Claire’s Opinions on Things™

(or, a recap of 2023 in listicle-on-steroids format)

🔥 a 2023 recap! but, because this year was defined by too many eras, too many plotlines, too many changing contexts and emotional states… I can’t just write a linear story because my brain can’t even process it all. So, I’m going with a different route, in which I non-linearly talk about storylines if I’m reminded of them <3

(also, sorry, be prepared for too many long comma-separated lists in sentences?)

I’m not a very strongly opinionated person and I vacillate between beliefs the more I learn; and also don’t find myself a great literary or film critic. So, here’s my opinions on the many things that I consume because I run away from boredom like a mouse runs towards a cheese in a trap 🪤.

this will likely forever be a draft, because i’ll always have more to add, so please feel free to add notion comments or dm me any reactions. a lot more random lists / comments from friends are on the notion. this is my love language. or give recommendations/reactions to your favs.

ov~

jan-jun: senior year, andover. traveled to italy, went to warp and horizon, did college visits, fell in love with my friends <3

jun-aug: rsi counselor. many friends visited, got to counsel™ my kids.

august: tokyo, w/ the rat squad. explored the city and nature, spent time with long-time friends.

sept-dec: freshman year, mit. kind of hell kind of heaven, call me the pearls by burgmuller the way I be having highs and lows. went to dc, nyc, and ri.

📚 books that will leave you forgetting who you are

An incomplete list of books I read this year. Back during college apps one college had this prompt that was just “a list of books you read in the past year” and I got so excited I wrote like seven pages of thoughts and quotes and stuff until my school counselor told me no one was going to read it.

• books un-included or before 2023, that you should definitely read (in 2022-23, I took a course on trauma literature) — you can find it on the notion or at this bookshelf.website link.

• tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, gabrielle zevin (winter break, 2022-2023)

  • A while ago, I went on a bender and re-read the little poems and docs and projects I did as a kid in elementary school and found so many rants about how all the songs in the world were about love, about romance, how every book had to have some unlikely pairing. And while this book touches on that, and yes there’s this feeling of unrequited love; I prefer to live in the world in which Zevin writes one of the most beautiful representations of platonic love. Because what else is stronger? They build a world together, destroy that world and their world, struggle to share things about their lives with each other but instead. build. new memories. I think that’s the most beautiful thing about friendships that I really started to appreciate this year: that you don’t need to just share your life stories; the traumas; the sad parts, but instead, you can build strong friendships by building new memories. It’s why your freshman year roommate is your closest friend, why the first person that talked to you at a new school will forever have a nice spot in your heart, and why, to this day, I am still friends with the people that responded to my first messages in Hack Club or the people whose names I got wrong and didn’t get mad at me at Andover.

• the three-body problem, cixin luo (winter break, 2022-2023)

• godel, escher, bach, douglas hofstadter (jan, 2023, unfinished oops!)

• crying in h-mart, michelle zauner (march, 2023)

  • I read this on a plane ride to WARP and proceeded to ugly cry sandwiched between two buff Texan guys. 10/10 experience. This book is meant to be sad, so sure, makes sense, but I just couldn’t get it out of my head weeks after. I have a March 18, 2023 note titled “an airplane crisis” and it is 1,643 words of me trying to parse out my thoughts about family and identity. I don’t think I can ever find the courage in me to share that, but I find myself, ~9 months later, a lot more forgiving and patient, not finding myself drawn to fits of text essays to the family groupchat™… but how much if that is just added compartmentalization? I also find myself more aloof with family: I can find it within myself to constantly forgive and move on, but it may be because I care less Anyways, read it. (and the author is also Japanese Breakfast!!!)

• range, david epstein (march, 2023)

• superforecasting, philip tetlock (march, 2023, unfinished)

• dark matter, blake crouch (april, 2023)

• the seven husbands of evelyn hugo, taylor jenkins reid (april, 2023)

• washington black, esi edugyan (may, 2023)

• this is how you lose the time war, amal el-mohtar & max gladstone (may, 2023)

  • “I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”

  • “Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”

• kink, r.o. kwon (june, 2023)

• the brief, wondrous life of oscar wao, junot diaz (july, 2023)

• stories of your life and others, ted chiang (august, 2023)

• the myth of sisyphus and other essays, albert camus (august, 2023, unfinished)

• time is a mother, ocean vuong (december, 2023)

  • go, dear reader, and read “amazon history of former nail salon worker.” I read this book in one sitting, with A, at Trident Bookstore, my new favorite place in Boston. Over the summer, S and I had hung out there, reading whatever book we had scavenged, munching on some nachos, and enjoying the calm of a bookstore that gave you the space to enjoy yourself and have fun.

