I’m rather tightly constrained by my phone battery here, so not as much rambling as you’re fretting that you might see.
An Apartment Viewing Phase of Life
I am curious but often clueless about how I’ll perform in social settings beyond the transactional. Lack of data being the main culprit, a bad feedback loop. But I know I enjoy my current phase of going across town and viewing apartments.
What’s not to like about it (other than the imminent pressure to move out of the current guest room soon and be homeless)?
You’re introduced to and guided by a nice but soon departing tenant — in this city this is exceedingly likely to be a brilliant scientist who’s moving on with their career — shake hands with a landlord that will remain in text bubbles or emails, and greet people that by construction will not become your neighbours.
You walk through empty houses between supporting and containing the lives and thoughts of one family unit, to the next.
A thread of my brain looks for places to store a guitar or a box of hot wheels where none exists at present — tastes in poster and cuisine and beauty far differing from yours, integrated over who knows how long for you to glimpse at them. I categorically don’t mean that I enjoy the voyeuristic aspect where you peek on and fantasise about others’ private lives, but I enjoy viewing apartments for the genuinely unique opportunity for human connection.
Maybe the predestined transience promotes my active engagement, much like how my Berkeley chiming-in organising-study-groups and going-to-club self was more outgoing than the baseline, which left me a myriad of problems to resolve in simmering, story for another time.
You leave, after brief conversations within boundaries about each other’s lives and how much heating costs, equally transiently realising the above. You fill in self-declaration forms if there’s feeling for a mutual favour, and you move on.
Branching Off From Vienna
I never should have doubted that I’m smart. Or not: “that thing, Physics.” The way I define smart, which occasionally shows up in conversations and gossips, is “做什么有做什么的样子”, in EN, one who looks properly in the way they are doing something, whatever the thing they do. A rather phenomenological approach.
Smart or not, I am of the view that people who set up camp around ever-improving numerical confidence over their basic qualities without a drive to utilise them in the real world and to better lives are in for a wasteful existence. Oceans in my head are not for merely sloshing around.
Which brings us to Vienna, my first song with vocals, written slowly from September until now. Almost perfectly in sync, over the lives of my latest apartment bean plants.
While the lyrics remain fiction and I’m only imagining a love song here with no real recipient, the night where the melody first formed in my head was indeed a mini-Berkeley episode. A normal social attempt of reconnection with another person, overwritten and twisted by rumination that soon followed. I’m committing to once again branch off from that form of narrative and organisation of life.
The song as a file on my system has branched a few times on its own as well. I trusted icloud version control too much, and leaned too late that some Logic plug-ins refuse to participate in the systemwide undo tree. With this now completely in the rear view mirror, perhaps I should have done the things I sing about, instead of sending a mental projection to stand in some quiet rainy streets. Forever.
The lyrics are reproduced here for your perusal and enjoyment and cringing.
Titular Matters
One doesn’t need to (and rather should not) look up the dictionary meaning for “to live in the moment” in order to understand what it entails. I am rather confident I know what that phrase means too, actively enjoy it when such opportunities do show up, but am somehow reluctant to seek them on my own initiative. My repeated failure to cap my Instagram usage to a non-pathological level being a strong and recent evidence.
Apartment viewing has opened a window for me to connect with strangers on a moments and moments only basis. Not that I’ll be that dumb challenger of social contract and keep going to open homes for the rest of my adult life even in periods of stable housing, or rely on this method to talk to people. Still, it is a nudge in the right direction to be mindful of conversations to have, eye contacts to make, and future to create.
I don’t know how many such warm sunny winter days are ahead, or if I’ve missed my opportunity at all to avoid a High Tower Loner endgame scenario, but I’m extremely grateful for this one.
Typed and proofread on this bench,
8 December 2024
Gö
Yourong Frank Wang 