Daydream Diary

Before you read: I started writing this article last year and it's been sitting in my drafts for months now. I wanted to write a post about The Substance, but I was worried that I wouldn't be able to express my thoughts on the film in a coherent way. Which it absolutely deserves. But I really want to get this out, even if it's messy and not perfect in any way. Enjoy and beware of spoilers.

It’s September and I have found myself back at home, after achieving a huge milestone. I finished my master’s degree. I had poured all my free time and tears into preparing for my final exam, questioning myself if I am going to be able to do it. No day had gone by without indulging in the habits of ordering take-out and drinking an extensive amount of caffeine to comfort myself while going through the same notes over and over again. I was negligent of myself and said my life will be fixed once I get my degree. Well, I got it, but nothing else has changed, and what’s more, I’m left dealing with the aftermath of my poor choices. I am not going to lie, this was not a once in a time thing. I struggled my whole life with practicing healthy self-care habits, the difference is that I can’t get away with it anymore. There was always the next big thing, that if I would do, I could start living my life to the fullest after. Like finishing a degree, losing the extra weight, learning a language, moving out and the list goes on.

What self-care actually is? Self-care is the practice of individuals maintaining their own health and preventing diseases. Self-care in social media, however, is used in relation to becoming the best version of ourselves, chasing a version we dreamed up one day. People will promise that you can become this perfect version of yourself, if you follow an exhaustive list of self-care activities, such as waking up at 5am, exercising, and having multiple-step skincare routines. While self-care is important, when it becomes the very manifestation of your perfectionism, that leads you to constantly think you are not worthy yet and therefore, you don’t deserve to feel good in your own body will become very toxic, very quick.

The Substance tells us an unsettling story about beauty standards, aging, and how we internalize societal pressure about our looks. In the beginning of the movie the audience meets Elisabeth Sparkle, a successful Hollywood star who’s about to get fired from her aerobics show. Her boss is looking for a new, younger face to get the channel’s ratings back up. Distraught, Elisabeth leaves and gets into a car accident. In the hospital, she learns about the Substance, which promises a new, better version of herself. Elisabeth, as her last resort, orders and injects the drug, which causes a younger woman, called Sue, to emerge from her slit open body. The trick is that only one body can remain conscious, the other one has to be fed intravenously. Elisabeth's body is also used to create the stabilizer fluid which keeps Sue alive. The two have to switch every seven days. From this point we follow Sue as she becomes the replacement of Elizabeth on her show, and in each turn, as she's indulging in her new, perfect life, she starts to take away more and more days from Elisabeth, causing her to rapidly age, which cannot be reversed.

The program insists that the two beings are one, which both will ignore during the movie multiple times. When Elisabeth realizes Sue doesn’t respect the rules, she tries to get rid of her by stopping the program. Last minute, she decides not to go through with her decision. She clings to Sue, thinking that she is the only lovable part of her. This enables the vicious cycle to continue.

After another failed termination attempt, which leaves both Sue and Elisabeth conscious, a fight between them results in Elisabeth’s death. After this, Sue starts to rapidly deteriorate, as she cannot keep living without the original body. She uses the leftover serum on herself, which creates a grotesque creature, Monstro-Elisa-Sue who has both of their faces on her deformed body. Then she sets off to Sue’s big New Years event to host the show.

Now, I watched this movie a long time ago, I still cannot stop thinking about it. Regardless of the body horror, it has such an important message it easily became one of my favourites. I kept hoping that Elisabeth would realise her own worth and put a stop to the experiment. However, she became increasingly caught up in a cycle of self-harm from which she could not recover from. It beautifully encapsulates the many expectations that women face regarding their looks, and how they will do everything to meet those expectations. It’s a harsh reminder on how much we tend to hate ourselves and pick at every small detail about our bodies, while wishing to be someone else, someone more beautiful, more fit, someone simply better. I find the themes of the film and how they are portrayed very relatable to my own struggles with body image. Elisabeth and Sue to me represent the current version of myself and a better, but unattainable one, because I always thought only this better version deserves to be treated right and any acts of self-care would be wasted on “current” me. And even though I don’t have a physically manifested better version of myself, it still manages to beat me up every day for not meeting my own expectations of how I should be.

