tendiaries

[tendiaries]

this is the story that made me want to start blogging in the first place, because it's probably long and i have no other place to put it, and this story is not something you hit people up with and say "hey! let me tell you where the idea for this character came from!" as you will see. though i guess i think that about everything i ever felt the urge to tell anyone, and it is why i write

i started writing this story that we've come to known as "rabbit hole" but then was titled "stalkerau" around october of 2022. for a long time most of it was murky, and i myself didn't know a handful of the answers that we have now laid out, but the process was fun. throughout my time writing it i perhaps processed too close to the sun and the story despite being very distant from my experiences is still so close that it made me deeply sad at times and also clarified to me that i absolutely need therapy

one of the things that was a challenge about this story was making seonghwa seem Right as in hongjoong's eyes he's just a goody two-shoe little guy but i don't think he would've been drawn to someone who clearly displayed signs of deep seated issues such as hongjoong had he not been through things that made him drawn to them. so we end up with this guy who's been simultaneously abandoned in more ways than one and was then sheltered as a remedy for it

when i was a kid, from i think 5th to 8th grade i had this classmate with whom i had a love-hate relationship with. he was temperamental, overly emotional, always getting into trouble and throwing tantrums that seemed too big for whatever callout he got from the teachers for not paying attention. i remember feeling sorry for him from those things alone, i felt particularly sorry that he always felt so angry when he started crying out of being accused of doing something he didn't do (which somehow happened often. is everyone's school like that? i remember so many boys getting wrongfully accused of all sorts of things)

he used to come to my house sometimes, and sometimes he'd come by the bakery that was near my house and he stopped by just to say hi and didn't want to come in because he wasn't supposed to take long, so we just chatted by the door for a bit. it was odd to me that he did that because we never felt like friends as i sort of knew i wasn't supposed to trust him, and he was too busy being misogynistic to ever act as if we were friends in school. but i liked him when we were just chatting as kids and he didn't have to pretend to anyone that he was tough.

when he came by my house we liked playing video games (i had a super nintendo he snubbed because it was sooo outdated in comparison to his playstation two but he also loved it) and playing with barbies. he wasn't the only boy that came over to my house to play with barbies, there was another one, and the funny thing is that they shared the same name and middle name. both of them were always worried that i would tell someone in school that they played with barbies at my house. it never crossed my mind. i hope both of them felt that their secret was safe with me enough to not let it rid them with anxiety

i don't know how i found out about the things i'm about to type now. this type of story has a way of going around and you never know the source, i have no idea who was it who told it to me. it might even have been teachers, now that i think about it, which i hope is my memory playing tricks on me as that is something absolutely terrible for them to have done

his mom had died when he was pretty young, but i think he was old enough to have memories of her. from all the vagueness going on surrounding the topic, i remember picking up that it had been a suicide. it always made me think of the music video for stan by eminem for some reason. now that it's been half a life without watching the video, i can't even remember if there was a suicide in it, but it's the image that always came to my head along with this story. his dad was a pilot, i think, and he didn't raise him, and instead he was raised by his aunt and his uncle. the last time i remember seeing him anywhere on social media, i saw he had become a pilot too

the thing about him was that all throughout school he talked about being beat by his uncle. it was something he talked about often, matter of factly. sometimes he mentioned it when he was wrongly accused of something, or if a teacher threatened to tell his uncle about something wrong yet absolutely harmless or innocuous he had done, which they threatened (and often times, probably carried out) with the intention of bringing him harm. on those occasions he mentioned it with fear, and sometimes having this hovering over his head made him cry

sometimes i feel wronged by the school system for never having realized that there was something wrong with me, for never having helped me realize i struggled with adhd, for never having taken me by the hand to go further in my school career. but i was never failed by those adults in my life the way he was

have you ever looked at someone and felt a sense they were beyond help? i remember thinking that about him when i was a kid, and i don't remember thinking this about anyone else at that time. i remember thinking that about him when i saw he'd become a pilot. i fear he grew up to pass all he went through on to someone else, and i wish i had enough hope that he could've escaped the cycle to look him up now and see how life is treating him now that he gets to control it

despite it all, i think about him fondly. i often go by the church that is right in front of where he used to live and i think of him. i don't even know if i wish him well, but i remember his voice and his constantly bruised legs and the bag of warm bread when he stopped by my house, and i remember the legends of a note he wrote confessing he had a crush on me

i don't know how to wrap this up now, i just wish someone else would know about him with all the details i know. when i took from these memories here and there for my fiction it wasn't with the intention of bastardizing someone's real story. i suppose i simply wanted to talk about it. not all of it made it into my story, but i wished it'd exist in full somewhere

