#something about me and characters whos names start with Z and meditate and are often in a swordsman/kicking + green/yellow duo

[wtfforged]

shoving my comfort characters together like barbie dolls

[junker-town]

SB Nation reviews: The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Fox Photos/Getty Images

Style 10

Content 7

Overall 8.5

When you’re only allowed to leave the house once a day, it puts a lot of pressure on the morning walk. Do I point the buggy north or south? Fortunately for me, just down the road from my house is Crystal Palace park, which offers two great benefits: first, a lot of space for social distancing and the avoidance of joggers, and second, a chance to travel back in time a few hundred million years. Even luckier, this route — down to the park, round the dinosaurs, back again — is almost exactly the right length for my daughter’s first nap of the day. Synergy in the time of corona.

From time to time, I like to imagine that the Crystal Palace dinosaurs catch somebody entirely by surprise. An unsuspecting soul, ambling along the path, KeepCup in one hand and phone in the other. Then all of a sudden: horror. A creature — a monster — scaled and dreadful, clambering out of the water, out of deep time. Teeth from a nightmare; spikes serried along its back. Cracked, staring eyes. Mouth open to bite. To roar. To … to … hang on, it’s not moving.

But even if this does happen, the shock can’t last long. Once the brain catches up with itself, it will remind its owner that the dinosaurs have all been dead for a while now. And in any case, this doesn’t look like any dinosaur you know. The legs are wrong. It’s fat in the wrong places. It’s the wrong kind of strange.

Mike Kemp/In PIctures via Getty Images

When I first saw the dinosaurs, some 15 or so years ago, I laughed. They were funny. They were wrong. They were funny because they were wrong. I was 20-odd years old and so I knew everything; certainly I knew what dinosaurs looked like. I’d seen Jurassic Park. As a child, I’d memorised every name from Aardonyx to Zupaysaurus and back again. And so, as a young and irritating adult, I knew just how silly and incorrect these weird lizards were.

They were built in the 1850s by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a sculptor and natural history artist, in collaboration with various experts in early paleontology including Richard Owen, the man who came up with the word “dinosaur.” They were based on reasoned extrapolations from the available fossils and they were, for their time, as good a job as anybody could likely have done. They became a minor sensation, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dropped by several times.

They even made it into literature — the titular hero of HG Wells’ Kipps takes his bride to be to walk among the “strange reminders of the possibilities of the Creator … huge effigies of iguanodons and deinotheria and mastodons and suchlike”:

Kipps meditated on the monstrous shapes in sight. “I wonder ‘ow all these old antediluvium animals for extinct,” he asked. “No one could possibly ‘ave killed ‘em.”

”Why, I know that,” said Ann. “They was overtook by the Flood …”

Kipps meditated for a while. “But I thought they had to take two of everything there was —”

”Within reason they ‘ad,” said Ann …

The Kippses left it at that. The great green and gold Labyrinthodont took no notice of their conversation. It gazed with its wonderful eyes over their heads into the infinite — inflexibly calm.

But neither history nor paleontology have been kind. The park was ravaged by fire in the 1930s and afterwards the dinosaurs became run down. Even now, despite their addition to the UK’s list of protected constructions and ongoing restoration efforts, they still seem quaint. Polish them however you like, but Hylaeosaurus looks like a Harryhausen, the Teleosaurs raise their long snouts to the air like they’re tooting on trumpets, and the Labyrinthodonts, whatever Wells might have said, look like nothing so much as a pond of idling toads.

Moment Editorial/Getty Images

Of all London’s many parks, Crystal Palace is the most post-apocalyptic. As such the dinosaurs, long-fallen monarchs dragged forward through time by their planetary heirs, suit their space well. So does the coronavirus, as it goes: the quiet skies, the awkward distance, the sense of the world moving from a known past to an unknowable future.

It is named for a vast Victorian glass exhibition house that was built in Hyde Park, up in central London, to host the Great Exhibition of 1851. After the exhibition ended the whole edifice was taken down and moved eight miles south, to preside over a newly defined park in a leafy suburb. New lakes were dug, dinosaurs were built.

The Palace is no longer there. It burned down in 1936, and subsequent movements to rebuild the thing have founded on issues of cost, of time, and a general sense that there’s always something more important to be getting on with. But you can walk around the space where it was, which is still freighted with its absence. Stone mountings support a great emptiness. Grand steps carved into the landscape lead nowhere at all. Guardian sphinxes sit at rest, with nothing to watch over.

