My top bonkers Twin Peaks scenes

I am celebrating the end of watching the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (a process I have dragged out much too long for fear of leaving a Twin Peaks-sized hole in my heart) by capturing my favorite, most surreal moments of the show. A big thank you to David Lynch for pioneering a show so wonderfully addictive, full of so many strange characters, and for keeping true to that weird Lynchian soul.

6. Get Happy—Season 2 Episode 1: May the Giant be With You

After Laura Palmer’s death, we’ve known Leland Palmer to be dramatically moved by music.

This scene is a good example of the show’s incredible way of weaving in the duality of light and dark, overlaid with a nice gloss of surrealistic quality. We are introduced to Donna Hayward’s younger sisters, who are preparing a small show for Donna, Maddy Ferguson, Leland, Sarah Palmer, and the Haywards. One daughter sits at the piano with a pink tulle dress and crown, while the other stands and reads a self-penned poem about Laura.

The poem reveals a lot about the mysterious Twin Peaks, with mentions of the town’s dark “woods” — the woods that definitely represent some kind of time warp/black hole/place where Bob hangs out.

“It was Laura and I saw her glowing

In the dark woods I saw her smiling…”

Leland then requests the song “Get Happy” and proceeds to sing off-beat, and in an increasingly manic pace with his fists in the air, until he collapses on the Hayward’s floor. And in a tuxedo! The dinner guests’ faces turn from laughter to vague worry and disgust, as do our faces. As do ours.

5. V-i-c-t-o-r-y—Season 2, Episode 3: The Man Behind the Glass



Poor Nadine Hurley just wanted to invent some soundless drapes — and when that didn’t happen, plus the slow unfortunate breakdown of her marriage with Ed Hurley, she felt she couldn’t deal. Nadine falls into a coma after swallowing a bunch of pills in her living room, and Ed visits her in the hospital just as she begins to stir. After a sweet rendition of “On Top of Old Smokey” by Ed, Nadine puts a steel grip on Ed’s hands and we discover her beast strength.

Not only does Nadine single-handedly break through what must be iron shackles, she also begins to furiously chant a high school cheer song.

Haunting, if just a little bit funny, this scene is the beginning of Nadine’s regression into her old high school self.

4. My name is Mike— Season 2 Episode 6: Demons

Mysterious one-armed man Philip Gerard has been moseying his way through Twin Peaks since we first saw him sneak behind some doors at the hospital. Philip had been staving off Mike’s demon-soul with his injections, but the good old boys at Twin Peaks PD kept him from his medication for just long enough to see what would happen.

And did we all get a show. We finally get to see the mysterious Mike after Philip falls into a convulsion and delivers some of the coolest, most guttural mouth sounds. Philip’s high register suddenly changes to a deep, regal swagger, and he finally spills on Bob’s back story.

He tells us that Bob is an “inhabiting spirit”, a world-wandering soul who attaches himself to lifeforms. Bob, Mike says, feeds on fear.

3. It is happening again— Season 2 Episode 7: Lonely Souls

Our favorite giant makes another appearance — this time at The Roadhouse — and everyone seems to be picking up on his energy. This is just one scene in the emotional upheaval that is Season 2 Episode 7, but maybe the most strikingly bizarre.

Log Lady tells Agent Dale Cooper and Sherriff Truman that there “are owls in The Roadhouse”, which prompts them to go and check out the scene. Julee Cruise and the band is looking and sounding ethereal with “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”, surrounded by halo lighting, soft smoke, and a very Lynchian microphone stand. Everyone from Twin Peaks is here tonight, from Bobby Briggs to Donna to the old man from The Great Northern.

While sitting, Coop gets a vision of the Giant on the stage, who tells him “It is happening again.” It seems the Log Lady has an intuition of the Giant, as she looks back and forth from the stage, confoundedly.

Most of The Roadhouse patrons we know are intuiting on the strange events of the night. Like the day Laura Palmer was found dead, Donna again begins to sob out of the blue. Bobby becomes immediately forlorn and the old man approaches Coop, telling him, “I’m so sorry.”

2. Not going back to Missoula— Season 2 Episode 7: Lonely Souls

So what, exactly, is happening again?

While the Twin Peaks gang are getting weird visions down at The Roadhouse, something sinister is happening at the Palmer residence. Ol’ gum-chewing Bob, the Bob who we’ve only known in dreams and apparitions, stares back at Leland in the mirror.

