I'm so happy you're here. This is my first digital postcard. I hope this postcard can be the start of a conversation. Let’s begin.

Felt sense: Messages for My Body

Jet lag. My body recognizes my mind fuzzy. It’s a couple of beats behind. It’s as if the audio of my mind and the video of my body aren’t syncing. I laugh at myself when I think how excited I was to leave corporate, thinking I’d also leave behind the 11PM calls. The joke's on me: late night global calls is not exclusive to corporate life. The past five weeks had me on Zoom at 6AM, close to midnight, and some hours in between. I was logging in as a writing student, learning how to write publicly, online. In the beginning, it was terrifying.

About a year and a half ago, I stopped posting stories to Instagram, snapshots of mundane scenes from my life provoking long, reflective passages. I wasn’t sure why I was posting. How useful my rambles were, for public consumption? Did people get anything out of it? (Thank you for subscribing and visiting me here!) What’s the implication of leaving a trail of data behind?

I haven’t figured it out. But what I do notice is this: I keep returning to the tension between what I experience privately, and how I share it publicly.

Once a month, I’ll share an essay that comes from an Afterimage. Here’s my first one.

​

Essay: The Art of the Striptease

Over the last five weeks, I've been learning to write. Some of you know I've been drawn to writing and have encouraged me to continue. The last five years, I’ve been writing the same way I used to keep a sketchbook: all for me and just for observation. What's changed these last weeks? I've started to write publicly.

I've always thought newsletters were something Someone-Who-Knows-More sends out. I don't know more than you. I just know different things.

Here’s what the writing process feels like to me, and how I experience it: The Art of the Striptease.

​

Saw: Seeing with the Eyes, and Other Body Parts

The snow around the house is melting. But it looks more like it's lowering than melting. The surface, untouched, stayed the same from last month and the whole thing keeps lowering as if it's on an elevator with no walls, like the contraption used by stage artists to appear and disappear. I was convinced the surface was hard and dry. I went to test it. My brain froze not because of the temperature of the snow, but because it had been betrayed. The snow was as soft as feathery shaved ice.

Overheard

A Curiosity: Saudade

The quote from Susan Cain. I heard her talking about waiting for friends to pick her up in her dorm room, listening to Leonard Cohen, the volume up. She was relishing it. Her friends were confused why she'd listen to “sad” music. For Susan, it wasn't sad. It was bittersweet.

The question of why music in minor keys sounds sad to certain people made me wonder whether there are cultural differences in perception and interpretation of musical passages in minor keys. I think of prayer calls I've heard in India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. It made me think of Japanese enka music and fado. Fado brought me to a curious sentiment the Japanese share with the Portuguese and the Brazilians: saudade. Longing, melancholy, nostalgia.

​
Connecting to: The Sad Workout

I'm doing something with "sad" music right now. I'm working out to it. My workouts from the past two months have been simple. There's no equipment except for the weight of my body. I fell into contemplative piano music from a suggestion for background music for writing. I started using it to work out. Or more precisely, I got up from writing and started stretching on the yoga mat, then transitioned into a workout to let my body release the physical tension I was holding onto as I wrote.

What started as a kind of joke with myself helps to bring out sensitivity and awareness to movement. The workout experience is noticeably different compared to working out with no music, or with dance music (or anything around 120 BPM per minute). Sad music on! I'm in second position, and everything changes. I'm suddenly elongated. I hit my marks with precision. My body feels hyper aware. Sad music transforms my workout from something uninspired and bordering on sloppy, into an elegant affair. My body remembers long necks, shoulders back, spine straight, turn out, and energy into the fingertips.

A taste of sad music to work out to:

• ​Joep Beving, Sleeping Lotus​
• ​The Plum Forest Singers, Yumeji's Theme, a haunting acapella version of the love theme from Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love.

There’s sad-ish music to run and dance to, too. When I want to shake off some energy, I channel my inner Pina on occasion. Vigor, elegance, and strength is a powerful combination to try on. It changes you.

​

Right Now

While ending up on Japan's northernmost island was not how I'd envisioned things, it's offered me lushness and luxuries I didn't have vocabulary for in the past. The only thing I'm missing here is people. Random people. I love wilderness, and I miss people. I miss people, their routines and their observations. The movement and conversations that form from the gaps between your quirks and mine. Endearing subtle quirks and not-so-subtle ones. I get to watch the seasons change here on the island, but I miss watching strangers in my neighborhood. Especially the strangers whose strangeness wears off, revealing a friend.