• the book of goose, yiyun li (december, 2023, unfinished)

• a little life, hanya yanagihara (winter break, 2023)

  • This book fucking destroyed me. Read over the course of a few days the last days of the year; had me sobbing into the new year. There’s a quiet beauty to Yanagihara’s writing, where instead of trying too hard to write poetic sentences that make us too aware we are reading someones Writing™, we instead are brought into the simple, to the point, heartbreakingly simple thoughts we all silently share.

—

🎵 serenades. yearning. emo rock. sounds like butter.

oh boy. My mom says all I’ve done this entire winter break was “investigate music” and sleep, which is pretty accurate because I’ve gotten nothing done, but this also means I have so many beliefs about music (mostly just about songs I love I don’t think there are any negative opinions on anything—I hold the strong belief that music taste is the one thing you should never actually insult.) This is gonna be a long one :)

so, playlists made in 2023

I made ~60 playlists, with maybe 40 of them public and “curated”. i might do a visualization of how many i made each month with a mapping of what I was going through (# of times i’ve said I was stressed?) and see if it’s correlated.

• playlists not included (either irrelevant or redacted) are in the notion link at the top of this article!

• do we dance in our sleep? (jan 5)

  • every since rsi 2022, a J and I have been exchanging playlists with song recs on and off as we remember to do so. J really likes things ranging from intensely sad covers of Michael Jackson songs by EDEN to extreme heavy… rock? metal? by Bring Me the Horizon. This playlist has recycled many, many songs and versions :)

• iambic as a kick 🔗 (jan 11)

  • I’m a sucker for songs with good lyrics, and it was about then that I really got into Florence + the Machine. She has written beauty like: words were never so useful until I was screaming in a language I never knew existed before, and and its hard to write about being happy ‘cause, the older I get, I find that happiness is an extremely uneventful subject. Please check out her newest album.

• italia 🔗 (jan 28)

  • M and I went to Italy (Florence & Venice) for an algorithms conference (SIAM APoCS), but most of the time was spent exploring the city, seeing the sights, having a lot of gelato and italian espresso, and walking around at night. It was the first time I’d ever been in Europe and I had a lot of time getting to know some of the other researchers at the conference (very interesting seeing our extremely serious mentor… have a fun, chill part to her too??). I think back to this time of many firsts, of the first time in europe, one of the first of exploring a city at night with a friend, learning the love of a new place, and so on.

• buttervinyl 🔗 (feb 8)

  • One of the most amazing parts of friendships is when you get to share your interests with them (like that tumblr post: “what is friendship if not the way I can get ten to fifteen people to consume a piece of media if I’m annoying enough about it”) and I will forever appreciate S for getting me to finally appreciate the beauty and deep lore of jazz composition and performance. Some of the best concerts I’ve been to have been live jazz/funk jazz: like Snarky Puppy or Cory Wong. I think these are my favorite memories of friendship, of when someone shows up over the summer with a picnic blanket and your favorite pocky and you just sit in boston commons, or when someone flies over to go on adventures with you in the city when you say you’re violently bored, or even when someone ships you a box of fidget toys and a postcard over the course of the past few years because they’re always thinking of you.

• the context of my entire life (feb 21)

  • inspired by my blog post: https://clairebookworm.substack.com/p/the-context-of-my-entire-life

• legally not allowed to make jokes (mar 2)

  • N’s birthday! For the past few years N & R and I have had a tradition of making a fuckass playlist for each other on birthdays.

• warp!! (mar 11)

  • Around december 31, 2022, I joined a discord server (sorry) of a bunch of rat folks and it’s kind of funny how, in the span of the year, so many of these people have become my closest friends and trusted ones. warp, in the middle of nowhere, austin, texas, taught me how it felt to be around such a varied group of people who loved to learn category theory for hours and solved secret hitler the board game over the course of the camp.