Maddy comes downstairs and Leland/Bob attacks her, starting a whirlwind scene of blood, dancing, and slow-motion editing. As Leland is revealed as Bob, we finally get to put the pieces together of his stark-white hair, his strange dancing, and his previous murder of Jacques Renault. As Bob, Leland is a terrifying monster who sucker-punches Maddy and throws her into a picture frame. We imagine glimpses of Laura’s death being repeated, especially because it seems this attack was prompted by Maddy’s plans to leave Twin Peaks.

“Leland says you’re going back to Missoula, Montana,” Bob screams.

As her actual double, Maddy represents all of the love and rage both Bob and Leland feel for Laura. In the midst of attacking her and dancing with her, Bob cries over Maddy while calling her “Laura”.

1. Let’s rock— Season 1 Episode 3: Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer

The icon of iconic moments, the red room scene was when I became fully on board to the weirdness that is this show. The elements of the room are simple yet haunting — red drapes, a red suit, a single statue in the middle of the room, and that one shadow of a bird that silently floats through.

Cooper seems paralyzed in his chair, watching the scene motionlessly as an old man. “The Man from Another Place” has his back turned toward us, furiously rubbing his hands together before turning around and doing an insane, backwards hand-clap.

As he begins his strange monologue speaking entirely in reverse, the man’s body movements and voice are garbled and disjointed — his nature very alien. The scene also incorporates long, silent pauses that leave little else for the audience to focus on. Laura, too, is speaking with reverse speech.

“I feel like I know her,” says Laura, “But sometimes my arms bend back.”

It’s only later that FBI specialist Albert Rosenfield reveals to us that Laura had her hands bound behind her the night she was murdered.

So much of this scene include crucial clues to the story — birds, chewing gum, eerie dancing, and Laura’s whispered secret. It’s this secret that leads us to Leland/Bob at the end of the second season. Because of this and because of almost every single aspect of this carefully-crafted sequence, it’s my dearest, most surreal scene from the series.

All of my masks

Jiufen was an hour-or-so trip from my hotel via Taiwan’s convenient train system. While the metro could get you to the bottom of Jiufen’s mountain, heading up the winding roads to the tourist-filled alleyways took wild twists and turns in an old, stuffed bus.

That day it was raining in Jiufen, making for soggy mountaintops and umbrella-clad shop owners. I was heading up various open stairwells to find a famous rice cake shop in some crevice of the area, when around one corner I found the red wall of masks. It was what is called the “house of ghost masks” by its owner; horrifying, body-horror, trypophobic, and right up my alley.

Masks have always been an area of devotion to certain friends of mine. Artists and performers I know love them for their transformative quality–something about swapping in another face literally changes you into someone else, revealing something about the nature of humanity. Makes sense to me.

Some find masks as a tool to hide, but others use it as a gateway to discover new characters, new attitudes you hope to adopt, your “true self”.

If I had to pick a mask I thought I wore everyday, it would probably be one vacillating between the two masks in the center of the photo; stoic and jolly, humorous and content. Perhaps on other risky days I’m the strawberry mask, or the one full of holes in the bottom right.

I don’t believe one ever is without a mask, though. Even as the glow of the TV hits your face at midnight while you’re on the couch or hiking through the forest alone or meditating underneath swirls of incense — are you ever truly without a mask?

Walter J. Ong writes in “The Writer’s Audience Is Always Fiction” that masks are needed for all human communication — written, oral, sign, body.

“We address others orally as our superiors, inferiors, equals, which is built into existential actuality more directly than written communication can ever be, has within it a drive making for the removal of masks,” writes Ong, “Lovers try to strip off all masks. And in all communication, insofar as it is related to actual experience, there must be a movement of love. Those who have loved over many years may reach a point where almost all mask is gone, but never all.”

Interactions between you and any other person is always obscured by masks, the masks of status, gender, experience — the layers are full and wired on from years of reinforcement. An effort to love others authentically is an attempt to look behind all masks, but what about the veils you adorn for yourself? Can someone else strip that off, maybe even with their own mask still on?

How is one supposed to remove the masks you’re not even conscious of having?

Imagining the multitude of attitudes and feelings and aspirations I dress myself with everyday, it’s difficult to know if I am really strawberry-man or hole-man or gold-face on the inside. When all of the masks are gone, perhaps there is still one fused to the core. I wonder what she looks like.