These sphinxes were recently restored and repainted a startling shade of red, somewhere between blood and rust. This, apparently, was their original colour, back when they guarded the steps of the Exhibition, but it has the odd effect of making them seem somehow less historical than they did. Old stone, historical stone, is crumbling and grey, stained with water and furred with moss. It wears its time like a lined face; the past can be read into it. Here the search for the authentic has produced something jarring, a double anachronism: they seem neither new nor old, but rather to have fallen out of time altogether.

Being older, wiser, and significantly more tired, and being reconciled to the fact I don’t know everything and often barely know anything, which I understand to be the condition of adulthood, I no longer find the wrongness of the dinosaurs funny. But I like them a lot more than I did. There is something encouraging and heartening about their wrongness. They stand now not as monuments to the power of Victorian science, an empire extending itself into the distant past, but bear witness to the fallibility of humanity.

Because, dear reader, it turns out that I was wrong as well. Jurassic Park was wrong.

I remember, as a kid, being impressed by the teeth and the horns and all the rest but most of all by the seriousness of dinosaurs: the grand longnecks, the terrible sharptooths. Even The Land Before Time is clear that its characters’ frivolity is a consequence of their childhood; the adult dinosaurs are just as serious as they should be. The dinosaurs I grew up with, once I’d left that early childhood stage where everything can be any colour and started reading books with pretensions to accuracy, were drab creatures. They ran from grey through brown and on to dark green, with just the occasional flash of colour to keep things interesting. Serious colours: all the flavours of military camouflage

We know better now. We know — we think we know; we are currently advancing as our best guess; the science has changed — that dinosaurs, or at least quite a few of them, were riotous explosions of feathers, profusions of colour. Hilarious, dramatic, and even a little bit camp. I wonder, sometimes, as I push the buggy past the Iguanodon’s portly shape, how the feathering of dinosaurs might have altered my childhood obsession. Perhaps it would have been less serious, less taxonomic — I know all the names! I am insufferable! — and more playfully strange. Or perhaps I would have just got into stamps instead.

Imagno / Contributor / Getty Images

For Christmas, my partner and I bought our daughter an A to Z dinosaur poster, painted by the artist James Barker. The paintings are colourful, gleefully ridiculous, almost expressionist; a far cry from the greens and the greys of my youth. This is not an attempt to depict dinosaurs as they were, with as much accuracy as the moment allows. Rather, these are dinosaurs as they might have been. As it would have been fun for them to have been. Why shouldn’t Allosaurus be bright blue, with an orange head. Are you going to laugh at it?

The Crystal Palace monsters aimed for accuracy and so, as knowledge moved on, became ridiculous. Now they have been reclaimed, are celebrated in their wrongness. You can buy a T-shirt. Meanwhile the Crystal Palace sphinxes were restored with dutiful attention to authenticity, which has had the paradoxical effect of taking them out of all possible places. The dinosaurs on my daughter’s poster dance the line between these two: they are playfully, consciously incorrect. They peer out from behind their probable-feathers, a rainbow of possible-colours, and in their ambiguity they propose a relationship to the past that is imaginative and free. That takes what we know, acknowledges that we don’t know everything, and asks not what a thing should be, but what it could be.

Image courtesy James Barker

Fun fact: there was an Andrewsarchus. Not a dinosaur, not quite, but a prehistoric ungulate that slouched around what is now Inner Mongolia some 25 million years after the last Tyrannosaur lay down and died. As delightful as having my own almost-dinosaur was, however, it could not stop me cultivating an obscure jealousy of my brother, Peter, and his near-perfect overlap with the mighty Pteranodon.

[emma-what-son]

Interview Magazine

From Interview Magazine April 2017: You can go on the site to see the pictures from the shoot. I’m only going to post her interview where she got asked questions by Jessica Chastain. I’m peppering my own comments throughout.

It's been almost six years since the release of the last Harry Potter film, and still it can be difficult for people to separate Emma Watson from Hermione Granger, the character she played in all eight installments of the hit franchise, from the time she was 11 until she was 21. Maybe there's a reason for this. In the "fantasy" that she says became her life and the lives of her co-stars, Watson, like Hermione, has displayed unbridled passion, natural talent, and—thank goodness for us—a defiant determination to do things her way. Whether that has meant taking time away from a white-hot film career to pursue a degree from Brown University or addressing the issue of gender inequality at the U.N. General Assembly, in her role as a U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador, Watson has been steadfast in her authenticity. And if she's made some mistakes along the way, as she insists she has, they haven't been onscreen for us to see—certainly not in her two stunning post-Potter films The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) and The Bling Ring (2013), which gave us tiny glimpses of her future in film. That future is now here. In March, Watson played Belle in Disney's live-action reboot of Beauty and the Beast, and she can currently be seen opposite Tom Hanks in the surveillance thriller The Circle, based on the novel by Dave Eggers. If the former was a return to the magical universe in which we first met her, the latter has given Watson the welcome opportunity to question how we live today, in the real world. As she tells her friend, the two-time Oscar-nominated actress Jessica Chastain, the struggle to live up to her onscreen persona—to become a spokesperson, a role model, for an entire generation of girls—might all be worth it if she can still be herself. 

