2 post 2 furious
Mar. 2nd, 2025 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isunshowerwow im back so soon... yeah. couple of things.
in book news, i received i'm waiting for you and other stories, a work of translations of kim bo-young sci-fi, for christmas (along with girl at war (see last post)). finally got around to it. this book advertises itself as four stories; it's two stories, one of which sits in the middle of the other one. but they aren't really the same universe. i mean, i guess you could make an argument for it.
the main story, "i'm waiting for you", tells the story of a man who is engaged to a woman, and the two of them keep getting temporally displaced as they journey to their wedding day and end up surviving the downfall of humanity alone, separated from each other, but writing to each other all the while. i read this one alone at a regional rail station in 40-degree weather at like 10:30 at night waiting for the last train back into the city, and reader, when the main character walks into the church he was supposed to get married in eons ago, miraculously intact, only to find the letters his fiancee has written him over the same duration of time? yeah. i cried. i cried and then when i finished it i COULD NOT immediately go back to my horror podcast (any other hi nay listeners out here?) so had to put on the voces8 recordings of there will be rest and stars (in my most recent choir concert, we performed both these pieces immediately together with no break in the middle; this works thematically as the composition is similar, they're both sara teasdale poems and "there will be rest" ends with a line about "stars i shall find" so then if you segue right into "stars"... also if you read up on sara teasdale and/or consider the themes for .2 seconds there is a very plausible reading of the narrator dying at the end of the first work and arriving in heaven for the second, and my point is, i'm not accepting any other way of programming either of these from now on kthxbai) and just stare up at the (mostly empty. city living sux sometimes) night sky for a while before i could THEN go back to my horror podcast. incredibly impactful piece of work.
"on my way to you" closes the book and tells the same story from the bride's perspective. it has a much more hopeful ending and imo they definitely do reunite (and in kim bo-young's extended universe, they do and then they have a daughter together, which makes me happy. they deserve it). her outlook and experiences are so different from his but i really like it as a sequel nonetheless. apparently the first story was written for a friend of the author's so he could use it to propose to his girlfriend and the sequel was written as a later gift to the married couple. i think that's fucking cute.
"prophet of corruption" (which is listed as a separate work from "that one life", but "that one life" reads as a chapter from "prophet of corruption"... anyways) explores what it means to be an individual. it has this interesting take on reincarnation--basically, that souls are recycled life after life and you go up to the afterlife and decide what to do next--that actually is very aligned with my own personal beliefs so that was sort of interesting but also my GOD the philosophy in here lol. this piece's main thesis is that a) we are all interconnected. harming another living being is harming ourselves. which. in this day and age. but also b) individuality as a contrast to that is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just different. and c) defining another as corrupt and "other" thereby corrupts and others oneself.
in mental health news i have not been doing so well lmao there's been a lot of little chaoses in my life lately and i'm not coping so well. nf season is kicking everyone at the eurovision blog's ass and i'm, like. not handling the discord server's transition from "we're coworkers" to "we're friends" because sometimes i feel like the friendship is contingent on me getting a good grade in blog responsibilities and with my SPECIFIC anxieties... well let's just say that on saturday i had a really shitty busy day at work that burnt me tf out, promptly left the aforementioned discord server because i believed that nobody there liked me enough to notice/care (...they truly did not notice lmao but whatever if i wanted to fish/put on a show about it i kinda picked the wrong day to do it because there was Much Business occurring) (business = croatia) and that they considered me a nuisance and what have you. i made it approx. 20 hours before realizing that Hey, This Sucks. the flight instinct has been a thing with me for years and years and years and its literally always detrimental to me and to my friendships so i need to, uh, not do that and embrace fear and learn that love comes with it and what the fuck ever. so i lied and said i had tech issues and rejoined the server and now i have to beg the least-online-out-of-all-of-us mods for my roles back and rejoin all the threads and its like a little awkward but its fine i did the grownup thing and came back its FINE.
in book news, i received i'm waiting for you and other stories, a work of translations of kim bo-young sci-fi, for christmas (along with girl at war (see last post)). finally got around to it. this book advertises itself as four stories; it's two stories, one of which sits in the middle of the other one. but they aren't really the same universe. i mean, i guess you could make an argument for it.
the main story, "i'm waiting for you", tells the story of a man who is engaged to a woman, and the two of them keep getting temporally displaced as they journey to their wedding day and end up surviving the downfall of humanity alone, separated from each other, but writing to each other all the while. i read this one alone at a regional rail station in 40-degree weather at like 10:30 at night waiting for the last train back into the city, and reader, when the main character walks into the church he was supposed to get married in eons ago, miraculously intact, only to find the letters his fiancee has written him over the same duration of time? yeah. i cried. i cried and then when i finished it i COULD NOT immediately go back to my horror podcast (any other hi nay listeners out here?) so had to put on the voces8 recordings of there will be rest and stars (in my most recent choir concert, we performed both these pieces immediately together with no break in the middle; this works thematically as the composition is similar, they're both sara teasdale poems and "there will be rest" ends with a line about "stars i shall find" so then if you segue right into "stars"... also if you read up on sara teasdale and/or consider the themes for .2 seconds there is a very plausible reading of the narrator dying at the end of the first work and arriving in heaven for the second, and my point is, i'm not accepting any other way of programming either of these from now on kthxbai) and just stare up at the (mostly empty. city living sux sometimes) night sky for a while before i could THEN go back to my horror podcast. incredibly impactful piece of work.
"on my way to you" closes the book and tells the same story from the bride's perspective. it has a much more hopeful ending and imo they definitely do reunite (and in kim bo-young's extended universe, they do and then they have a daughter together, which makes me happy. they deserve it). her outlook and experiences are so different from his but i really like it as a sequel nonetheless. apparently the first story was written for a friend of the author's so he could use it to propose to his girlfriend and the sequel was written as a later gift to the married couple. i think that's fucking cute.
"prophet of corruption" (which is listed as a separate work from "that one life", but "that one life" reads as a chapter from "prophet of corruption"... anyways) explores what it means to be an individual. it has this interesting take on reincarnation--basically, that souls are recycled life after life and you go up to the afterlife and decide what to do next--that actually is very aligned with my own personal beliefs so that was sort of interesting but also my GOD the philosophy in here lol. this piece's main thesis is that a) we are all interconnected. harming another living being is harming ourselves. which. in this day and age. but also b) individuality as a contrast to that is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just different. and c) defining another as corrupt and "other" thereby corrupts and others oneself.
in mental health news i have not been doing so well lmao there's been a lot of little chaoses in my life lately and i'm not coping so well. nf season is kicking everyone at the eurovision blog's ass and i'm, like. not handling the discord server's transition from "we're coworkers" to "we're friends" because sometimes i feel like the friendship is contingent on me getting a good grade in blog responsibilities and with my SPECIFIC anxieties... well let's just say that on saturday i had a really shitty busy day at work that burnt me tf out, promptly left the aforementioned discord server because i believed that nobody there liked me enough to notice/care (...they truly did not notice lmao but whatever if i wanted to fish/put on a show about it i kinda picked the wrong day to do it because there was Much Business occurring) (business = croatia) and that they considered me a nuisance and what have you. i made it approx. 20 hours before realizing that Hey, This Sucks. the flight instinct has been a thing with me for years and years and years and its literally always detrimental to me and to my friendships so i need to, uh, not do that and embrace fear and learn that love comes with it and what the fuck ever. so i lied and said i had tech issues and rejoined the server and now i have to beg the least-online-out-of-all-of-us mods for my roles back and rejoin all the threads and its like a little awkward but its fine i did the grownup thing and came back its FINE.