The art of letting go, or what I learned from trapeze

There’s something about doing what terrifies me that makes me feel absolutely invincible. It could be just receptors flying but it also could be something else—the core within me that shakes when I climb a ladder thirty feet.

I furiously put chalk on my hands just twenty seconds before, and already I doubt the efficacy just fifteen feet up. I’ve always wanted to do swinging trapeze. There’s a lot of things I do that are intentionally chosen to push my boundaries and make me feel uncomfortable. Improv, dance, speaking, performance, trapeze. In truth, just executing these things is only the first act.

Leaping from the ledge of the trapeze proved not to be so hard for me. The ropey net near the floor made me feel better, my grip on the wide, swinging bar made me feel safe. As I swung the length of the gymnasium, instructors called out for me to lift and wrap my legs over the bar. Hands still on the bar, I swing to bring my legs over—my first ride on the trapeze and things are going alright.

With legs hinged on the bar, swingers are then supposed to release their grip and hang their body towards the ground, arching their back to the opposite wall. Hands off is the second act.

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In the last quarter of my life I’ve sought skills and thrills, things to make me scared, and experiences to keep me searching for one epiphany after the other.

It’s an epiphany like the ones that come in mid-air, unable to make your hands loosen their grip from the bar. And as much as my brain could tell my body one thing, my body just would not respond. It’s unfamiliar, the strange and literal paralysis of fear.

My muscles braced, rigid like my concrete plans and morning routine. Tense. I live in a world of soothing preparation amidst a desire to flow. The fluidity in my life almost never comes— a dance that flirts with passion, a presentation that barely completes without self-doubt.

In trusting myself and the people around me enough to let go, I could one day enjoy the moment or the ride of a swing.

Letting go isn’t about staying on or falling, because that’s the result and the result isn’t right now—or at least that’s what the epiphany told me as my fists clung to the bar. I stayed hooked to it even as the instructors shouted a couple more times, until finally racking my soul and releasing my body downward.

If someone gets hit by a train full of commuters, did they get hit at all?

A scorching hot day in the South Bay Area, and commuters are packed in the Mountain View train station to make their way northbound back into the city after work.

As the train approaches, noted by the whaling horn, people squish together to push and pry to make it to the train entrance sooner than that person, and that person, and that person.

CalTrain speeds north, stopping at stations like Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Just north of Redwood City, the cars slow to a stop as the overhead voice tells riders that an incident has occurred.

For any regular Bay Area public transportation traveler, this is just a part of the everyday risk. But that’s perhaps one reason why no one seemed to care. Social media quickly tells us that the southbound train reaching Redwood City has hit a pedestrian.

The overhead voice — filled with apology for the delay — informs passengers that there was a “trespasser strike”. A woman across the hallway laughs to her friend, tickled by the intentional dispassion of the term “trespasser strike”.

As more people climb onto their laptops and phones, chatter elevates as more start to make alternate plans for their way home.

I interpret writer David Foster Wallace’s essay This Is Water like this: being aware of the world outside of yourself is crucial. It must be a constant reminder towards compassion and empathy — being so entrenched in self-centeredness can be like a fish that doesn’t even know its living in water.

“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.” — This Is Water, David Foster Wallace

As I start to reminisce on this, I glance at the seated, impatient people on the train. My own pre-occupation suddenly starts to show itself to me, that I too was flirting with passing judgement on a train full of other commuters. I was still putting myself as the center of this world.

Just another cliché in a train full of clichés.

The overhead voice tells us cheerfully they received the signal to move forward.

The train pulls away from the station, slowly as not to disturb the southbound train still stuck in its place, now abandoned.

Next to the train tracks, we pass one policeman taking notes as he speaks with the southbound train’s driver. Further along, police cars line the street as more policemen stand and look at the stuck train, gleaming still in the hot, setting sun.

Murakami, Munch, and the fleeting nature of infatuation

Hope, love, and loss–reflecting on the disillusionment of The One.

“On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning” is a short story by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer born in 1949.

I was introduced to Murakami in poetry summer camp when a daily packet of short fiction landed on my desk; innocuous but entirely life-changing. “On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning” was one of the many short stories in the packet but I’m unable to remember any of the others.

Murakami struck a chord with me in the way he infused the surreal into the most mundane parts of the every day. Monsters could show up on people’s lawns from bursting through the ground, giant talking frogs interrupt a man’s normal life to take him on a wild adventure. In this way, Murakami uses the bizarre and dreamlike to tell us things about “normal” life as we know it.