  • Previously, I had met some of them (U, S, and S) at treehacks, where I had so much fun doing not that much coding and a lot of talking with a lot of the techbro-esque people I had only known online. It was nice seeing T again, to run around and watch E and N jump into fountains (next time, I want that to be me; I want to be the type that’s a lot more fountains), to pull two all-nighters in a row and subsisting on caffeinated chocolate :). I have many thoughts on collegiate hackathons, and I think, in general, they are a lot worse in the ways I have been taught to care about than high school/less career-driven ones, but it was still worth it!

• horizon playlist (mar 14)

  • hack club continues to be a big part of my life even after I worry I have overstayed as an alumni, and this trip to new york gave me the chance to reconnect with so many people, to take my sister on a trip :), and to once again work and contribute to a project surrounded by passionate and unabashedly genuine people.

• songs to be a better stereotype (mar 16)

  • for those friends of yours who are [rainbow] and don’t know the canon songs and artists. like I thought we all knew these songs. very incomplete…

• keeping my peace (mar 30)

  • I love the concept of living through eras, even if telling myself i’m in a “healing era” doesn’t actually do anything for me. Keeping your peace means going home early for a night so you can call your distant friends, means grabbing dinner with R after quizbowl, befriending new people you never spent enough time with, spending hours in the makerspace cutting einstein monotiles, hanging out with the grades below you and joining random dance groups on a whim, talking with J every day at the most random of meals and figuring out our emotions together, hanging out and making tea with the dorm <3

• afterdinnerslumps (may 19)

  • why am i so sleepy after i eat?… i was supposed to do great things!, miracle mile

    

• workshop <3 (may 23)

  • for senior spring, i only took one class: The Workshop. There, we explored what we wanted, answered our own questions, took trips to nearby museums and cities to interview people and delve into a topic, and dug our own garden. While there were many pros and cons of this form of education, it was perhaps the perfect thing for me to learn to heal from the toxic cycle of productivity I had found myself in for the past few years. Every Friday, S and I would head down to Perry’s Plate and grab brunch, bring some variety of friends with us. Every thursday, after dinner, the squad and I would head down to the chapel for an hour of handbell choir and listening to the tinkling notes. It was rituals like this and realizing I had too many surface-level friendships and not enough people I felt like I could say I loved that started this beautiful term. And plus—I got to spend so much time learning about various areas of linguistics, from jack kerouac’s french-canadian writing to toki pona!

• a bay window 🔗 (may 23)

  • What made my last year at Andover so memorable was it was also my first year boarding, especially in a stack—a house of 10 of us that all chose to live together. I have so many memories of M and I sitting in my room talking (crying?) until 3 am about our lives and families and the ways we deal with the way the world perceived us; of S really teaching me what it meant to strive for something; of listening to Midnights when it came out in the dark in S’s room and then making eye contact with bigger than the whole sky came on; of all the snacks and rants I had with the teachers; of dealing my stash of caffeine to Y and Y… I will forever love these nine other girls because they really taught me what it mean to exist without the constant pressure of being home, to relax and talk about our day, and even better, how to record asmr. <3 I didn’t think it’d hit so hard, but I was sobbing at graduation. margaret, the woman who had helped raised me back in LA when my parents were first new here, came to see me graduate and dude when I tell you thinking about it all is enough of an emotional onslaught.

• how to see me (may 24)

  • i feel like so many of us would give a leg and an arm to know how we are perceived. I know I think about this more than enough on a daily basis, and I find myself twisting myself into a different person over and over again, which only serves to hurt me and those around me. maybe these songs have a meaning to me specifically, but there’s a mitski quote for this:

  • “I spent all my teen-age years being obsessed with beauty, and I’m very resentful about it and I’m very angry... I had so much intelligence and energy and drive, and instead of using that to study more, or instead of pursuing something or going out and learning about or changing the world, I directed all that fire inward, and burnt myself up.”

• reset my life (jun 17)

  • boygenius! clairo! AJ and I spontaneously pulled up after paying for way too expensive resale tickets, and I fell in love with boygenius swaying to their music in the dark more than a few hundred feet away from the stage as I scrolled through the lyrics on my phone. if you don’t know who you are, you fuck around and find out—quoted by a fav author, c. thi nguyen.

