at large to embrace.

Being the subject of a documentary is a leap of faith. It is entrusting your life's journey in another person’s hands for them to shape it into a narrative that sifts the chaff from the wheat and makes it shine. It is cherry picking parts of your existence to craft a narrative that caters to a narrow slice of humanity. It is a leap into a chasm, hoping against hope that there is a safety net being held outside your field of vision.

Will I survive or thrive? Only time will tell.

"Question for you. I don’t wear lipstick. If I want a light tint, any recommendations? Something that will suit my face."

I text my good friend first thing in the morning. What ensues is a conversation that lingers long after I have said my byes, made lunch, washed my hair and mapped out the rest of the day.

A few weeks ago, there was a parallel conversation on Threads (which I can't find now) about women who preferred the company of men in group get-togethers. My response to that was that it was internalized misogyny.

I am a child of the 70s. I was raised on a diet of books from the UK. My childhood idols were George aka Georgina (Famous Five), Jo March (Little Women) and all those girls who shortened their names to sound masculine, wore their hair short and shuddered at the thought of make up. They were often portrayed with traits commonly associated with men - courage, adventure, rebellion and, confidence. There would always be a foil to these tomboy characters - Anne in frilly frocks, long golden hair and a simpering voice.

In my teens and twenties, I cut my hair short (but not too short for fear of my mom). I waxed my arms and legs but stayed away from lipstick, mascara or anything that would be overtly feminine. I preferred blacks and grays and avoided colors like the plague. And, when in co-ed groups, I gravitated to the men who talked money and/or sports as against the women who talked in laws and kids.

In my fifties now, I see it for what it is. Internalized misogyny. In a deeply patriarchal society, women were rarely given the means, resources or opportunities that men were granted naturally. We are products of our upbringing. If all girls saw around them were exhausted mothers and grandmothers lamenting the weight of responsibility thrust on them, that is all they associated the women and in turn their girlhood with. It is natural to abhor and gravitate towards the aspirational masculine traits. Somewhere in there, the feminine was swallowed, stunted, hidden and suppressed to the point where any expression of it felt alien and oppressive.

So, today as I mulled purchasing my first ever lip tint, I wonder what it would have been like if I had leaned into what was natural. What would my twenties have been like if I had sought color and beauty? What if I had realized then what I know now, that confidence and self assurance is gender neutral, that courage and rebellion are not the bastion of men, that adventure is that of the soul not the body? There are no answers as there are no re-dos of the past.

However, my future does look pretty darn colorful.

In the run up to the Super Bowl LIX, I spent hours on TikTok and Instagram watching reels about the makeup of the Eagles team. Given my political leanings and where I live, there was no question whom I was rooting for. Being a #Swiftie, I have been plugged into the Chiefs as well, notably the Kelce(s) with connections to both teams. So, when their quarterback and his family came out as openly MAGA last year, the match up took on more meaning than just a game of football.

As humans, we thrive on symbolism. At a time when it feels like we are in the midst of a dark, dystopian novel, this game came to stand for hope vs despair. So, naturally I rooted hard for my home team. When Kendrick Lamar was announced as the halftime performer, I went down another rabbit hole. I was already aware of his beef with Drake and the diss track in question. My obsession with K-pop had already primed me to appreciate how political rap as a genre is. But, I was not prepared for craft and artistry that the halftime show was. Go watch the show if you have not already. All 13 minutes of it. Pay attention to what he is saying.

My kids and I watched the game, rooted loudly for the Eagles, hugged and cried when they won and went to bed very, very happy. The morning after though was reserved for the analysis, the commentary and the break down of what was an epic evening. So, in no particular order, I am assembling a set of links that I probably will go back to in time.

Upasna Gautam on Threads writes beautifully about how masterful Lamar's production yesterday was. Go check it out.

Seema again on threads does a good summary of the show and the things you might have missed.

Jessie Thomas gives context to the "revolution will not be televised" reference by Lamar

Also this from somewhere online.

The best and, nuanced explanation of the whole show from @muva_kita on TikTok.

So, if like me a huge part of the halftime show went over your head on first watch yesterday, take the time to read, understand, unpack and sit with the discomfort. America needs you to. This is what subversive art is all about.