In “On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning”, Murakami writes about a man who ruminates on passing by a girl who he is certain is his soulmate. The man was walking west to east, while the woman east to west. In this man’s retelling of the story to a friend, he shares that he is positive of his love for her because the woman wasn’t remarkable in any way — it was just an intense feeling about the woman that shook him to his core.

If he were to have met her, he says, he would have approached her and regaled her with a story about a man and a woman. This story-within-a-story tells how this man and woman fall in love and know that they are the “100% perfect” ones for each other, but decide to put it to the test by separating and letting fate take the reins.

Fate has its way and soon the man and woman forget entirely about each other. Much later in the future, the man and woman pass each other by on the street and both have a glimpse of a thought where the other is The One for them. In the fleeting moment of heart-pounding potency, both man and woman resign to their path and cross each other without a word.

“A sad story, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.”

And that is how Murakami’s short story ends. A complete look at the failings of “could be” and “could have been” in the microcosm of one man’s conversation.

This man contemplates how he should have spoken to a woman he saw, serenading her with a story about the ephemeral nature of love in an overcrowded maze like Harajuku, Japan. Of course, this story about the man and woman never reaches the target, making it a gorgeous meta-tale about infatuation.

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I recently was able to visit the SFMOMA’s exhibition on Edvard Munch, an 18th-century Scandinavian painter whose symbolic paintings focused on themes of anxiety, loneliness, and love.

In The Lonely Ones (seen above), the painting’s motifs are as simple and in-your-face as Murakami’s short story. The possibility and aching closeness of love are there, but it makes the separation and sliver of emptiness between the two characters all the more apparent.

Much like in Murakami’s story, the man is the one slightly positioned towards the woman, but both are gazing outwards towards the wholeness of life and the future.

As they are turned away from us, neither the subjects nor even our eyeline meets anyone else’s.

No one person is connecting with the other, and this creates a very real sense of loneliness.

Munch created several versions of this painting, but all with the same concept and visual idea. As the man is shaded in darkness and the woman in light, it shows the unavailability of each person to the other.

It’s as if both are passing each other on the street, knowing the possibility of love could be there, but moving past — solidifying the gap that for a brief moment, wavered with chance.

Anomalisa and the truth of despair

Charlie Kaufman’s film exposes life’s disillusionments, all through the medium of puppets and the uncanny valley

By the time I heard about Charlie Kaufman’s 2015 directorial film Anomalisa, I considered myself a tried-and-true Kaufman-head.

The story of Anomalisa follows protagonist—deeply depressed Michael Stone—as he travels to Cincinnati to speak at a business conference on customer service. There, he reunites with an ex-flame named Bella, and meets and quickly falls in love with conference attendee Lisa.

Michael’s bleak take on life is portrayed in his struggle to connect to anyone — his wife and child, Bella, and Lisa — ultimately showing that his desire for love is futile.

Human automatons

Kaufman teamed up with stop-motion animator Duke Johnson (business partner to Community actor and animator Dino Stamatopoulos) to create this entirely stop-motion animated film. Kaufman made a very clear choice with the look and feel of the characters; human and puppet perfectly intertwined. This almost-humanness is known as the “uncanny valley”, or the eerie feeling when experiencing something that closely resembles (but doesn’t entirely look like) a human being.

Each character’s face is adorned with two lines next to the eyes and one line outlining the jaw to create the illusion of a mask — these characters are supposed to function as puppets.

Much like in Being John Malkovich, another Kaufman screenplay, the use of puppets serve as a way to analyze the human condition. In Malkovich, main character Craig uses John Malkovich as a human puppet, taking over his body and life in a way that serves Craig best.

In Anomalisa, these puppets create the visual equivalency of sameness, or of the human-as-machine.

We all have the same voice

The concept of sameness and banality is another big theme for Anomalisa. The film’s cast is comprised of only three actors- David Thewlis voices Michael, Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa, and Tom Noonan plays exactly everybody else. That’s everyone from the cab driver, to Bella, to Lisa’s coworker Emily, even Michael’s child.

Even the hotel Michael stays at is called The Fregoli — Fregoli delusion is the actual psychological condition where one believes every person around them is in disguise.

In fact, not only does everyone’s voice sound the same, but their faces are identical as well. Both men and women don the same non-distinctive face; plain, unblemished, and right in the middle between masculine and feminine.