JESSICA CHASTAIN: Hi, honey. Where are you right now? EMMA WATSON: I'm thrilled that you asked, because I didn't want things to get weird. I'm in the bath. In Paris. I didn't want you to hear swishing water and be like, "Uh, what are you doing?" I'm very relaxed. Where are you?

Why was she thrilled? I don’t get it.

CHASTAIN: I am in a hotel room. There are bags of hair extensions and makeup and clothes everywhere. WATSON: As long as there's a clear line across the floor so that you can actually get into bed at night, you're good. CHASTAIN: Are you on vacation, or are you working? WATSON: I'm working. I just did the photo shoot for this with Peter Lindbergh, who I know you've shot with. I love him so much. He's the Ferrari of photographers—really thoughtful, engaged, and then boom boom boom. He is so quick. He does not mess around. During the day, I asked him, "What are your plans after this?" And he said, "I'm going to go do another meditation retreat." I was like, "Of course you meditate! You're like the Buddha. You're, like, one of the happiest people I've ever met."

No “...and next up I’m doing” comment from Emma. Just the shoot.

CHASTAIN: Talk to me about your relationship to fashion and photo shoots. It must have been such a different experience for you when you started, because you were so young.

Really? We’re really doing this?

WATSON: Fashion is something that I love, and I find it to be so expressive and creative, and it's obviously a way into my characters, so I'm always deeply engaged with it. What I find difficult about photo shoots is the line between playing a character—you're being asked by the photographer to take on a role like you would in a movie—and being a fancier version of yourself. It's about finding that line between being spontaneous and open to direction, but also trying to explain to photographers that the "me" is often taken out of context because it has all of this other stuff attached to it. The fact that I was a child star is difficult for most people to understand, and it can be really conflicting for me. Photographers want to reinvent you, to take you somewhere else, to show you in a completely different way. They look at your previous work, and try to figure out what they can do to show a new side of you. CHASTAIN: I wonder if I have freedom in a way that maybe you might not. Because people grew up watching you become a woman, are you held to certain standards of having to be the same as you always were? WATSON: I think I am. It's one of the things that I struggle with, because the three of us—Dan[iel Radcliffe], Rupert [Grint], and I—were kids when we got cast in this fairy-tale series, and what happened to us was kind of a fantasy story in itself. Outside of the movies. So the story of my life has been of public interest, which is why I've been so passionate about having a private identity. When I step into a character, people have to be able to suspend their disbelief; they have to be able to divorce me from that girl. And not having everyone know every single intimate detail of my entire life is part of me trying to protect my ability to do my job well. Generally, I've been fortunate, like when Sofia Coppola offered me a role in The Bling Ring, which was so wonderfully different. Artists have given me a lot of freedom—have been able to imagine me in other ways—but it's something I am aware of, for sure.

CHASTAIN: I've learned so much about acting and theater and films—life in general—from making mistakes. Do you feel the freedom to do that? WATSON: I know that I'm under a different microscope, a certain level of scrutiny, which I find really hard at times. And sometimes the fear of doing things is overwhelming. I get incredibly overwhelmed, and sometimes feel hemmed in by that, afraid of that. But I know that if I live in that fear, then my life as an artist, as a human being, really, is over. Ultimately, it will silence me, and it will silence what is in me—which I have yet to explore and uncover. People couldn't believe it when, after Harry Potter, I was like, "I'm going to school." Essentially, I took five years out to study, doing only a few smaller projects, and, to a lot of people, it seemed like I was passing up a lot of opportunity. I received a lot of angry phone calls. But I needed the space to go and explore who I was, without being under the microscope. And I did a play at Brown. I did Three Sisters. I loved it. I loved working with other people my age who were figuring it out. As you say, I loved being able to make mistakes. To be able to step away was pretty key. When I was auditioning to play Hermione, I had this fearlessness, because I wasn't aware of anyone else. I just knew I loved that girl and I loved that role and I loved that world, and I went for it. But now I have this other thing to overcome, like in Beauty and the Beast I sang for the first time, and journalists would ask me, "Do you think you're going to be able to pull it off?" There's an incredible awareness that I have to push through. The night before I gave my speech at the U.N., I was an emotional wreck. I thought I was going to hyperventilate. [laughs]