• bluets 🔗 (jul 2)

  • perhaps the most beautiful lyric essay book written: bluets by maggie nelson. read it. “suppose I were to begin by saying I had fallen in love with a color…”

  • I absolutely love, love it when someone reads a book rec or listens to a playlist I send—with reactions, rants, more. it’s the best feeling in the world :) People like R or J, who send long rants or photos of pages or notes app screenshots of song-by-song reactions, thank u.

• in my room (jul 25)

  • July was a challenge to get through for a variety of reasons, but I think that whole experience taught me so much about myself and how to find comfort in being alone (which inspired my blogpost on how to be lonely). :) i did get to go to Dartmouth middle of nowhere to see people again! Thanks N and A for that — it was so cute to see everyone huddled around an econ paper.

• loml 🔗 (aug 5)

  • first dates, bright red lipstick, layered necklaces, spontaneous road trips, hyperpop, falling in love with the stranger at the bus stop only to forget them when they get on their bus (credits to, like, idk tumblr vibes)

• tokyo 🔗 (aug 8)

  • Shoutout to D for giving me a reason to have one of the best months ever; to be able to explore tokyo on my own, to work and live with some really cool people, to cavort around train stations and be lost in the train system with N and G, spend hours talking in a hot tub, to go kayaking and mountain biking in the mountains, to have a 14-hour long 1-on-1 with U that consistent of lying next to a lake overnight… staring at the many many sooting stars… as we talked. And I guess I dashed my dreams of tDCS being effective and real technology, because zapping myself, N, and D did nothing…

• slan, dia duit 🔗 (aug 24)

  • if you ever find yourself in tokyo, please go to the teamlabs museum. the hozier unreal unearth album had just come out and I found myself crying as I was lying on the floor of a room with the entire ceiling an immersing n, r, and I in a flight through worlds of flowers. It was weird and so, so cathartic, and listening to all things end on loop helped me fully subconsciously think through graduation and leaving so many people. ‘slan, dia duit’ or hello, hello in irish.

• ashmont alewife (sep 3)

  • hacking at mit with friends is a precious experience, and I’m so honored to be able to sit and meditate on rooftops with A and Y, to fail at big whale w V and R and K, stealing massive bread knives and ranting about madeon with B, to lie on a field even without stars with A, to wander around newbury and take ungodly amounts of photos and buy things we will regret in a few minutes as we fall in love with the guys singing on the streets with A, to walk around campus and catch up on life anxiety free with S, to rap badly or get life alive with the haters, spending hours at a coworking place with R, making dinner badly, walking out of a terrible chem midterm and immediately getting Figma ice cream… I love Boston for its accessibility, for its walkability, and most of all, how so many amazing people I care about are here. I love my dorm and my room and how so many people show up at random times and how “ran through” that beanbag (may it rip) is. S/o to Y for being the d1 beanbagger and for all the night time discussions we’ve had in the dark because it’s easier to talk about insecurities without eye contact. (cue reference to paul grahams cities.)

  • I love being near harvard too, and being able to see my amazing friends (at the worse place). It’s so fun exploring N and F’s dorm or getting poke with N and I love how all I need to do is just take the 1 bus. Maybe I should cross register??

• grindset mindset (sept 15)

• walk on the charles 🔗 (sept 25)

  • I should do this more often, but it’s always too cold or I always feel like it’s better spent working on that pset or studying. Near the end of the term, though, I did actually go on those walks with some others, and it was so beautiful at night. A playlist of aggressively heartbreaking songs.

• art n blu (oct 1)

  • I love Boston for its museums and appreciation for the arts. For a while, S and I went to concerts almost every week, two of which were at the ICA, which did a showing of a new jazz album and the voice of the singer fixed all of the trauma I had just gotten from spending hours with rats at the mri.

• ur soju-te (oct 4)

  • R is legal! dragging behind N and I, lowkey.

• i will live in your heart 🔗 (oct 15)

  • Unorthodox MIT extracurricular, but I did theatre again in college as the lead Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, but this time, we’re in the 70s NYC and lesbians. It was so fun all around; I really got to feel my character (honestly, how much of Benedick was even acting?), and I spent way too much time rehearsing. This playlist is what I imagine benedick and beatrice (ship name: beadick?) would make in their sappy love era as they live their happily ever that lasts only a few weeks until their collective issues rear their heads again. I remember my line: “love me, why!” and an audience member yelling “get therapy!” best heckling in the world.

