🎶 snowy christmas days lofi mix - feardog
Happy last week of 2022!! New Year’s Eve has always been one of my favorite holidays—there’s just something romantic and glamorous and reassuring all at once about counting down to midnight, potentially kissing someone, and starting a new planner with all of the previous year’s disappointments tucked away permanently on my shelf. (After my beloved Muji planner got discontinued in the U.S., I’ve been using this monthly planner. If you work in a corporate setting, however, I would recommend this monthly/weekly planner, as I found weekly planners crucial for fielding all the surprise tasks and requests that can crop up throughout the week.) And depending on which hemisphere I find myself in on NYE, the air feels like either bitingly cold motivation (to jump around! to run! to get warm!) or warm promises of a life of leisure. (I love my parents but no longer visit them for the holidays, which I’ll get into more in this newsletter.)
You’ll notice that you’re receiving this newsletter from Substack, instead of hello[at]cecexie.com. In keeping with my general goal of 2023 to do more of what I like to do and less of what I don’t like to do, I decided to move my newsletter over from ConvertKit. ConvertKit was great in many ways, but I now see it as more appropriate for creators and small businesses with its endless customization features and monetization integrations—and I just want to focus on writing and having an archive of my writing freely accessible to everyone. So please make sure to mark emails from cecexie[at]substack.com as “not spam,” and if you’ve enjoyed my work in the past year, consider sharing debrief with a few friends for 2023!
going home for the holidays. or not.
In college, it seemed like everyone goes home for the holidays. It felt like the thing to do—wrap up your last paper/final and then join the mad scramble to get a cab to the train station or airport in order to get home in time for your Hallmark movie holiday. (This was before the era of Uber and Lyft, and I remember once waiting for a taxi that the dispatcher had promised was on its way for over an hour before giving up and walking to the train station, my bright red suitcase trailing behind me, wheels grating uncomfortably against the concrete.) I’d often run into acquaintances on the Metro-North from New Haven to New York, and our conversations would go something like this:
Them: Where are you headed off to?
Me: Oh, just back home to California! It’ll be nice to go somewhere warm. What about you?
Them: Home, in Texas. / My family gets together in Italy every year for the holidays. / Back to Singapore!
Despite my external cheerfulness about heading to California, the truth of the matter was that I went home for the holidays not because I enjoyed being home, but because I didn’t know where else I could go or what else I could do. I already was one of those students who didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of having to crash a longer holiday and fielding the same well-intentioned but distressing questions yet again about where my parents were (“They’re in California.”) and why I hadn’t gone home (a rotation between “It’s a little far to justify the flight” and “Oh, they’re not that big on holiday stuff”). Home for the holidays was the default, the normal, the prototypical American college experience—and I wanted all of that.
I was too naive at the time to realize that while faking it until you make it works shocking well in professional spheres, the tactic utterly fails in personal realms like family (and friends, and romantic partners). If I just go home and act excited to see my parents, it means we’ll actually talk to one another. If I buy them Christmas gifts, it will mean that we care about each other.
Cue the many Decembers setting up our fake Christmas tree by myself. The carefully selected and wrapped presents that I would later spot dusty versions of, on the dresser in my parents’ bedroom. The dinners spent with only my book as company.
It shouldn’t have surprised me, because it’s not like family dinners were an occurrence in high school or middle school or… well, ever. My parents supported me in a lot of ways, but they struggled with supporting me emotionally, likely due to their own inexperience with the concept and the harsh conditions in which they grew up. As a result, I was alone unless I took proactive steps to not be alone—I routinely ate by myself but was also often the pseudo-adopted child of my BFFs’ parents. Their houses had gigantic Christmas trees with elegant ornaments; mine had a shedding fake tree decorated with a popsicle-stick Rudolph that I had made in elementary school. Their houses were filled with visiting relatives and family friends; mine was largely silent except for the evening hum of the Chinese news program. Their houses were boisterous and warm, with couches covered by swaths of comfy blankets; mine was consistently cold due to my parents’ refusal to turn on the heat in the winter. (Just put on another sweater, right? As if another sweater could fix the issue.)
I felt such shame at what my home for the holidays looked like. But despite my shame—or perhaps more accurately, because of it—I needed to keep up appearances and act like I, too, was loved in the way that I wanted to be loved. Whenever a high school friend left our hangout earlier than expected, apologizing that they had a family dinner, it took every ounce of my self-control to be casual about it and not awkwardly ask if I could come along. Oh, yeah, a family dinner? Totally get it. Me too.
I’d then drive home, walk past the fake Christmas tree, and sit in my room, alone. I’d bring a space heater into my room, turning it up until I didn’t need that extra sweater (or three). I would read or watch movies under my covers. I would watch the light disappear from my window.
Turns out, I had lied to everyone. California was actually much, much colder than Connecticut.
🔖 open tabs
The released transcripts of the January 6th congressional committee hearings are absolutely fascinating. I couldn’t put down Cassidy Hutchinson’s transcript (summary here), and everything that Ms. Hutchinson alleges that her first lawyer, Stefan Passantino, did seems to be a complete violation of legal ethics. Mr. Passantino allegedly told her, “The less you remember, the better,” declined to execute an engagement letter with her, and hid the fact that his legal fees incurred in the representation were being paid by an organization tied to Donald Trump. Just wow.
It’s amazing to me how hip-hop blogs, podcasts, and social media accounts have spun the trial of Tory Lanez. I love myself a good social or cultural commentary, but when the financial incentive of these platforms is through more clicks, how can we be surprised that unsupported theories abound? I’ve been playing Needy Streamer Overload, and I think it hits the nail on the head in terms of what types of content prevail on the internet, conspiracy theories being one of the more “profitable” categories.
Of course I read New York magazine’s article about nepo babies. It led me to wonder what type of nepo baby I might be—perhaps a standardized test nepo baby?