Michael’s face is special, since the story is told from his point of view. Lisa’s face is also strikingly individual, with a scar on the left side of her face and even red streaks in her hair.

Michael’s unfailing need to connect is represented by the way every character looks and sounds exactly the same. Regardless of gender, age, or relationship, Michael finds everyone achingly vapid. He is worn out from life.

The hope of being saved

This feeling culminates in a scene when Michael stares at his hotel room’s bathroom mirror and his face begins to warp. The glitches accelerate as he finally takes a hold of his face and removes the exterior—everything below his eyes comes off like a mask. Underneath, Michael finds his two eyes bulging, mixed with mechanical machinery and metals. He realizes he is actually a machine.

It’s this split second of a moment when Michael first hears Lisa’s voice — it breaks him from his trance as he exclaims, “Oh God, someone else”.

The first burst of fresh air and the promise of a savior energizes Michael to frantically rush outside of his hotel room in search for the magical voice.

After finding Lisa, the source of the one original voice, Michael quickly becomes infatuated. He yearns to learn about her; everything from the details of her day to her favorite songs and the meaning behind the scars on her face.

Lisa is equally as entranced by Michael — she had traveled to the business conference to watch him speak, and admits she hadn’t had a boyfriend in eight years.

The pair grow close: Michael lightheartedly nicknames Lisa “Anomalisa” for her self-description of being an anomaly.

Michael, too, finds her an anomaly — the one person in the world who broke through his feelings of despair.

The film also carries a side-theme about Japan; Michael visits an adult store where he buys an antique Japanese doll (puppet?) for his son. At the end of the film, Lisa discovers that the term “anomalisa” means “Goddess of Heaven” in Japanese.

And hope is again lost (or is it?)

As the sun breaks in the morning, Michael and Lisa sit down for breakfast. The two discuss plans to start a relationship–Michael to divorce his wife and Lisa to move to Los Angeles with him. It’s during this conversation that Michael hears Lisa’s voice in an entirely new light.

She mentions possibly visiting the Cincinnati Zoo together — something that the Tom Noonan-voiced cab driver suggests at the beginning of the film. At this, Lisa’s voice begins to merge with everyone else’s’, and Michael’s disillusionment begins to overwhelm him once again.

With the morning shedding new perspective on his night, Michael feels that hope of a new life drain entirely from him.

By the time Michael gives his presentation at the conference, he can barely hide his despair.

“I’ve lost my love. She’s an unmoored ship drifting off to sea. And I have no one to talk to. I have no one to talk to. I have no one to talk to,” Michael tells the bewildered audience. He continues, “I need tears to tear me in two and let this nightmare escape.”

Michael ultimately returns from his trip back to his family, and back to an unwelcome surprise party filled with same-voiced and same-faced people he can barely recognize.

He brings the Japanese doll back for his son and gazes upon it wistfully as it strangely begins to sing — a Japanese song in Lisa’s voice.

So what does it all mean?

In a final scene, Lisa drives back from the conference with Emily, and she writes a letter to Michael that we hear in her original voice.

As Lisa takes a brief glance at Emily in the drivers seat, we can see that Emily’s face has changed — it’s subtle, but Emily is now more feminine, pretty. She is unique outside the realm of Michael’s mind.

As much as Kaufman connects with the regret and longing in Michael’s story, the director still recognizes a world outside of his own. Lisa still has her own voice, Emily has her own face, and perhaps Michael’s wife, his child, and everybody at the surprise party does too.

It is only within Michael’s delusion, his “nightmare”, where he is unable to find the love to pull him out of it.

Punching up or simply punching “not racist”

Improv classes have always been a place of possible precariousness to me. A bunch of strangers with differing understandings of the world, truth, and what is funny or not.

I will be the first to say that my brand of humor might not be for everyone. But I do try my best to punch up.

The concept of “punching up” is another highly debated idea — what is known as comedy that criticizes and critiques those who are higher in power structure than you and not below. For example, it might be funny when we make fun of Trump but perhaps not as much when Trump makes fun of homeless folks.

But punching up isn’t a sacred rule for everyone. In fact, punching down isn’t always cliché, and it isn’t always hacky. I can agree that in context, punching up or down aren’t hard and fast rules at all.

