One year ago today, I was walking through the snowy paths and icy walkways of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, when I came upon Brockton Point Lighthouse, overlooking the Vancouver Harbor bay. It didn’t immediately dawn on me until later that night, but that’s when I finally figured it out. The name of my new blog that I’d start on Substack.
The idea of starting and writing a newsletter or blog was kind of a foreign concept to me at the time, and if you asked me about it just a few weeks before that Vancouver trip, I probably couldn’t even imagine committing to writing one. I had a Tumblr back in high school that I never quite knew how to use properly - the reblog just felt like another extension of a retweet in that it was more or less just finding whatever was in my feed and sharing whatever I liked, and committing to just one singular interest in one blog seemed exhausting when I found myself to exist in n overwhelming multitude of cultural spaces.
It all started when I decided to post “Fixations”, an Instagram carousel post summarizing all the movies, music, books, TV shows, video games, and places I enjoyed this year. The post was put together as a Google Slides PowerPoint presentation, and I used a picture of myself at a recent Santa Barbara trip for Breanna’s birthday as the cover, with text added in using Instagram’s Stories feature. While it might have been haphazardly put together, I genuinely put a lot of effort into it. I spent a good portion of my slower work days writing out the slides and adding images. And I genuinely wanted to share this with the world, despite some ambivalence that I’d come off as self-centered or conceited.
In an effort to seem more “unique”, I had foregone what I deemed to be the stereotypical “Christmas card” language of showing off my accomplishments and, instead, inserted oddly specific and “useless” statistics in my slides, such as emphasizing how I read a disproportionate amount of time travel books in 2022, or that, somehow, most of the games I played were either rogue-likes or souls-likes, or both (Sifu was both). I had another point on how many Golden Road drinks I drank at ballgames, and how many sessions of therapy I attended in the calendar year (I counted them in my Outlook calendar). This wasn’t so much to come off as quirky or “not like other guys", but more to actively become the anti-Christmas card, to actually tell people that I have a problem, that I am obsessed with consumption, that I get fixated on the same things in regular patterns.
Admittedly, Fixations was a release for me. Just two months before in October 2022, in a bizarre series of events and accusations, a former friend of mine insisted that I was copying her. In some bout of insecure paranoia, she cited the presence of classic 70s rock in the playlists I created on Spotify, my interest in vintage fashion, my recent dive into the works of Mieko Kawakami, and even the fact that my Instagram bio and captions used the same two words that her’s used; all of these little unique quirks and oddly specific pieces of my interests as “evidence” that I was copying her. She was convinced that anything I did and so much as breathed was a direct influence from her, so much that she was deluded into thinking this was some sort of romantic obsession with her.
Now that it’s been over a year, I’m simply more amused than hurt when recalling and writing about this rather unreal story (Someday, I’ll write about that whole ordeal and full turn of events with this ex-friend, because it really does make for a great story, I promise!), now with the fully-processed understanding that this person was deeply insecure about their individuality and decided to take it out on me. What still gets me is the idea that there’s a problem that I could be influenced by my friends. What difference did it make if I explored more music or found more artistic outlets through one friend or several? Isn’t it great that we can influence each other and share joys with one another in the same things?
And that’s why I wanted to post Fixations, to reclaim my cultural interests as my own, but also embrace them as something to be shared and influenced by others. And, most of all, to express that my idiosyncratic interests and obsessions can be something that we can both be proud and not-proud of. That, no matter what, I can own my obsessions, whether I liked it or not.
Fixations 2022 received much more positive feedback than I anticipated; friends reached out to me, asking me about my favorite books of the year, or double checking that I did, in fact, read that many books. One comment on the post simply stated, “Ethan Wrapped is so much better than Spotify Wrapped.” One remark from a mutual friend named Kimiko asked if I had a blog, suggesting that my interests could even warrant such one. That’s when I thought, why not keep going?
And that’s where we go back to that fateful trip in Vancouver - the stirrings of starting a blog on Substack were already brewing, and all I needed was a name. And once I saw my 8th lighthouse of the year, that’s when I knew.
It’s been one year of writing on Lighthouses now, and writing this retrospective doesn’t feel all that different from writing any other blog post. But, I do admittedly cringe whenever I read some of my old posts; there’s something about how I wrote a year ago that seems repetitive or doesn’t sit well with me. But, that could always be a sign that I’ve gotten better as a writer (and, hopefully, as a person); regret is really the only proof we need to know we’ve grown and changed.
But what also helps is knowing that these entries are going somewhere, that I’m not simply spewing nonsense into the void, that people will take my own words and find their own from them, holding me accountable to continue being a better and more aware writer.
As corny as this sounds, I’d like to thank a few readers this year for being themselves and going out of their way to read my blog: To Breanna, my first ever reader and proofreader before these posts even go public online, who never doubted our partnership and my writing skills to take that great leap for this blog; to Rouel, my self-proclaimed #1 reader whose personal messages and reflective (and beautifully positive) feedback have come to be something I cherish and anticipate now (even despite my occasional Dodgers trash talk); to Uncle Johnny, who commented the most on my posts; to Larry, my jazz mentor who still manages to email me about my blog and listen to my playlists; to Vanessa, one of my first subscribers who I’m pretty sure hasn’t missed a single post; to Chris, who continues to inspire me to culturally explore; to Cindy, who holds me accountable to write truthfully and honestly; to Patrick, who possesses the seemingly magical ability to understand the root of my entries at first read and weave a meaningful seminar out of them; to Bandy Andy, who has gone out of his way to share my articles and shed the deeply personal connections he makes with them; to my mother, who continues to read my posts in silent contemplation and reflection; and, lastly, to you, the readers, who are what makes Lighthouses such a special way to connect with you. To another year of exploration!
Post-script: Fixations 2023 is here; while I may not dive too deep into this, my year-end playlist at the top of this post (and posted again at the bottom for your reference) can sum up my musical year. With all the traveling I’d done this past year, it was definitely harder to find time to sit down and watch my favorite TV shows, or watch films in the same pattern that I had done back when I had a home in the Long Beach suburbs. Nonetheless, I managed, and the patterns started to fit themselves, coiling along the paths I found myself around the country and globe. I decided that this year would be the year I finally up my baseball and poetry knowledge (not related to each other), as well as the one where I fully embrace spending full-price on video games that I simply could not wait to try this year. I met some of my favorite writers, I “graduated” couples’ therapy, and continued to follow the threads of my old habits, from obsessively listening to singles by The Smile or watching any show that Nathan Fielder so much as touches. I visited a total of 5 jazz clubs, 5 trivia nights at bars, and learned everything and nothing all at once at both. Much of this year was an exploration of my palette, as well as a cleanse of it with a familiar taste, but what will always stay true this year is that I continued to remain culturally inspired through the paradox of it all. After all, I did manage to write a new blog post at least every two weeks this year!
One baseball quote I love is “The only way to prove you’re a good sport is to lose.”