ihatefrauds

My musings, love for film, cinema, commentary anything artsy Read My Medium

[ihatefrogsblog]

HOT TAKE: "In light of the whole timothee chalamalabingbong ballet fiasco I feel like Opera is truly a threatened and declined form of art not because Mr.ping pong hates it because often times people who claim to be saving it are generally pretentious and when real action is needed to preserve it they take a step back...I mean apart from the commercial viability regarding the interests of the masses and not the elite sliver of people at the top, there are lot of examples of artforms that have a similar fate... If opera enthusiasts, muscians etc (people on the other side?) can call cinema a corrupted art form, then he has the right to express his opinion too. So many people from "distinguished"or "high art" circles, sculptors, bla bla do tend to have an elitist or superiority complex and call film an inferior medium... Why does nobody object that? Thanks for listening to my ted talk and if you're pursuing ballet or opera or whatever, do your best I hope you shine :)" (feel free to object it never really is that deep)

[ihatefrogsblog]

The illusion of willpower.

Is hustling dependent on trauma?

Take a look at your social media feed. I’m sure you’ll find the aesthetic tiktok “hustle culture”niche with the CEO that wakes up at 4 in the morning, does cold plunges, a 3 hour workout, journals and does a million other things, before you’ve even woken up. Being a “self-help guru” or creative motivational content in today’s world paints a picture of righteous people trying to help others do better, be better, look better, feel better and so on. What I believe it does, is feed into the illusion that average honest people cannot reach where their idols are because they do not have the willpower and are therefore incompetent and are often left feeling guilty or lazy and just negative.

I’m sure he must be healing now and the point I’m trying to make isn’t the same old boring, an artist must be depressed to create something meaningful or if you haven’t had an “struggles” that would be regarded as such by other people then that means you won’t do well in life… The point I’m trying to make is that celebrities, idols and all famous hardworking people are the 1%.  Most of them have made it largely because of necessity and partially because they want to. James Clear had to develop a positive mindset to survive. All of these “hustlers” had to hustle reflexively so that they could survive, it’s simple natural selection.  To expand, let’s take an example somebody morbidly obese climbing stairs as beads of sweat drop from their body, every fibre in their being hurts and it is becoming a threat to their life they have no option but to lose the weight. Or a person in an abusive or toxic household is left with no choice but to escape and someone whose family is dependent on them financially at a young age has no choice but to make it big. It’s simply to stay alive.

Extreme discipline often emerges from extreme circumstances

This needs to be spoken about because over the recent years a new profitable market of “SELF HELP” (that I believe started off with the right intentions )has slowly become exploitative. I mean, think about it. Would your favourite wellness influencer or coach remain relevant if everyone had their problems fixed? I know this might be a stretch, but I believe there is this intricate loop that keeps you stuck.  This market thrives on selling the idea of willpower being akin to a product, something you can manufacture if you want something badly enough. There is this insane notion that if you simply emulate the routines and habits of people you admire you will get results period. The Achilles’ heel of this market is the cleverly left out aspect of context, personal experience and nuance behind the situation which makes all the difference. Most of these people you look up to acted out of survival and not choice. Leaving out the pain, instability and pressure that made that extent of obsession necessary in the first place.  Furthermore, Willpower is treated like a moral trait. If you don’t have it, you’re a bunch of wonderful adjectives like lazy, weak, or a waste. The really frightening aspect to all this is prioritising feeding the ego. By ego I mean self-centered thinking that is marketed as “self-love” and “self-appreciation”. I admit these are very important things but it undermines the importance of connection and can sometimes overemphasizes being transactional over having a natural giving nature.

Essentially,  Willpower isn’t evenly distributed because life isn’t evenly distributed.

So, to point out why I am discussing this is recently I’ve noticed that most people who are deemed average compared to extreme situations, we expect ourselves to operate at the same intensity as people whose lives demanded it. This creates a huge loss of self worth and it has an overall negative impact.  I also want to be really careful that when I say average people I am referring to people who have their basics, like food, water, shelter, economic stability and other aspects. I am aware of devastations like starvation and extreme poverty and the fact that they work extremely hard and experience traumatic events on the daily, they’re seemingly “functional”, this emphasies my point as, people sometimes use these examples to put themselves down, by comparing themselves to people surviving because they have to like children of war-stricken countries, or people born with illnesses.

And maybe the most radical thing in an optimization-obsessed world is accepting that

You don’t need to suffer first in order to deserve a meaningful life.

Cam is so funny pls 😭 Thank you for reading, this is a lot longer than I intended for it to be but, thanks anyway if you got through it :)

[ihatefrogsblog]

An ode to whimsiness ‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

My recently discovered favourite word is “whimsical.”

A simple trisyllabic word, and although it does not make use of the entire alphabet in the English language, it appears pretty diverse. Whimsy would be a close second; it’s shorter and sweeter-sounding.

Not because I’ve never heard it before, but because it never meant anything to me — until now.

Think about how many times you could use a word like that (not too many times, that’s for sure.)

When I finally looked it up, I expected something simple. The internet, of course, disagreed.

Whimsical is peculiar, playful, fantastic, but also volatile, capricious, and impulsive.

The same word that evokes sunshine and daisies also implies instability.

That duality fascinated me.

If whimsy were a person, I’d love to get to know them.

What draws me into this is how everyone knows that the world is on fire, people across the world starve, laugh, cry, and some days it feels like the only rebellion available is joy.

Embrace your whimsy and invite magic into your life with open arms, because the fact that all of us are alive is a statistical miracle.