  • “i will live in your heart, die in your lap, and be buried in your eyes, [beatrice]” - benedick

  • love is fun and beautiful (?) and I got to experience in the mindset of someone else, which was weird enough of a brainmush that I think it helped me through a lot.

• concerts (oct 16)

• i wonder what amelia earheart would think 🔗 (nov 14)

  • I could tell you this is an enigmatic playlist title, but it’s actually because I mixed up who In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel was about. Please don’t come at me. But this is male manipulator music that I hate to say slaps, which, also, I sent to the exact people I knew would go bonkers over The Smiths and Deftones and OMG RaDhIOHEAD? in the same playlist.

• shes LEGAL bitches (nov 18)

  • My beautiful and amazing roommate’s 18th birthday. She’s taught me so much about myself and made my first few months at MIT so much better <3. Love u anj.

• we’re actors — we’re the opposite of people! 🔗 (nov 21)

  • Every few weeks, I think again about my favorite contemporary play of all time: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I don’t think I can ever express how much joy I get from reading it, from meeting a fellow Tom Stoppard fan, and how I see Hamlet now as RGAD fanfiction (instead of the other way around). I made this playlist when I realized I am living a life I could only dream about before. “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.” Where, at the start, I could have chosen such a drastically different path, where there are so many points in my life (or, even, 2023) where I could have made a different decision, where I am finding myself living an escaped life a childhood me would dream to have. And I don’t think I regret much (living a motto of “it’s already happened”), but my autobiographical episodic memory makes me realize how impactful every decision I make is. And appreciate where I am today, where I can see the people I see every day and live where I live being so close to the cutting edge of the world.

  • It's like that tumblr post. being ten and dreaming of the future so far away, it couldn’t come faster; now im one foot in and its scary but at least im there?

• hair (nov 29)

  • The reasoning behind this playlist is too embarrassing to explain, so I’ll just let it be. Just know I was in very goofy silly mood when I started making it and then it lost the plot. <3

• pull away (dec 7)

  • I’m so grateful V and I have bonded so much over our unspoken shared lives and how much we are able to talk about on a day to day basis. Thanks for letting me send you daily songs, to rant about how much I love lizzy mcalpine or how I just cried to some 8 minute sufjan stevens song, going to concerts w me, and being hella funny.

• wo ke yi kai xing ma? (dec 15)

ok so im a curius user and I read a lot of the internet™

favorite articles and pieces! (the more literary ones, not the more technical ones… for those to go to my curius.)

• A Life of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

• My love: it aches - The Tech

• an ode to "i hate myself and want to die" - freddie deboer

• in defense of feeling - ephemeras

• to be loved is to be changed - ava bookbear

• this is water (speech) - david foster wallace

• cities and ambition - paul graham

• you like books and think they are your friends - ava bookbear

movies (? )

My attention span does not help with movie-watching if I’m not with friends at a theater in which I can still quietly whisper to the friend next to me (sorry, sorry). (incomplete)

• A Silent Voice

• Spider-Verse (both)

• Boy and the Heron (watched Dec 27, 2023)

  • w/ M, A, M, S, D, V, and M (and later, R)

  • I think I’ve grown beyond the age where I eagerly await a revelation to wash over me after I blow the candles on my cake, to magically be more like the people around me the moment I age one year, but a part of me still dreams of birthdays as a day I can fix things. Maybe my biggest flex is I don’t cry on my birthdays, but then maybe I should put more emotional weight on my birthdays because then I can find myself changing each year.

  • Anyways, I’m 19! It’s weird, being a number that’s so unsettling to speak out loud in front of my sister, a number I’m scared to say out loud because there’ll always be a following comment on how I’m so old, how I’m so close to 20, and am I where I thought I’d be at 19?

• Hunger Games: A ballad or whatever (watched Dec 6, 2023)

• Poor Things (watched Jan 4, 2024)

p.s. one thing I’ve learned writing this is I have way too many friends whose names start with M.

p.p.s. i’m a d1 yapper so none of this is coherent