Last night’s improv class asked for scenes inspired by the word “gum”, and two non-POC students began to fake Asian accents — creating a world where two stereotypical Asian characters worked in a gum assembly line.

It’s an understatement to say that I thought it was an incredibly cringe-worthy, unfortunate scene. It’s perhaps something only a person of Asian ethnicity can understand — the perpetual casual racism that flows through media and society unchecked.

Perhaps the two students thought it was interesting character work, but I found it to be low brow “comedy” that lacked any sense of context or awareness.

Luckily, another student entered the scene as a boss figure and reprimanded the “assembly line workers” for their stereotypical fake accents. Suddenly, the world of the scene changed into one where these two characters were tactless employees who regularly get in trouble for racist impersonations.

It brought a reality check into the scene itself, breaking the fourth wall just enough. The tension breaks and audiences get swept with relief, and now they feel they can laugh at the collective ridiculousness. That’s punching up…and I think that’s pretty funny.

The only thing we have in common is our loneliness

Synchronicity is one of the most fascinating experiences to have — it’s paying attention to the patterns in your life, taking note of where they show up and what they mean for you.

Synchronicity happened to me in a beautiful way this week. Hans was getting ready to leave for the train station when he recited from Seven Arrows, “According to the Teachers, there is only one thing that all people possess equally. This is their loneliness.”

“It’s a quote that’s really been resonating with me lately,” he says.

Battling brain cancer throughout his life, Hans has a good idea of what its like to be alone. It’s a concept I could empathize with in my personal loneliness but would never fully understand.

One day later, Janice and I were sitting in the sun discussing one of the great icons of her life — a man named Thomas Merton.

Merton, a 20th century theologian and student of religion, explored and compared the vastness of spirituality from Catholicism to Buddhism. He passed away as a monk at the age of 53 in Bangkok, Thailand.

In his book No Man Is An Island, Merton writes,

“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.”

The “island of man” is a concept I ruminated upon most while I lived in New York. It’s not an unusual thing to think about while riding trains full of passengers steadfast on not making eye contact, or streets rampant with pedestrians pulling feats not to touch each other.

Humans are full of desire, and yet trapped in themselves. Our primal need to be understood is the one thing we share and because of this same fact we still cannot comprehend anyone outside of ourselves. It’s kind of a devastating Catch 22. Lives are often long spent trying to fathom our own soul let alone another’s.

In a video by The School of Life titled Why We’re Fated To Be Lonely, the narrator states that because we were born during the exact time in the exact place that we were, it’s almost impossible to find someone who will even slightly understand you. Our particularities in culture, family, and experiences dictate the shape and form of our souls, and that is hard to match with someone else who is equally as individual.

Merton writes that it’s futile to try to remedy loneliness. It’s no fault of yours, or mine — it’s just the way life works out for everyone. It is what it is.

Perhaps there is a way to connect on the one thing that tethers us all. Millions of love songs and self-help books on making friends would prove this true.

But no matter the relationships, the isolation of self will stay ever-present. There is such beauty in sadness, and the same with being lonely. The gorgeousness of loneliness lies in the exploration of your individual soul and the efforts in trying to reach out to another human. Often in our efforts to find understanding with someone else, magic can happen. Let’s take consolation in that magic.

Meeting surrealism: An obsession with Escher then and now

I was introduced to the artist MC Escher when I was 10 years old — in a Japanese theme park modeled after Dutch living called Huis Ten Bosch.

And what a strange place Huis Ten Bosch was. This theme park was constructed with architecture from the Netherlands — windmills, canals, clogs, and multicolored tulips adorned its perfectly manicured streets to repurpose an idyllic image of the European country.

The park opened in 1992 on Japan’s Hairo Island. Fireworks hit the sky every night at Huis Ten Bosch.

The memories of this park and the MC Escher museum inside it are as blurry and dream-like as the movement of surrealism itself encourages. It’s probably fitting to remember an artist like this so known for his whimsical work.

MC Escher, a 19th-to-20th century surrealist artist and mathematical genius, was born in the city of Leeuwarden in the Netherlands in 1898. His adolescence bloomed into adulthood just as the Dada era transformed into the Surrealist cultural movement of the early 1920’s.

I remember getting to know Escher in the theme park museum like many others do — examining his most popular pieces Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), Two Birds (1938), Drawing Hands (1938), and of course Relativity (1953).