Think about what whimsy means to you. I think of big smiles, the kind that makes your cheeks hurt, ladybugs, golden hour, green grass, the smell of hay for some reason and goosebumps.

This year, especially, the way news is being presented, the way monocultures barely even exist anymore, and a thousand other signals seem determined to tell us we are doomed, but at the end of the day, all you have to do is make a bit of money, help people and have fun.

Lost a job? It hurts, but it isn’t your identity.

Someone stopped talking to you? Painful but survivable.

Haven’t paid your taxes?

Okay. Please pay your taxes (:

(But seriously, pay your taxes.)

You see,

I’m not promoting being irresponsible but if we have a problem in our lives, half of it is the actual problem and the other half of it is this ego or persona that we desperately clutch on to, the person that we believe has never failed, that is a good person, that does charity, that is beautiful and kind and never ever messes up.

Every time we do something that proves to us that we are not entirely this person, we destroy ourselves with our bare hands.

I believe your whimsy is loving your messiness, along with everyone else’s. It lies in loving the fact that you’re a good person, you’re disciplined and also the fact that you’re lazy and you can be inconsiderate at times. It’s giving yourself the grace of being a person, a fully functioning or partially functioning human being.

The whimsy of always being late, or perpetually forgetting to put the cap back on your toothpaste and a million other idiosyncrasies can drive us insane, but they coexist with you being an eloquent dancer and someone who makes great breakfasts or gives great advice.

So, give yourself grace, give others the same grace. The human beings you listen to, you watch, you agree with or disagree with, deserve the grace of being human. (Maybe grace should be my favourite word.)

To clarify, “whimsy” to me is not irresponsibility but the courage to hold your flaws gently.

Allow whimsiness to embrace you, to cover you in its blanket of glittery powder, cotton candy, and the smell of the back of a baby’s head.

Sprinkle glitter on your tears, allow yourself stay in bed till noon but, let whimsy exist not as escape but as mercy.

cheers to sunshine and rainbows (:

[ihatefrogsblog]

So I posted this piece on medium and it didn’t gain a lot of traction…thought I’d give tumblr a shot-

14 year old me and my unhealthy obsession with Call Me By Your Name

On my younger and cringier emo self’s idea of love, nostalgia, and discovering how art can change you

It’s five minutes to twelve. I can’t fall asleep. It’s summer and my AC doesn’t work…I’m listening to a Call Me By Your Name playlist (yes Sufjan Stevens). Everyone’s asleep and it feels perfect. I used to detest summer but now its comforting, it’s so weird because I am craving for the heat of the Sun on my skin and it’s not like it’s winter so that’s odd

You know those moments where you just want to go to a place or a moment that perhaps you were a part of and are not anymore? It’s the comfort in looking back that scares me sometimes, because being and living in the now is scarier and it’s easy to live somewhere else, like in the past. Even if it’s sad atleast you know and can choose where you want to be, you don’t get that in the present. Maybe that’s what escapism is. I’ve just watched Call Me By Your Name and it’s such a cool film.

I want to be there. I want to drink Italy’s lemon tea and watch two people fall in love over the course of six months…

People have many interpretations of what it truly feels like to be in love…

Some say you’re happy all the time, some say you’re sad because it matters or because you care and other people highly regard the physical aspect. I do agree that it must feel beautiful to wake up next to someone and feel weightless, like you’re the smallest thing in the world, in the best possible way. However, rubbing skin isn’t what I would consider the highest level of intimacy, but it was represented quite aesthetically in the film. (A large part of the film)

Some people say that Love is when you look at a person and they reflect yourself, who you are and it’s the process of morphing into one another and becoming “one”. That sounds really suffocating and who’d want to lose their sense of individuality?

“They say that real loss is when you love someone more than you could ever love yourself,or something along the lines of that, and by ‘they’ I mean Robin Williams (aka Dr Sean)…”

I’d love to experience it if I’d be daring enough to try.

They say that there are different shades of Love like intimacy, infatuation, reverence, awe, obsession. That does make sense but, I don’t think Love exists in and of itself. Like just Love, no context, no addition or subtraction I haven’t seen it. Maybe I’ve never felt it. Well, there’s obviously maternal and paternal love that many including myself are fortunate to have.

Is love an emotion, feeling or a noun or a verb? I mean technically it’s an abstract noun. I think nostalgia is the most indescribable emotion to have been identified. It’s like you can smell the weirdest thing and remember so much. It can make you feel loss or emptiness and remind you that memories are everlasting unlike time that moves on unhindered.

Now that I think about it, I wish CMBYN was recognised for the way in which one’s first love is depicted rather than another tragic gay movie. Not that I don’t enjoy them I mean Maurice was pretty heart breaking but I feel like because its labelled as such fewer people might want to watch them because its a niche-er topic I guess? Well I guess that’s even sadder.

So, that’s an excerpt from my incoherent and melodramatic journal…This movie resonated with me so deeply because it was one of the first times where I could feel, smell, hear and live in every single shot of a film.I’m not being dramatic when I say I was transported…

Luca Guadagnino being a creative genius is indisputable, irrespective of your personal views on the overall message. Creatively speaking it is a really beautiful film. Although 14 year old me had no business watching all that it deeply impacted me and I also believe it changed me.

I used to hate summer, all my friends would have somewhere else to go and where I live, summers felt sticky and humid and kind of gross but after watching this movie for the first time, I truly understood what art means to people and how it can change the way you see the world.

If you haven’t seen it, watch it (preferably alone). And yes, skip the peach scene.

Thanks for reading :)