He reached the gate just as the sky overflowed, the new storm broke in the form of a huge bone-rattling boom of thunder. Raindrops as big as pebbles began falling at a rate so fast it was like peering though a veil.
The figure he had seen fighting its way up the flooding river toward the church was struggling significantly more as they neared the wall – their energy was clearly waning. The water had reached waist height.
There was a hunting call, and seconds later a group of soldiers broke through the forest across from the draining grate. They drew up short as their heavily booted feet slipped on the steep embankment.
The figure in the cloak stumbled and cursed as they looked back at the soldiers. The head of the group had a deep purple cape, turning almost black as it absorbed rain and mud – a leading officer.
But who was the figure in the river? He watched as they took their last, lunging steps toward the grate, pouring out the last of their strength. Thin, graceful hands gripped the bars, they looked in at him, his hand on the winch to raise the grate.
They were covered in filth and grime, and now closer to him he could see blood. As he peered at them, they became a she. Her eyes were a dark swirling brown, they were possibly warm another time, but now were cold enough to freeze hell.
Photo Credit: Trip Advisor
Otto couldn’t move, her outline was blurry with rain but her eyes shone through like beacons of frost.
Based on the horribly juxtaposed 13 book children’s series, Lemony Snicket’s A series of Unfortunate Events is back on the screen.
After an adaptation starring the ever bold and physical comedian Jim Carey, there was something missing – a certain element of discomfort that made your skin crawl. Long-time and new fans alike are excited to see the whimsical and dark series come to life in ways the movie didn’t.
Thanks to Netflix, 13 years after the movie, fans left wanting more are treated yet again to the world of the Baudelaire Orphans.
Photo Credit: Flickering Myth
Netflix is a growing empire, what with its ever-increasing show and movie collection complete with the little red Netflix stamp in the corner. But none of its other series’ are nearly as daring as Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Clocking in above The Crown as Netflix’s most expensive show to date, and aimed to appeal to every major viewing group, A Series of Unfortunate Events had to jump through all the hoops and stick the landing.
And stick the landing it has, masterfully translating a rich and vivid book series to the big screen.
With Daniel Handler (or better known to A Series of Unfortunate Events fans as none other than the Lemony Snicket) writing for the first two episodes detailing the first book, the show was off to a strong start.
The filming, dialogue and acting perfectly reflect the original material in ways that are often lost in book-to-screen translations. The actual visual and audio result is a style that is resonant with Wes Anderson’s later works like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom and even Fantastic Mr. Fox, with vivid colors, sharp dialogue, specific score, and subtle etchings of humor in small, seemingly insignificant places that make all the difference.
Sticking pretty closely to the original books, the Netflix series has only upward to look. Having only covered four books of 13, and with the introduction of a secret organization only hinted at in the books, the show will undoubtedly grow in complexity and content as the series goes on.
There’s just something that is so painfully cheesy and overall too varnished about the music released during Christmas time.
I don’t understand how or why Christmas has become an even more Hallmarked holiday for romance than Valentines Day.
I am very accepting of the concepts of caring and giving that provide the foundation for Christmas, but there’s something about the influx of songs talking about finding true love due to Christmas Magic that really does not sit well with me.
Maybe it’s because I actually am Scrooge, but maybe not. I’m not sure.
Or maybe it’s the fact that I subconsciously believe most things meant to be cute and sweet are extraneous.
Which, upon further reflection, basically means I am the Grinch all year round.
Questions swirl: who am I, what am I doing, what do I plan to do?
I glance at the banister beneath my hands. It has a cool and smooth texture, but I can’t help but notice that every once in a while a splinter will prick my finger; one off-grain hair on the back of the hyena, one loose screw in a well-oiled machine.
Do I dare to be that screw, to be an off-grain hair?
The banister leers back at me, returning to its faux smoothness, mocking me – showing me that even those hairs are smoothed out. The bottom of the stairs approaches with a swirl of nonexistent dust soaked in blue lighting.
I can feel myself physically growing colder without anything else becoming chilled.
I imagine my breath swirling and dancing, taking to the air, oh how I long to dance that waltz, a waltz that is carefree. Of freedom, non-worry, to dance to an unknown beat, the beat that is all my own with no rules or steps, no one can dictate what it is, what I do, how I move, what I ask, how I ask, what answer I receive.
The end of the stairs comes faster than I want, as if telling me that my time for contemplative thought is over. I stare down the hallway, looking at the doorways – all the doors of different paths I can take; nothing black or white – all gray – all this sad, desolate gray, I can’t figure out what I should do.
