Recap
November 9, 2019
You’re back! At least I think you are back. Who knows, maybe this is the first time you are reading one of these posts. If that is the case, Welcome! My name is Aemi. I do not know how you came across this blog, but thank you for spending a little bit of your time reading my stories.
Around the time I started publishing these posts online, I began listening to a podcast by the creators of Welcome to Night Vale, Jeffery Cranor and Joseph Fink. (If you do not know what Welcome to Night Vale is, I highly recommend you listen to a few episodes on any major podcasting platform. Its quirky, satirical, deadpan humor is a real treat that has listener often go, “well, you are not wrong…”) Their other podcast, Start With This, is all about consuming and creating art. It is about the process, the little details that go into developing something.
Most of us, at some point or another, have had an idea for a story or a sketch on our mind, or a photo we wanted to take that we just never got around to doing. For some reason or other, we never end up producing it; we got busy with life, or maybe we thought it was not good enough, or maybe we did not know how to develop it. This podcast helps us take that idea and produce something real from it. For them, the medium they use to describe their artistic endeavor are podcasts; mine is this blog.
The topics they cover are accessible to a variety of mediums because the fundamentals are fairly universal. While there are certain topics that will not work out on a blog, such as dialogue (because, I hope you noticed this is a weekly monologue), there are bits and pieces that are useful in developing my thoughts into a cohesive manner.
One topic that did stick with me is the idea of recapping the story thus far. I realize I was naïve to think that you, the reader, have read every single post from the beginning. Most, if not all, of you have read the most recent post; and then hopefully went back to read how the story has come along. So for those who may not have had the time, this post is a small breather to catch everyone up on what has been going on for the past three months.
If this is one of the first posts you are reading on this blog, I must encourage you to go and read through the other posts. It is not a requirement, and I tend to write each post as a mini story, but it does help put the stories into context. And for privacy reasons, I have changed the names of everyone I write about. The main theme is showcasing the juxtaposition of growing up as an American Malayalee. Sometimes, I am put in a position where certain “cultural norms” might seem logical to one group and completely bizarre to the other. One of the first things I talked about was matrimonial sites; these are sites whose sole purpose is to match suitable partners. While this is a complete acceptable and common way of finding a partner for Malayalees, it is a foreign concept amongst Americans. The closest I could think of is eharmony or match.com. Full disclosure, I have not been on either, so this is just an assumption. Sure, we have dating apps, but the main goal is to get people together; marriage is something that might happen if all goes well. I have talked about my experience on a matrimonial site, and how, through American eyes, it is a strange concept.
A good portion of my posts are a category I call “non-happenings”. It was originally called something else, but one of you readers suggested a new name for it and I liked that much more, so I changed it. These are stories that begin like fairy tales; chance encounters, random connections, an overly eager family member. But for one reason or another, nothing ever came of it. The key thing I want to stress about these non-happenings is that even though nothing happened, that does not mean it was a bad thing, or that it was a good thing. It was simply something that did not work out. Life is full of non-happenings, it does not have to be just about potential relationships. Job applications are the biggest one for me. Do not let the Hallmark Channel fool you, the chances of a relationship being so neatly packaged and hand delivered to you like your coffee is incredibly rare! Rom-coms flood the entertainment mediums because they are exceptions, not the norm. There is so much that has to align (you both have to be in the same physical space and time, you both need to open to new relationships, both of your personalities have to be desirable to each other, and so many other things), that the chances of it happening are slim. It is not worthwhile to despair over it.
Sometimes things will happen, and you do not know how they will turn out. That is what is going on with the Lucas updates. To catch y’all up on that, my friend Lenny decided to play matchmaker and give my number to his co-worker, Lucas. Now, before anyone gets up in arms, Lenny did ask me first and I told him it was okay to do this. At first, I thought Lucas was going to be another non-happening story. But then something did happen! He messaged me last week and we have been chatting. For the sake of privacy, I will not go into detail about what we were talking about. But I will say that we are asking questions and finding out more about each other. It is a good place to start. Will anything come of it? It is far too early to tell.
That, in a nutshell, is what has been going on for the past three months. If any of that seemed interesting to you, I recommend you go back and read through the old posts. Leave a comment about what you like, what you do not like, if you relate to these things, or even suggestions on what you want me to talk about! This is a small operation, so I do appreciate your feedback. If you like what I am sharing, follow me on social media to stay up to date on when new posts are uploaded. Why not take a moment and hit the “follow” button:
IG: @asanworks
Twitter: @asanworks
FB: A new page
And if you know someone who has gone through or is going through this, share these posts with them as well. That way, we can all laugh together. Until next time.
- Aemi
