I made it! TWO consecutive days of blog entry writing! I know this is walk in the park for some people but I'm the kind of person who doesn't really stick with stuff unless someone else is involved in it, so I'm pretty proud of myself for making it to day 2 (well, technically, it is 00:46 here in Seoul so this might not count in other people's standards).
SOoooooo, I woke up today to my partner Ben's message saying "Ahh dam was that really 1 year ago? Thas maddd" with a picture (attached below) of a performance I did during the end of second term of our master's degree.
I wore my inflatable latex squid headpiece to the last formal of the term at my university. This was after I handed in my MFA dissertation and when my relatives in Korea started texting me to get prepared for things to start shutting down in the UK as well. Korea was hit with the virus a few weeks before it got serious in Europe. I remember feeling like a character in an apocalypse movie. You know when the world is deserted and the main character ponders on the days before it all changed? I felt like that past version of the character, expecting to wake up to a zombie filled world.
Anyways, that squid dinner performance was the last in person thing I did till now and the last time I had dinner in a room full of people, all sitting 30cm away - at most.
Think I'm still at the denial stage in the 5 stages of grief. And denial is only the first stage, the rest goes anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - for anyone who's not familiar with it. Even though all my plans for the upcoming 2 years have crumbled into pieces and death numbers won't stop rising, I'm still denying everything, but it just hit me that I've avoided processing this properly for an entire year now when I saw that message from Ben. Maybe, now that I lost my full time job, I can slowly move through the remaining stages and accept that there's nothing I can do about this thing that happened and is still happening.
I applied to about six places (jobs, residencies, exhibitions) and got rejected to one of them so far (I felt a bit of a hostile vibe from one of the interviewer for that residency position, I was not wrong haha). So I'm just trying to play out the waiting game as chill as I can. But it's just too hard to play cool when you feel sick to the stomach while refreshing your inbox just in case you hear back from one of them. So I went for a fortune (? I don't know if 'fortune' is the right word, I think with what exist in Korea instead of 'fortune reading', 'faith reading' is a much better translation? the Korean word for it is 사주) reading session with a friend, just for fun and to get a bit of encouragement about my future as these fortune readers never say anything bad. And the person said these fortunes are like a barcode that everyone's born with, it won't change but will be read differently depending on the scanner. Yeah, I mean I'm not an expert in barcode technology but I think that makes sense? Anyways, this person said that I do have a very good fortune over all and that the next three years are my good years and the three years after that will exponentially get better depending on how I do with the upcoming three years. And that I have luck coming in my way with documents from July to October so, hey, I might get one of those opportunities I applied for? I'm just trying to do everything that will get my mind off of the outcomes of these applications (and trust me, there are soooooo many more to apply still) while churning them out constantly. I'm grasping for straws to get some emotional consolation. In my case, the straws were 40 minute 사주 reading session for 5만원.
I should stop and go to bed. I have to get up in 5 hours for the opening night of Claustro at CCI Panama. Lu and I are taking part in the exhibition as a collective and we're planning to do a broadcasting interaction for it. Here's a link to the work if anyone's interested: https://www.mipark.info/caring-the-message-mi-lu
I wonder when my entries will start having a purpose? or a theme? a thesis statement?
Maybe I just have to write them earlier than midnight hahh
To conclude today's blog entry, here's my todo list from today and a screenshot of that message from Ben mentioned earlier in the entry.
TODO LIST
Hoover the house ✔
Export (or find a way to share) Microsoft Teams BROADCAST CREW conversation for today's meeting with Laura ✔
DO 30 mins of exercise (yoga or go running) ✔
Finish second round of translation of aunt's research proposal 𝗫
Get groceries for 매운탕 ✔
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