Photo Credit: The Millions – The Shining
I know that I want to leave, but I can feel fear closing in around my resolve, fire to ice. Am I a glacier, with more to me than is seen, or am I an ice cube, simple and nothing beyond my square?
“You know it doesn’t work like that,” I say, trying to keep the shakiness from showing.
I feel cold and my eyes burn. I grasp the hemline of my loose tank top. The air around me swishes menacingly through the hair around my ears. I purse my lips making sure I don’t say anything I’ll regret. I nod as a way to say I’m not continuing the conversation, then stalk off down the hall.
I feel the faint sting of a layered label along my stomach. I know immediately what it is: odd. I frown, looking down trying to see my collarbone. I close my eyes, willing the red shadows away. I close my eyes and let out a breath of hot air. The hallway is small, confining, making it hard to expel the blackness rising in me.
The pastel yellow door of the bathroom mocks me. Smiling garishly at the obsidian ice building in me, I grab the handle pulling the door open violently. I get ready for a shower, careful to not bump the new lacerated label. I stare at myself in the mirror. There is black scrawling all over, at all angles.
I begin to rub the new label, causing twinges to run through my legs. As I turn the water on scalding, I scrub it gently at first, then furiously to where the pain is almost too much to bear. I keep scrubbing until it starts to bleed again. The sobs start coming as fast and easy as breathing. I sit down carefully, the snowy porcelain of the shower floor slowly becoming a pale pastel pink.
The tears and the hot water are mixing together. The water shuts off – the allotted time over. “There are other living souls in this house that need the shower!” my mom calls from outside the horrid yellow door.
I don’t justify her calling with a response.
I quickly stand up to grab the heavy-duty band aids out of the cupboard, praying that my mom doesn’t open the door and come barging in like a freight train. I struggle to cover the entire surface area of the label. “Sawyer!” I finish the sad attempt to bandage my leg and sling a towel around myself. Trying to look as dignified as possible, I leave the bathroom.
The path from the bathroom to my room is even narrower and lined with mirrors. A knot forms in the base of my throat. I stumble halfway to my haven without looking at a mirror. But I can’t help it.
I glance up at the mirror. The person that glances back is me but darker, more attractive, and has a murderous gleam in its sinisterly blackened eyes. Its elegantly sculpted brows raise, asking ‘what do you think?’ A slender finger beckons, a full red mouth pulls into a grin, revealing teeth sharpened into points. I can feel it pulling me forward. I struggle to pull myself out of its grasp, until I’m once again staring at my scrawled-on feet and the smooth clean floor.
Photo Credit: Pinterest
I lift my heavy, leaden feet and shuffle the rest of the way to my haven, my room. The dark wooden door opens without so much as a whisper. I make sure to turn on all the lights so there is no shadow left anywhere in the room. The rich cobalt walls reflect all the light, making it seem like I’m underwater.
There is no feeling in the world like finishing a good book.
It’s like a slap in the face, or getting a bucket of ice water poured on your head. It’s a jolt that causes me to realize that I haven’t been in my body for the past – a glance at the clock – seven hours.
Nothing mattered. I was running through the streets of Ketterdam, a thief fighting the odds alongside Kaz Brekker, I was battling he who must not be named with my fellow students and professors, I was Aelin Galathynius and no one could stop me.
But once my eyes greedily devour what’s left on that page, I’m back to being me.
Just a girl with cold feet, a stiff posture and the most marvelous one pound object in front of me.
I’ll spend the rest of the day in a blind daze. Wondering why I am no longer in Ketterdam, or at Hogwarts.
And it hurts. A physical ache in my chest. Why isn’t this me? Why aren’t I living this kind of life?
And its an awful realization that I’m not.
For the rest of the day I’m shaky, seconds away from crying for no good reason. I’m hyperaware of whatever I’m doing in the world around me, but lost, aimlessly drifting in a world that seems like it’s not quite real.
I’m lost, just wanting to be able to read the book for the first time again. To get lost all over again.
I wander through the house, wanting that life, wanting to just disappear into the books that I love, to live these incredible lives.
Despite the struggle, the scars, the damage, the truly horrendous pasts that give dimension to the people who I am closer to than anyone else in the world, I want to be these people.
And **** the writers who create these worlds and these people. I run from my emotions and yet I can’t run from reading, and emotions are all I get from reading. I can’t bring myself to run from these writers. I’m like a junkie who hates what they do to themselves but loves the ride too much.
All I want to do is read and never reach the end. But equally so, the end is the best part. I am constantly tempted to rip out the last page and toss it to hell but I can’t. I always walk through the fire for it.
