I’ve been cutting myself some slack for not writing my novel at night, and instead spending evenings listening to records with my husband, watching shows like One Day or Expats, solo (because my husband is a very picky TV watcher who holds out for a capstone show every ten years) or scrolling through social media. Fact is, my ADHD brain derives some pleasure from perusing Instagram and sometimes even TikTok for trends–be it fashion, beauty products or new restaurants– and at age 50, I will cave to my brain and it’s myriad delights.
I’m more able to forgive my evening sloth because I’ve recently hit pay dirt–writing productively at least once a week at the NY Society Library. (By pay dirt, I mean I have written about five pages of my novel and for me, that is the height of success). One or two days a week (when I do my best to take a respite from my legal services job), I meet the friend who told me about this UES private library to write our respective novels. Everything about this charmingly decrepit old stone townhouse delights me (other than their strictly enforced no drink/no food policy that I, the low-stakes rebel that I am, routinely flout by smuggling in candy or once a scone in a wrinkly bakery bag. How do these librarians expect writers to tap at their keyboards for hours without steady mastication?)
For a modest annual fee, you can become a member and enjoy other benefits like a 3:30 pm communal tea time that I’ve not yet experienced, the right to take out books and reserve monkish private rooms that have outlets, a desk, a chair, a lamp and in some, an admittedly dreary small window. The library opens at 9 am and if you chance to come to the door early, a cheerful employee emerges to drag two metal tables and chairs onto the sidewalk so you can rest your weary bod.(To date, I am the only person who I’ve ever seen use these tables so I feel especially grateful). Inside the lobby, there’s a shelf of frequently replenished $2 books that always command my attention and on the ground a veritable goldmine of free, yes free audio books. The old townhouse has two very snug, old-timey elevators that are an agoraphobe’s nightmare. See the metal gates that must be pushed aside before the elevator progresses and listen to the wheezing sound of chains/old gears straining. It’s positively antediluvian!
Though I once tried reserving a cell-like private room with a penal type square window that looked onto some townhouse roofs, the room was too white, drafty and bleak for writing. Then I started “body-doubling*” with my friend Lisa who has been a member of the same library for years and finding different sections of the multi-floor townhouse library to settle. (*Body-doubling for those unfamiliar is a practice that is helpful for those with ADHD, which consists of doing a normally solitarily done activity alongside another person to gain motivation).
For Lisa and I, the prime spot in the library is a wide oak table with a banker’s lamp that can be found in a sunken corner of the art book stacks. Somehow, endless shelves of mind-blowingly diverse art books do not distract me. My fingers practically dance across my keyboard when I’m seated there. My theory is it’s the watchful and stern gaze of the long deceased 19th century banking scion who is depicted in the portrait on the wall behind us, that keeps me in line. As a large brass plaque on the wall we face informs us, in 1878, a lawyer named John Cleve Green donated $50,000 for our study alcove. How can I argue with such gravitas? It’s also probably the considerably less stern but industrious company of my friend, a talented already published author who is meticulously researching and writing her second novel, that motivates me to be productive. Glory be!
One caveat: our nook is a veritable mecca. No less than three unusually tall, surly, white men (all seemingly middle-aged to old with a Billy Bob Thorton vibe) vie for this study space. If I dare take a bathroom or near by coffee detour and arrive at the nook at 9:05 am, chances are one of our sourpuss rivals will be seated in my maroon leather swivel chair–smugly looking up at me and my out of breath, wan face.
Just last week, one of these curmudgeonly men passed our spot and gave my friend and I some blatant stink eye as we quietly sat side by side at our long desk. Quite unprovoked, this classic lurch frowned at us, said, “I hope you two don’t start talking” and shuffled away. Later, my friend saw him seated at another corner of the stacks reading a book called the Heroic Temper, which seemed like a fitting title.
