The childhood friend / Daily Nexus

I. What are some of your hobbies?

I dug up this red digital camera from my childhood, hoping to get a hazy 2000s look to the photos I took. I’ve been using it frequently, bringing it almost everywhere I go. My dad keeps asking why I don’t just use my phone camera, since it’s probably just as good and I don’t have to carry around another thing that could get lost. I don’t have an answer.

Sylvia Li on the beach / Daily Nexus

I spent a weekend taking photos of my friends, telling them to move around and put their clothing here and move slightly left and tilt your head this way. It’s not that I’m a photographer, or am even trying to be one. In my head, I’m a horrible painter with a vivid imagination, shaky hands, vaguely colorblind and crippled by an ever-looming fear of failure. And I don’t paint. I hide behind the camera, blaming things on the exposure or the way the camera stores color values. I let the camera take the fall for me.

We visited an art gallery a few blocks from the beach. The lady at the front desk informed us of their strict no-photos policy. This was understandable, I decided. Bring back the magic of paintings. Prevent fine art from getting sucked into the data black hole that is generative AI. The painting lives in your mind as light rays project to the back of your retina, not as the camera stores the pixel. So on and so forth.

Tucked away in a back corner of the gallery was the sharpest red I’d seen in my life. It was the primal, fear-inducing red of fresh blood and anger-flushed cheeks. The ear-grating Chinese red accompanied by firecrackers and cymbals to scare off the Lunar New Year’s winter beast. The duality of red in both the rise and fall of the sun, the horror of Apollo’s chariot shattering as it tumbles out of the sky, only to climb again come morning. In the middle of all that red, the deep blue figures of fishermen and their wind-shaken boats define the horizon.

Forgive the purple prose; I’m a Leo. 

When staring at a bright color for a long period of time, the cones in your eyes get “tired,” and it takes more stimulation to see the color in question. I stared at that painting so long that, when I tore my eyes away, the whole world was tinted with a sickly green. What was it that Ursula K. Le Guin said about duality? “Light is the left hand of darkness / And darkness the right hand of light.” You cannot see red without green. I looked back at least three times before we left. 

That painting — a piece by Denis Lebecq — lives in my mind still. I know I can Google professionally-taken photos of it, or move to France when I’m 50 and lonely to see his work in some other gallery in a foreign country. But I can’t shake this feeling that I will never see it like that again. 

So yeah, I take photos. But with every click of the camera, I fear I miss the moment for the memory.  I fear I smother the painter.

Carmel-By-The-Sea / Daily Nexus

II. How’s the weather over there?

Hot weather makes me want to tear my goddamn skin off. My friends and I joke that I’m secretly a vampire, turning to stone or whatever myth you choose when I stand in the sun. I’ve always been horribly sensitive to heat, sweat pooling on my back even indoors, thighs sticking to the leather car seats even with the air conditioning blasting. The sun blinds me, and bright colors of street advertising force me to squint every time I step outside. I swear I can see the individual atoms vibrating faster and faster. I am sautéed at high heat with olive oil and onions.

Sunlight surrounds me, and yet my brain fog has never been worse. 

For the past few weeks, all I could muster myself to do was lie down on the couch in an air conditioned room, trying not to think about the carbon emissions with every passing minute. I scrolled through TikTok mindlessly. The blue light made it hard to sleep at night.

As iPad kids become another element over this dystopian The Veldt-ian horror, more and more studies come out saying that it’s healthy for kids to be bored. Old kids TV shows were slow-paced and dull in color. Too many colors overstimulate them, make emotional regulation harder and decrease cognitive function. The same, I imagine, is probably true for 20-year-old teenagers.

As an (ex) psychology major, I know with near-surgical precision what parts of the brain light up with what stimulation, which neurotransmitters leap from axon to dendrite, how receptors lose their potency the more they are used. And yet my TikTok screen time averages over three hours a day, even on vacation. 

Fueled by heat-induced madness, I recently drove down to Carmel with a friend of mine for the weekend, reveling in the way the 100-degree San Jose heat wave faded to overcast skies and slate blue. The ocean seemed to suck the color from the sky, drybrushing the last dab of ultramarine paint over the bottom half of the canvas.

I smoke a cigarette with my childhood friend on a foggy beach, trying my best to not actually inhale the smoke. I believe my academic knowledge of stimulants and depressants and nicotine withdrawal will save me from a future addiction. The sea is hopelessly gray. 

I forgot my damn camera. 

In my boredom, the fog finally lifts. I know exactly what the cure was: eight hours of sleep, deep breaths and the low saturation, low stimulation cover of clouds. Closing my eyes to identify the subtle flavors in $20 chocolate and $30 pizza. I know I won’t keep my head clear for long. My education will not save me.

Opinion editor (not me, the other one) and friends / Daily Nexus

Halfway through the drive back, I had to turn the AC back on. The heat settled back in. Just a couple frogs boiling to death.

III. How have you been?

In the most precise language that I can find, I’ve been fine.

Really, just fine.

Your friend,

Elizabeth

Sent from my Pixel 4XL