Photo Credit: BBC
It’s not like finishing a movie or a show. That is me watching someone else doing something. When I finish a book, I have been put through the same ringer the characters have. I have lived the same life.
Part of my soul is fulfilled and yet a larger part of it is missing. Finishing a book is losing a part of myself. A part of myself that I have committed hours to, I have paced for, I have lived for.
When I finish a book, I finish a lifetime. I say goodbye to friends who never knew me but I knew them. I say goodbye to a family that I loved in that time more than I have ever loved. I say goodbye to a reincarnation of myself. I say goodbye to something that doesn’t even know I exist and yet has wrecked me.
There is no feeling in the world like finishing a good book.
It is a feeling akin to finding the one thing in all of life that you search for, and losing the one thing in all the universe that you cannot stand to lose.
The first time he saw her was in an airport. A Petri dish of festering emotion and sickening crowds. He’d caught a wisp of her trailing at the corner of his vision, it was only a glimpse, but as he straightened himself back to forward, he knew she wasn’t just a figment of his travel addled mind. As he took a breath and grabbed his bag, a woman in a tight pencil skirt and a ponytail that seemed to pull at even her toes, came and rammed into him, sending him rocking back onto his heels, his brain rattling around like a drunk entering a dark apartment.
He continued toward his connection flight. Through the stifling heat and the crying couples, the chauffeurs with the fancy polysyllabic names spewed across expensive card stock, the pilots walking around with more purpose in their gaze than the entirety of the travelers bulging around them. The click of heels, the swish of slippers and everything fuzzy. He hated flying. He hated the people rushing around like plague bacteria happy to infect the next and the next. He wished he had a storm of anesthetic to clear away the sappy couples, the reuniting, the departing, the people too important to even breathe.
The people with screaming kids were especially bad this time. He flew all the time. He flew in winter. He flew in summer. He flew in spring and sometimes he even flew in autumn. He found his terminal, it was crowded, with lines already formed and spilling out into the walkways. Making irritable people even more irate.
“No Todd I told you it was 6:30. How long has my mom been stuck in JFK?” A pause. “No Todd it’s not okay, it’s not okay at all. She’s eighty! And she’s been stuck in JFK for five hours!”
Now there. There is a relationship that is moving fast, slipping down a slippery slope. It’ll be done in three months tops. He put an earbud in and turned his attention to another airport conversation. His own.
“No, mom, it was delayed. I’m still in Dallas.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes I’ll make it back in time.” It was getting dark. His head was rattling with every breath he took. “Thanks, bye mom, I love you.” He was going to hang up before she said anything else. He did.
He could psychoanalyze himself, he was cynical, very much stuck, but he wasn’t going to do that. There was no fun in that.
Photo Credit: The Telegraph – Rex Features
There was a blip. It seemed as if someone had set the world back a half-minute or badly spliced an old movie together. He blinked. Pursed his lips to one side. That was definitely sleep deprivation and yet, there, there was that baby’s cry again. He inclined his head toward the sound but it was gone, lost in the cacophony of other airport noises. He turned back to forward, only to move six inches forward and hit another abrupt stop. He really hated airports. He ran a hand through his hair making a bad situation worse.
“Oh for God’s sake, how long can this take?” A stranger breathes out. He was a small wiry man with the barrel chest of a Doberman pincer. A contradiction in every sense of the word. The man was innately untrustworthy in his eyes, yet somehow he couldn’t help but agree with the man, a vaguely troubling notion. He shoved the other earbud in, content to cease in his airport judging.
By the time he reached the back of the plane he had exhausted all of his music, which wasn’t saying much. He had very little music, and even less photos. He didn’t have much of anything on his phone, in fact.
He was in the farthest row back, cramped by the window, stuck between life-preserving plastic and the man with the dog’s chest. He could feel it, this flight was going to be obscenely long.
Halloween brings with it a lot of feelings. Excitement, happiness, the “officialness” of fall, and the feeling that all those scary things that go bump in the night are real. All of those feelings are expected, but the feeling that isn’t expected but seems to be there anyway, is a certain insecurity and anxiety.
Recently, I have grown even more conscious of my choice of Halloween costume.
Last year I found myself having to explain who I was dressed as to a complete stranger who made a not so delicate reference to my race.
He said to me, with a quizzical eyebrow raised, “Are you, like, an Asian version of, like, Harry Potter’s girlfriend or something?”
I didn’t realize at the time how much this bothered me, but the more I thought about it, the more troubling it became.
