September was a REAL LIFE kind of month. So this month's update is going to be a little different.
The most important thing I accomplished was
setting a date for my wedding! I got engaged at the start of the year (early Jan, told people in late Feb), but the planning process has been extremely slow. I made it very clear to M that if we're going to
do this thing that it's not going to be a stereotypical "woman does all the planning while the man complains about having to attend cake tastings" type of thing that I see so often. It has to be something that we do together and that we're both excited about! This has meant that the pace has been slower than it would have been if I were driving the whole project myself, but I'm in no hurry to get married - we've been together for 9 years, what's another one or two - and it was more important to me that the process felt authentically like a collaboration between us.
I did do the bulk of the research at the outset, but that was more a product of me being less busy at work over the summer than M was - and in the end we pretty much split the work of liaising with vendors quite evenly, and made decisions together that we were both happy with. And after a few days of high stress trying to juggle the ceremony venue, the reception venue, and the photographer all at once, we pulled it off!
We're getting married on the summer solstice next year (did not realise it was the summer solstice when I picked the date - also Hinata Shouyou's birthday!) and I am beyond excited. And M, who typically responds to "are you excited about X" with "excited is a very strong word", is also clearly looking forward to it. I am so happy not to fall into the trap of the wedding being one person's "big day" while the other person is dragged along reluctantly. It's a celebration of our partnership and so I want it to feel like a celebration and a partnership the entire way through.
Keeping with the wedding theme, M and I also went on a walk down Hatton Gardens to get some
inspo for our wedding rings. We sort of ended up right back where we started, but it was good to explore all the options to make sure they weren't the right ones for us. I don't have an engagement ring - we exchanged gifts instead - and so the wedding band is The Ring to me. I wanted it to look pretty, but also I don't want the stress of worrying about precious stones and whether they'll fall out. And I have a sort of ethical opposition to buying diamonds, which rules out a lot of the 'easy' options. So I think I'm going to go with a carved ring, which I'm really excited about!
There were also
a ton of social events this month - M's brother turned 30, M's mom visited for the weekend, so did M's dad, I met friends that I hadn't seen in a while for lunches and dinners... It's probably not loads of social activity compared to other people, but it was a lot for me! Honestly I have quite a small social circle but it's a really nice one, tightly curated to only the people who genuinely make me feel so good when I'm around them. I'm happy that I've stopped trying to socialise with
everyone so that I can focus on the people who I really want to invest time in.
And finally!
I went to New York!! My first time in any of the Americas, so it was extra exciting. I was visiting one of my best friends from high school, and I hadn't seen her for literally... 6 years? I don't know. Ages, for sure. But there are some friendships that you can come back to and feel like no time has passed, and this is one of them. She's into One Piece now, though. Which is horrifying.
I had such a fun time in NYC but I definitely didn't love the city - it's probably one of those very polarising things. I found everything so massive, the roads the buildings the cars the energy. I often say that I feel like London is made up of a collection of villages, every 'area' has it's own little high street with supermarkets, restaurants, shops, pubs - everything you could possibly need day to day. Whereas each equivalent 'area' of NYC felt way huger - the neighbourhood centres were much bigger, and the area encompassed in each neighbourhood was similarly scaled. In fact, my favourite bit of NYC was the West Village, which felt the most London-esque!
What I did love was the museums. I only went to MoMA and the Met, but both were amazing. The Met was obviously great for a more historical look at art - the Ancient Egypt exhibit was incredible. But MoMA was my favourite. I cried at the
Water Lilies room, as I always do when confronted with paintings from that series - Musee de l'Orangerie is one of my favourite museums precisely because of the Water Lilies. Monet is the first artist I fell in love with, thanks to a children's book about his art that I had as a child. (It was called
Linnea in Monet's Garden and I still have it!)
I was also surprised by
Yves Klein's Blue Monochrome. I've seen and read about it online, of course, and I sort of expected that seeing it in person would be a different experience than looking at it on the screen. But I didn't realise it was in MoMA, and when I walked into a room and saw that huge rectangle of sheer vibrant blue on the wall - I was genuinely so taken aback. It was so striking in a way that I simply could not stop looking at it. I spent an absurd amount of time just standing in front of it, and I teared up a little too. Every time I tried to walk away I found myself sort of drawn back to it, slack-jawed.
The thing about modern art, to me, is that so much of it won't speak to you. But when you come across the pieces that do - they will bring up some truly insane emotions in you. And those experiences stick with you. The only other painting that gave me this sort of slack-jawed feeling was an
absolutely enormous Cy Twombly in the Met, Dutch Interior. I've seen Cy Twomblys online before and they've always made me feel a sense of, uh, these are scribbles...? But seeing the scale of it, and sitting in front of that massive canvas of scribbles, I had a strange out-of-body experience, like an epiphany without an end. And seeing this after just having seen Joan Miro's
Dutch Interior (II) downstairs, and getting a similar sort of sense of awe... I don't think I really understand art, but damn if I don't feel it.
And finally, my favourite art installation -
House of Hope by Montien Boonma. Thousands of prayer beads strung up into the shape of a small house, walls lined with brownish shapes that evoke incense smoke, and a heady, herbal, medicinal smell that reminded me of TCM shops back in Singapore. The artist created the installation shortly after his wife died of cancer. As you walk around the room, almost smothered in that thick scent of traditional medicine, the way light passes through the strings of beads makes it seem like the house is sparkling. It made me cry then, and it makes me cry to remember.
I did also read one book this month - Harrow the Ninth. Justice for AugustMercy, I say!
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