Escher liked to play with the impossibilities of reality. In Relativity, stairs are connected in a way that leads to nowhere, and yet the scene looks perfectly functional. Hands on a two-dimensional piece of paper draw themselves, and patterns of animals move in a way where their white space in turn creates themselves in opposites.

Every piece of art mentioned above looks like it makes sense upon introduction but on closer inspection makes no sense at all. And right there is the heart of where my passion for surrealism began.

Andre Breton, the “father of Surrealism”, was a writer and poet born in 1896 in France. With his implementation of automatic writing and creation of The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Breton gained notoriety and a gang of surrealist artists to follow him. He is quoted as saying, “Nothing that surrounds me is object, all is subject.”

The surreal aspects of life may be that you see the world in one way and I see it in another. If surrealism is subjectivity, perhaps we are all living in a separate sense of surrealism — your world is surreal to me and mine is surreal to yours.

But the fantastical thinking of surrealist art and mindset can be much bigger, much grander. Like a dream, the world can look like it makes sense and that it is operating on an objective plane of understanding — but upon waking up you realize it was just a mess of realities.

A mess of realities is not unlike having a Dutch-influenced theme park in the middle of an island in Japan. In that surreal reality I met Escher, the inspiration for all of my great loves: the bizarre and the absurd.

Silicon Valley and the myth of cool

There is a myth of coolness that has perpetrated the very essence of Silicon Valley culture — a solid, binary assumption of what’s in and what’s out.

Silicon Valley has become a place where ‘cool’ and ‘uncool’ comprise a Venn diagram with two circles miles and miles apart.

Binary definitions

I was branded uncool last Friday at a technology startup nestled in San Francisco’s Financial District. This office was constructed to house just a few hundred people, there were snacks in the kitchen, and everyone owned standing desks. Yoga balls were just bouncing around.

It was in this kitchen where I met a male executive of the company.

“You work at *?” he says, “That’s super stodgy.”

“I can see what you mean.”

“There’s no innovation. And you live in San Francisco? How do you get to work?”

“The shuttle takes me to South Bay.”

“* provides shuttles? They’re cooler than I thought. It’s just kind of funny that you commute from San Francisco to San Jose; it’s like going from somewhere cool to somewhere not cool.”

A little background…

Silicon Valley has been the epicenter for the media’s concept of geek chic for a few years now — mythic tales of genius kids who create startups and become billionaires. It’s the Zuckerbergs, Spiegels, and Musks who have become the mascots of the technology that’s revolutionized the world.

Many have flooded to the area in hopes of achieving the same status. Silicon Valley’s oft-sited motto of “wanting to improve the world” has steadily changed into something more like “wanting to help myself”.

Rooting for the underdog

Older startups were characterized by engineers and business kids coming to the city straight out of college and building a company on their own. Their no-rules, wear-what-you-want attitude have helped breed a culture where rebellion and fighting the man is rewarded with the sought-after brand of cool.

It’s Apple’s humble garage beginnings being touted as legend and the Facebook origin story marking its place in American folklore with David Fincher’s The Social Network.

Role change

After years of the most talented and innovative coming into Silicon Valley, prices in the Bay Area have skyrocketed and the industry has become saturated and incredibly competitive.

It turns out that folks who come to make it in Silicon Valley startups today are some of the most privileged people in the world — while there’s no real doubt of their intelligence or creativity, education and wealth do play a huge factor.

Because of this, the startup exec finds the ability to live in one of the most expensive metropolises is “cool”, but living just an hour south of there is not. Similarly, having commute shuttles like the Googles and Facebooks of the world is “cool”, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that the company providing the shuttles still remains stodgy.

Perhaps what defines cool in Silicon Valley today is less about a company’s roots and more about the innovation its money can bring.

Either way, it seems like the underdog radicals that defined the area just a few years ago have been replaced by the very entitled people they were working against. And that’s not very cool.

What's in a name?

Stephanie Chan.

There has never been a name both so American and so utterly Chinese American.

In the United States circa 1980’s and 1990’s, popular names for baby girls included Jennifer, Ashley, Michelle, Jessica, and…Stephanie. As immigrants, newly minted Chinese American parents also desired classic Western names for their children. Assimilation and blending in is huge theme for third culture kids like myself.

This being the case, I was just one of many Chinese tots waddling around with the same dang name.

Today if you search Facebook for “Stephanie Chan” you will get endless results of other Stephanie Chans and Stephanie Chan variations. Scrolling through, it’s a bit of an apocalyptic world full of same-name drones.