Firstly, I was not a Harry Potter character – I had no reference to Hogwarts or Harry Potter on my person. Secondly, unless he was referring to Cho Chang, who most people forget dated Harry, he was referring to Ginny Weasley (Potter). Who is not/was not just Harry Potter’s girlfriend – she was a Weasley and a kick-butt heroine.
But it really bothers me that in order to play a character that I adore or admire, people have to specify that I am the Asian version of them. Admittedly unavoidable because I am Asian, but still bothersome.
As I thought more about this, I started to think of an Asian character I could be. I thought of all the books I have read and all the movies that I have seen. Very few came to mind.
Which brings me to light whitewashing. As I furtively searched for a Halloween costume this year, I found myself not wanting to have to explain to someone that I am an Asian-American dressing up as someone who is just American or just white in general.
So I ended up looking up Asian movie and book characters. It is disappointing that I had to search this in the first place, and almost as disappointing that I found even less.
This whitewashing issue is true for every “not white” race, but I put a stress on Asian because that is what I am.
Here are some examples of some of Hollywood’s whitewashing:
Photo Credit: Hollywood Reporter
I went looking for Asian screen characters that I could play, and the results were dismal. Then I looked for articles addressing whitewashing, and truthfully I found quite a few, but it was hard to find any that were specific to the Asian-American demographic.
I did find one by the New York Times though, which was nice because it wasn’t just about how whitewashed Hollywood is or how lacking in Asians it is. The article was also about how some Asian-American stars who had made it to recognition were fighting back (read more here).
Piggy-backing on the New York Times’ article, the Odyssey also published an article about the whitewashing of Asians in American cinema, stating, “The only difference between this generation’s whitewashing and the previous generation’s whitewashing is the gradual separation from the use of “yellowface.” (read more here).
Now Hollywood just neglects that the fact that the character was meant to be Asian.
But thanks to Buzzfeed, I can at least see what blockbuster films would look like with Asian leads. For example, this is only one of them:
Photo Credit: Buzzfeed
Perhaps part of the issue comes from my own insecurity of not looking “enough” like the people I look up to. But it does make me sad that I don’t find more people to look up to who look like me.
Shoes may in fact be the singular most important thing put on in a day. They affect the way you walk, the way you experience your day. Goodness knows the power of gorgeous, uncomfortable shoes and their ability to change your entire outlook on the upcoming week.
How you see yourself in the morning all comes down to your shoes. Are you a little taller than you were yesterday? A little more fluid, a little more grounded?
Even to those without shoes on, their shoes affect them. They decided not to wear them, and this influences the rest of their day because, simply put, there are certain things you don’t do unless you have shoes on.
While many would argue that they just throw on the same shoes they wear everyday without thinking about it, that is still their decision to have a “usual” action.
Photo Credit: Road and Track
Are you determined to look as good as you can? More laid back? Aiming to be fashionable? No matter the reason, shoes outrank your clothing.
Shoes dress up an outfit or dress it down. Shoes change the way others see you. Yes, people will see your cool bomber jacket, but are you wearing it with heels like a model, so you can feel like the rest of the world is your personal runway Are you wearing it with trainers, making the world your personal path? Or are you wearing it with boots, telling the world to get out of your way ’cause you mean business?
Your shoes are one of those decisions that make you, you.
It is common knowledge that the point of October is Halloween, what with dress up and ghosts; pumpkins, with carving and all the pumpkin-y food; and boots, scarves, and sweaters.
But that being said, I recently found something that outranks basically all but Halloween in my list of reasons to love October.
Photo Credit: Ashleigh Izienicki (@missupacey) via insharee.com
Started in 2009 by artist Jake Parker, it has since grown into a worldwide event.
At this point, many popular artists have created their own iterations of the basic prompt. Like @missupacey ‘s Witchtacular or @lyfeillustration ‘s Goddess Lyfeink16.
This year I have been following many of these artists working through Instagram. I also happen to just browse the art the rest of the world is doing.
It has, thus far, been a really really cool experience because no matter the level of art experience, people who like art are united for a whole month.
The best part is that since it is a self challenge, there aren’t really any hard and fast rules. The art is really up to the artist, they can choose to follow a prompt for all 31 days, parts of a prompt, no prompt, or only certain days.
While I don’t consider myself an artist per say, I do really enjoy art, so I decided to take part in the challenge.
It has been an amazingly eye-opening experience so far.
My Day 6: @missupacey’s Witchtacular prompt
While I hold no candle to the likes of @missupacey or @lyfeillustration, I have found that I have grown so much in technical ability and ability to translate my creative vision into an actual tangible image.
But most importantly, since starting (a day late albeit) I am finding that I feel happier.
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