Other than out-pacing lurches and working on my novel, I recently decided to start a monthly art-making party at my place as a way to mix my hunger for creativity and seeing friends. A party seemed the proper cure for recent disappointments (e.g., canceling a long planned family trip to South Korea and instead traveling out of state to visit elderly/sick family members) and the thought of gathering to make things–divine! I may sound Pollyanna-ish here, but for me, nothing beats the blues more than creativity!
It was also an opportunity for me to dump my treasure trove of art supplies, e.g., watercolors and pastels, blank coasters and plates to draw on, tote bags to decorate, claw clips to deck with beads, embroidery and paint onto my dining room table, eat Korean food (including a Kimchi tofu pork stew I made that was too spicy for most), drink wine and make stuff to a Spotify mix of my favorite songs in the background. And perhaps flouting the idea that scrolling social media is a colossal waste of time, I also introduced two mildly absurd Chinese trends I’d recently discovered on TikTok to the party activities. As any party planner knows, adding something absurd and unexpected, to the mix, can elevate the fun.
I’d recently read about the grapefruit/Pomelo cap trend in China and dismissed it as petty insanity. Supposedly, East Asian women view a round peak of the scalp as a beauty ideal and it’s been said that Blackpink‘s Jennie has the exemplary round scalp that adds to her youthful appeal. The higher hairline supposedly makes your face look smaller/more youthful. (Note to the sparsely follicled, those without the hair to fully conceal the yellow peel of the Pomelo can color its skin black with Sharpies). Some extreme Chinese people have even injected their scalps to add fulness to this area.
I don’t usually celebrate the intro of new stringent beauty standards meant to make women feel inadequate and I’m glad this particular cranial standard hasn’t yet wade into our shores. I remember as a college student , I once read that perfect legs created three diamonds when you squeezed your legs together. Dejected, I showed my guy friend who lived on my dorm floor my failure; when I pressed my legs together, there were only two diamonds! (He laughed at me). I’d like to think I have more weighty anxieties today.
I’m particularly glad I’m living in America because I just felt the top of my head perhaps for the first time in my life for purposes of writing this post; It’s as flat as the bottom of an iron. I’m doomed if this becomes a new thing! Or am I? Cue the photos of the Pomelo cap.
Certainly, a less scary alternative to scalp injectables is cutting off the top of a Pomelo/large grapefruit, gutting it, placing it on your head and then covering it up with your hair. As someone who doesn’t want to age poorly but shuns Botox and plastic surgery, I delight in finding natural remedies that promise to shave off some years of aging. Could this odd cap do the trick?
The benefits of this accessory might be the undeniably lovely scent of grapefruit 24/7 and the youthful glow caused by a near-cephalic head. However, these potential benefits were apparently lost on the fifty or so lucky friends I emailed weeks ago with a plea to try this beauty hack and show me photos of themselves. This fun, amendable crowd that is usually game for my challenges were largely silent–all except my enthusiastic artist friend who said her short hair regrettably prevented her participation, a kind-hearted but clearly skeptical friend who said she’d try to find a big enough grapefruit to fit her head, another friend who said there was no way she’d want grapefruit junk in her hair and a third friend, a Taiwanese-American, who said her brother and she used to wear the grapefruit cap as young ones. (Perhaps underscoring her feelings about walking around with a grapefruit cap in her youth, she didn’t volunteer to relive the memory for me).
So my daughter and I were the last ones standing. As we found, it’s not easy to find the right citrus fruit to cap your head. I first tried an average sized grapefruit; it was too small– making me look like one of those cartoon cats that have been wacked over the head with a mallet (a tall lump rising from his head). The best fit for kids or adults: a large Pomelo. It was a quick process of slicing off the top 1/3 of a large Pomelo, ripping out the meat inside (and of course eating it), perching it on my daughter’s head, wrapping it with her strands of hair and finally holding her hair in place with an elastic.
As my nine year old daughter said as I tried to affix the cap in her hair during her Roblox game time (see below before and after photos of her ‘do), the cap has the same effect as the Bumpit, a hair tool that causes hair to look more voluminous on top.