Nominative determinism is the idea that people are drawn towards activities and professions that fit their name. Perhaps you gravitate more towards happiness if your name is Joy, or towards cooking if your name is Baker. This concept is literally called “name-driven outcome” — meaning your label determines who you are. Maybe this is why as of late, parents have gotten keen, naming children wildly unique names with diverse spellings and meanings. Celebrities love to bestow their kin with abstract titles because they’re special, so their kids should be special as well.

A unique name means a unique child. The vice versa may be true as well — instances of the generality of my name (and ethnicity) do not escape me.

My roommate at camp in the summer of 2005 was surprised to meet me because her best friend was also named Stephanie Chan.

Work colleagues confuse me for my other Chinese American peer, Sophia. We both have 3 syllable names, but we’re just two girls with long dark hair and big eyes.

My improv class includes two other Asian American girls — other students in the class constantly interchange the three of our names.

If you take what Shakespeare’s’ words to be true, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, then it doesn’t matter what your surname is — not who your parents are nor your ethnicity or lineage. Your soul transcends all other branding you may have.

But unfortunately in the age where you aren’t just one Stephanie in a town of three, but rather one Stephanie in a world of hundreds of thousands, this iconic expression holds a little less water.

In a world of people who hold your same name and characteristics, how is one supposed to stand out? If you are given heterogeneousness as a baby, does it stick with you for life?

Do you strive for greatness? Or accept fate as you get swept away in a sea of people just like you?

I love you, Charlie Kaufman

A series of love letters to Charlie Kaufman. Part 1: An introduction to Synecdoche, New York

My first true Charlie Kaufman experience was as an 18 year old in my sophomore year in college–it was a time in my life when I adorned long hair with shorn bangs and a wardrobe full of crewneck t-shirts and athletic shorts. I was just getting my first taste of the world.

Two friends took me reluctantly to the Regal Cinemas on the college campus, a worn-down function with one working popcorn machine and stale seats. The audience was filled with older attendees who seemed more accustomed to the art film scene.

We were to see Synecdoche, New York, film writer Charlie Kaufman’s first directorial debut released in 2008. Kaufman is the neurotic mind behind other sad, whimsical works like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich.

As the lights dimmed and I sat through the run of the movie, all I can remember is an intense desire to leave. I felt such cruel, second-hand discomfort from the film — something I hadn’t felt since watching another great film, Punch Drunk Love.

In Punch Drunk Love, Adam Sandler’s dramatic take on a lonely man whose frustrating familial relationships and love life is represented by a score by Jon Brion — erratic drum beats and use of the harmonium made me feel as uneasy as I assume Sandler’s character to feel.

Funny enough (and perhaps not as much a coincidence as I think), Brion also scored Synecdoche, New York — although the soundtrack for Kaufman’s film isn’t what made me want to run out of the theater; it was the depiction of gore and aging so profoundly authentic.

It was the barefaced existentialism of main character Caden Cotard’s inability to find any semblance of love or fulfillment in his life. In this film, theater director Cotard tries to create a grand play that mirrors his real life — all the while losing wives, daughters, friends, potential success, and any power or purpose. The resolution of the film is that life has no resolution, leaving the meaninglessness disturbingly settle in you as it fades to grey.

It was brutally devastating.

At 18 years old, I exited the theater passionately deciding that Synecdoche, New York was the worst movie I had ever seen.

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I walked away and let the memory pass until a few years later, when I found myself living in New York itself. Moving across the country and a handful of years changed things — I still had bangs in my hair, but most other things about me were different.

I felt a strange impulse to revisit the film and went through with it — with a new lens, Kaufman’s film took on a deep meaning.

My fear of the film’s unfeigned honesty turned into what I can only describe as an obsession. Synecdoche New York slowly but surely became my creed, a manual by which I lived my life.

I memorized the script just by listening to it on repeat, and the film became the background noise — my life’s theme music — to all of my daily activities.

This movie did something wonderful to me.

Synecdoche, New York took the veil of life’s bland clichés and ripped it wide open.

Depiction of real depression, existential angst, and longing had never been so masterfully captured. I had always said sadness is beautiful, but now there was a piece of art that confirmed the visuals in my head.

It made me grow. It made me take a long, hard look at what being human truly meant to me. It was devastation incarnate. And that is my first reason why I love you, Charlie Kaufman.

More to come.