[tendiaries]

all i want for christmas is you

what is the purpose of concerts? i ask the crowd in a seinfield-esque way and wait for the feedback of a couple chuckles before continuing.

no, because, you pay a lot of money, stand somewhere for hours while deafening loud song plays and you see a handful of people on a platform. just people, normal people. and that's it. the crowd hopefully laughs a bit on this part, but probably not, as this is not very funny for reasons of it not being a joke.

there's a chance you're gonna be going through the experience surrounded by people you've picked fights with on twitter. most of them are complete strangers, just standing there with you looking at the same people. and realizing they're just people. and then it's over. nothing changes.

this is the bottom line of the mental gymnastics i've been using as an exercise routine ever since the end of 2019. it's gone through a few revisions and ended up here, and i think there's not much else we could improve on. this is, after all, me rationalizing concerts to the point of rendering them meaningless.

concerts are meaningless. that's what i keep trying to tell myself, unconvinced, but something's gotta give at some point.

i recognize that as far as being in countries that are not part of the "world" where "world tours" take place, i'm pretty lucky. i'm in the only country where we know for certain people stop by when they're touring this otherworldly continent (if they plan on performing a full concert, and not 5 songs in a festival that proceeds to get cancelled). and i'm in the only state where we know for certain people stop by when they come over to this country far removed from the world they tour. not the same city, but i can save up my 15 dollars for the trip, and i'm in a place where i can save 15 dollars. lucky

i remember pretty clearly in 2019 when the dates started being released, one new date every day, and how hopeful i was that i'd get the announcement i wanted. except one day, after the united states and europe were packed full, there was no new post. but that's ok! they do second legs of tours! so it's fine. it's tour > comeback > second leg, and chances are, if they're touring outside of the world, with the size of this country the odds are in your favor! and then that tour was postponed for two years.

they announce concerts in their country and i look up flight tickets. it's not unaffordable, but would put a strain on my finances for a while (this country is not part of the world so the conversion between world and non-world currencies is not great), but it's manageable. the problem is that we're not sure it's safe, if it's gonna get cancelled last minute, if the countries are gonna lock down again. but things are looking up so there'll definitely be a second leg announced now!

on the week of the LA concerts i mute "coming back", which i believe i still have muted to this day. i don't really check through my list of 60 muted words related to concerts (it works fairly well!). i found it a little hard to believe that there was going to be another world world tour announced before non-world got anything. for my well being (since the exercise hadn't reached its final form) i decided it was for a festival or two and for north-american promotions. it was not

the end of 2021 was particularly harsh in that regard. people were. honestly. insane. and insufferable about seeing the tour after two years. all of the concerts had streams on twitter, and people who lived in the world world were happy. i considered leaving. it was better than seeing people who had so much i wanted complain about the minor inconveniences of what they had. it's a difficult equation to make. i once heard someone say that there was a study somewhere that diminishing your annoyance improves your life more than augmenting your happiness, so according to this, leaving a thing i loved but hurt me was better than staying for the happiness it provided. i stayed then because i'm stubborn, a little stupid, and because those people who are just people who stand on platforms whom i've come to love cannot possibly improve my life by being removed from it. with them i would in one way or another let go of other people who i see on the same ground level as me, though the ground they stand on is notoriously part of the world and mine is not (this analogy sounds very self-victimizing but i just thought it was so funny and now i'm too invested in it to stop)

from the beginning of 2022 i thought that maybe if i could be In the world at the same time as the higher-ground-level people i'd be restricted on twitter a few less times (it's three so far! they were all because of this whole thing!). so some things were put in motion, but you see, i've never been In the world, which makes everything a bit harder. the main character of the world and a lot of its minor players are not very interested in letting non-world people get in, lest they enjoy too much the possibility of not being crushed by them economically and i guess spiritually and decide to stay a while. it's good thinking!! a lot of them would! a lot of them do! but to ask to just go for a quick visit and come back it demands a lot of time (which i didn't know about and therefore didn't have enough of) and a lot of money (which i don't have a lot of, but knew about). i did have a ticket to be ground level (pretty good ground level!) to see the higher-ground-level people. i know my luck well enough to never have really trusted this would lead me to being In the world at the same time as the people i wanted to see on the platforms blasting sounds that would make my tinnitus worse for a day or two, so although there was some upset it was manageable.