BEFORE THE POMELO CAP:
AFTER: (with the pomelo cap under her hair)
Despite my rebuffed advances (that is, my friends’ refusals to don a grapefruit cap), I persisted much like that one mousy mean girl in Mean Girls who wants to make the word “fetch” a thing and despite lack of interest by her friends, keeps trying; at my art party, I stood hovering above my guests as they sat crafting at my dining room table– our Pomelo cap in my hand. I ended up having one taker–a friend’s daughter. (See below before and after photos.) She liked it so much she took the Pomelo cap home and said she planned to wear it to school the next day.
BEFORE:
AFTER: With the Pomelo Cap under her hair
Though I predict this cap will be short-lived in this athletic girl’s hair. One cartwheel in the school gym and it will surely tumble onto the floor and cause a slip and fall. This has me wondering how Chinese women carry on with their busy lives with this enmeshed in their mane? I imagine hordes of them on the streets of Shanghai or Beijing walking measured and slow like charm/beauty school students balancing books on their heads.
The second Chinese trend that we tried at my art-making party–drawing faces on unusually large, flat-marshmellows with edible ink– was less absurd, and well, delicious. My friend who is a candy expert by profession came to the party and though she is arty soul, she bypassed the art supplies and beelined to the bag of fluffy white morsels. I enjoyed looking over and seeing my childhood pal chatting happily with cheeks full of fluff. (Party planning rule #2-give the people what they want!)
Supposedly, there’s a Chinese trend of drawing faces of Chinese celebrities on marshmellows and floating them in coffee/hot cocoa. A big salute to those in China who are able to draw such detailed faces on marshmellows. In my experience, this is a fraught task as the marshmellow texture and ink are at odds. See my below attempts at drawing faces on them and laugh.
Some Chinese trends I read about on #dr.candiselin were too absurd to test. As someone only tangentially concerned with the aesthetics of my hands (e.g., I’m an infrequent manicure-person who only only remembers to slather lotion on my hands if they are downright crusty), it is hard to imagine getting on board with the Chinese TikTok trend of applying red and white makeup on ones hands to make them look not just pale but cadavre-buried-under-a-snow-pile white— apparently an East Asian ideal. But this look is not just pale, it reminds me of how my hands looked when I used to get Raynauds flare ups in the cold weather (red splotches on pale itchy hands), and never imagined anybody would find that attractive! Please don’t mistake me for a xenophobe or a strident anti-China alarmist like many Republicans, but I like my hands to look like blood regularly courses through them!
The next trend troubles me as someone who dislikes pet fish. Apparently there’s a Chinese challenge/trend of placing an actual live goldfish and a life-sustaining amount of water in one’s neck clavicle to measure thinness; I shudder to imagine the brief but spine-chilling feeling of scales and fins swishing in my clavicle and the sight of the same embroiled goldfish without proper perch, flopping down my body to a gape-mouth death on my floor. (As I have mentioned in other posts, birds and fish are only to be admired from afar). The degree of sadism here is unspeakable; surely, this trend in such a populous country as China will wipe out the goldfish population and deprive city kids of the only pet their parents will allow. Bruh, try a scale!
I tell you now, when I take my family to South Korea as I anticipate doing one day, I will ignore the public sculptures that measure one’s waist. Seeing these silly sculptures that you have to squeeze sideways into and pray for release, I appreciate that I live in an American city that lacks these public service/exercise-encouraging sculptures and a city with a local law that makes it illegal to discriminate against someone at work based on weight, a law that surely does not exist in Seoul). My note to Seoul’s tourism board: taunting tourists with cheap, delectable fried street food and an abundance of swoon-worthy bakeries while littering the city with these guilt-inducing sculptures is a recipe for city bankruptcy. As imperfect as NYC Mayor Adams may be, you don’t see him installing large scales in the middle of Times Square! For when I am on vacation (and I imagine I’m not alone in this), I crave judgment-free indulgence.
Would you try one or more of these trends? Why not throw an absurd trend/art making party! (or you’re welcome to join mine!)
xoxo
Crazy middle class asian 