It’s time for a new blog post! A month has passed by since I first created my website. After my obsession started slowing down with coding, I took more time to enjoy other hobbies too. I finished the Hunger Games prequel books I got for my nameday and I have so many thoughts (beware of some spoilers here and there). I read the original trilogy at the ripe age of 13, when I wanted to be so different from anyone else and have my own very original thoughts that I ended up hating them. Yes, very silly of me. All the deeper topics of the book flew right above my head at the time, so I was very curious how they would read now, 14 years later. I read the first two again, before the prequels, like two months ago. I am not going to surprise anyone that I enjoyed them way more this time. I was entertained by Katniss’s snarky monologue more than I can admit, now that they reminded me of how it was to be a teenager. Peeta was such a lovely character, I wish they wouldn’t push for the love triangle with Gale in the movies as much. I had no care for him, really. And dear Prim. I was choking holding back my tears when we got to the scene in the last movie where Katniss goes back to the empty house and finds Buttercup.

The world of Hunger Games mirrors our society’s thirst for drama, how we find enjoyment in other people’s suffering, just think about how many of us are guilty of watching true crime documentaries, or dating shows where some unlucky contestants will be painted as real devils, while others will be cherished and forgiven for their behaviour (yes Love is blind I am talking about you), and how we choose to turn our heads away when war, oppression and discrimination happens.

The first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which was written from the POV of President Snow itself, has to be my favourite in the series. We can really delve deep into the mind of the main antagonist in his earlier years. To be honest I wasn’t convinced at first when we found out he’s only 18 at the time and he’s in his last year of high school (called the Academy in the book). When the story begins, we learn about his struggles with never having enough to eat and how he tries to maintain his image of wealth around other people, when in fact his family is poor, due to losing everything during the war. He’s chosen to mentor one of the tributes of the 10th Hunger Games, if he does well, he can win a prize that is his only way of getting into University. The stakes are high and as the games start we learn how much he is willing to sacrifice. The book focuses on the topic of nature and nurture, the question on what happens to humans when the constraints of society are stripped away, do they become ruthless killers or remain good at heart? Snow is surrounded by many characters that represent these ideologies. He’s constantly having conflicting thoughts about what is going around him, he knows the games are inhuman, he also experiences it first hand, and he starts to build a bond with his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird. But no matter how many times he sees acts of kindness, like when Lucy Gray, instead of running away when she get the chance, saves his life, or when one of the tributes pays respect to the dead ones in the arena by rearranging and covering up their bodies, he slowly turns to the idea of humans from the districts are horrible creatures who only can be contained by the Capitol ruling over them. Snow’s story is not the typical villain backstory, where we learn how good he was at heart in the beginning, but we see how easily he is influenced by authority, how he manipulates people, by putting up the act of a respectable, noble man saying what others want to hear, while we can read his true feelings, how repelled he is by others around him and how he is unable to be empathetic towards anyone, but to his own struggles. The twistedness of his mind, and the third person mode, which allows for more detailed descriptions, makes this book outstanding in the series.

The second and newest prequel is about the 50th Hunger Games, called Sunrise on the Reaping, and follows the story of Haymitch Abernathy, who later mentors Katniss and Peeta in the main trilogy. Haymitch is a beloved character and I know many fans were asking for his games for a long time before this book came out. I read many arguments on if these prequels are even necessary or not, and while I have to admit reading about the games for the 4th time at this point was more dreadful than before, I do think the topic and the events of this book complements the main three so well, showing how rebellions are being built over time, where luck is needed more than anything. It paints a realistic picture, by emphasizing how Katniss isn’t some kind of “Chosen One” hero, just a teenage girl who was luckier than anyone before her and could start the fire that then ended the rule of the Capitol.

To sum it up, I had a good time reading these books, including the re-reads and watching the movies. I do want to revisit it in the future and I am curious how the movie adaptation of Sunrise on the Reaping will turn out.

This is going to be my first blog post here and I am nervous haha. I think it is appropriate to talk about how this website came to existence. A bit more than a week ago YouTube just recommended a video about exploring the indie web from LuvstarKei. Which you can find here if you are interested. :) After seeing a couple of the amazing personal websites I was hooked. I started my own research, visited SO MANY myself, then decided to create a neocities account. I had a blast with writing in plain HTML and CSS for my own entertainment and in a couple days I put together what you currently see here. I've been working as a developer for a couple years now, and barely coded outside work since uni, so I found it refreshing to step away from restricting (and many times uncreative) company design guidelines and reusing the same components again and again. On the other hand it is actually challenging to work without a framework, which actually does so much of the hard stuff for you. Still, finding a good name was the hardest part. Altogether, I can say my current obsession is to work on this website and fill the gaps in my coding knowledge (i am no expert by any means).

As for the future I am planning to add more content to the site. I have so many ideas and small projects in mind (but I do not want to spoil anything yet). I would like to use this place as a scrapbook, to share my opinions and my interests in anything from the subject of coding to media, video games, books and who knows what.