when i got that golden ticket i told a handful of people, a bit embarrassed of the fact that it seemed reckless to an extent, the ticket itself was almost a month's salary, not to mention transportation and all the other little things you need to stay alive and healthy and safe both in the world and outside. i also feel like the world people have no idea how it feels like, so i don't feel like the expense to see normal people, absolutely fucking normal people, for two hours standing on the platform, seems justifiable to them. i really don't know, but i've also come to realize recently that i have a tendency to think the worst of people, which i'm trying to change. to half of them i never told that it fell through, but i guess they picked up on it anyway.

the thing about the golden ticket is that i had admission for one, for one day. but when i saw other normal people getting their tickets, no one seemed happy with anything they got. some wanted seats from where they could see the platform better, some wanted to wave at the platform people from ground level but behind a glass panel (spooky). that doesn't help make concerts make any more sense. if everyone is unhappy doing something you'd spend a significant portion of your yearly earnings to do while paying only an insignificant fraction of it, it starts to seem pointless. most of the people i know had enough admission tickets in total in 2022 to compose anywhere from 1 to 3% days spent with normal people worsening their earsight from the platform

statistically, every time non-world is not part of the world in "world tour", the chances of it being part of it soon go up by a little bit (again, i'm lucky that i'm in a very likely spot amongst the unlikely), but it's the bus paradox a little bit. actually it has nothing to do with the bus paradox. you just wait because there's nothing else to do (although you did check the flight prices for many places that are not punishing you for living in the non-world by preventing you from visiting it, and you did consider taking a loan that's roughly enough to buy a brand new car just so you could've gone somewhere and watched something and you deeply regret not doing it in hindsight. which is a bit crazy)

so now they're leaving the main character of the world soon, but not before announcing the supporting cast will also be graced with the presence of these normal people. and that's fine because everyone knew it, and i did the equation again only recently, before the first world had its tour, and decided to stay once again. ah! that's the bus paradox. that i could leave now because there's nothing happening and then there'll be less annoyance, or i can wait a bit longer and take the bus i've craved for three years, which has the most comfortable seats, the best route, and all of the people on board give you a sense of belonging because they're all going to exactly the same place as you, for their slightly different and not any shallower nor deeper reasons, and they say when you get off this bus something within you might be different for the better (only applicable if ridden few times)

and that's precisely the issue now. that this particular bus has been ridden so many times by everyone around you that riding it once (non-worlders are not lucky enough to have more than one ride available) starts seeming like too little too late. there's something about the thought of people saying they're happy for me because i'm finally gonna have this thing i wanted for so long, when they all had it so many times that they had room to complain about it, that just makes it feel all the more pointless. it's weird to embark on something that is life changing when it's life changing to no one else. it feels like it's too much made out of nothing. so that's where we started, i'm not sure what the bus is for anymore, and i'm embarrassed of the fact that i want to ride it so bad, and that it would mean so much to me, and that i can only ride it once. maybe. if it comes. i'm embarrassed of how i can quote every single person who voiced a complaint about their rides because i ruminated it for so long, as to why they felt that i was the right person they wanted to share it with while seeing me just standing by the bus stop unsure if there even is a line that stops by here

i also had to sit with the thought that maybe i'm a bad person, because of course my friends would be happy for me and they're honest, and of course they wanna share their life with me and i should be grateful. but (and this is not about concerts or buses or people anymore) at some point the frustrations of those who have so little have to be enough justification for not constantly carrying the positivity and good sportsmanship that is demanded of them. that is to say, i'm unfortunately never unaware of the fact of how little i have, and how it softens the impact of all that i can't have because i'm so used to making it into something else, into concerts are pointless, and puts everything that i want on a sort of pedestal.

so i feel i'm not really unreasonable. it's hard to believe in unreasonability when i've had to toy around with this thought so much to find some angle through which i'm not so ugly on the inside

concerts are pointless. that has yet to keep me from looking up flight prices and putting numbers on the annoyance equation