We took that whole route from young girl to Harry Potter to Brown again. Cue admiration for said speech:

CHASTAIN: That speech was such an important moment. I know it must be really stressful when so many people are telling you what is right for you, what you should be doing, but it seems to me that you've always listened to yourself and followed what you thought was right. Also, people will love you for your mistakes. I used to be terrified of making mistakes, and now I realize that if I make one, there's a lot of respect to be earned for throwing yourself 100 percent into something. WATSON: There's a Theodore Roosevelt speech about the importance of being in the arena, whether you fail or you succeed, or you make a complete idiot of yourself, as long as you're doing the best with what you have, using whatever knowledge you have to bring to the table at that moment. And you continue to keep learning. I think my mistakes have made me much stronger. It's nice to know that things don't ultimately break you; that you need to go there to know. I was talking to a friend of mine recently, like, "Okay, I've had a really hard couple of weeks, and I just want to figure out what I've learned here, what the lesson is." And he looked at me and said, "You realize that you're trying to skip the stages, right? You need to feel shitty for a day or two and be angry and upset and hurt and grieve a little bit. And then you may or may not figure out there's a lesson in it, but you don't get to skip ahead. You need to cry a bit and get angry. And then you can intellectualize and self-analyze." I was like, "Damn you, friend-who-tells-me-the-truth!" [laughs] CHASTAIN: It's so important for you to allow that to happen. It's good to intellectualize something but ... WATSON: You need to be in your body, as painful and annoying as that is. No one wants to go through not feeling so great, but I do ultimately think it's essential.

“Philosophy Emma” has made a comeback I see. CHASTAIN: The speech you made at the U.N. for the HeForShe gender equality campaign, how did that come about?

The speech was 2 and a half years ago!

WATSON: I've been working with an organization called CAMFED, run by this amazing woman named Ann Cotton, which provides scholarships and money for families that traditionally would only send their sons to school. So Ann would find these girls, who were being taken out of school at 9, 10, 11, 12 years old, and try to help support them—not just through their secondary education, but with small business loans, all sorts of other things. I had been approached by a lot of charitable organizations, but I wanted to understand something from the inside out, not just dive straight in to being the public face of something, and I wanted to work with a small organization. So I took a trip to Zambia with a few friends, and we stayed in the school. I sat at the back of classes, and I spoke to the mothers of the daughters who were in the program and in the community, and I tried to understand the challenges. And then U.N. Women asked if I would be a Goodwill Ambassador for women and girls. I talk about it in the speech, but I remember watching Hillary Clinton's genius speech on women's rights, saying they were human rights, and they showed the audience, and there were almost exclusively women there. Why do we think that this conversation isn't something that all human beings need to hear? And they said, "We'd like you to make a speech." I thought, "Oh, god." I must have spent six months writing it, from journal entries that I'd been keeping since I was 12 or 13. CHASTAIN: I remember how moving it was. I could feel that you were speaking from your heart. I keep coming back to the word authenticity ... WATSON: It's one of my favorite words. CHASTAIN: It's interesting that you say that, because that's what I think of when I think of you. WATSON: Gosh. CHASTAIN: I think in society there's a danger where everyone feels like they have to be the cool one. I don't feel that with you. You speak from your heart. And your open heart forced my heart to open. WATSON: Well, there's no higher honor or compliment you could have given me than using that word. No one likes feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable and weak. But I really have found that it's in those moments when I go there that there's a kind of magic. [The scholar and speaker] Brené Brown does an amazing TED talk about vulnerability, how it's the single most important way of connecting to other human beings. CHASTAIN: A lot of people talk about acting as lying—which I don't believe—because you're pretending to be someone else. WATSON: Ugh, no! Acting is telling the truth under imaginary circumstances. I cannot think of a worse way to describe acting. Also, I'm the worst liar ever. I remember trying to get into clubs when I was just about to turn 18. They'd ask my age—and my friends were already in the door, it was not even a big deal—and I was like, "I can't do it." It's terrible. They were like, "You're an actress, what's wrong with you? Get it together, woman!" [laughs]

Bringing this quote from 2013 back because I’m petty: "You sort of accept certain things about your personality," Watson said of growing older. "I don't need to beat myself up about not wanting to go out (at night). I thought there was something quite peculiar about me because I was this insular person. But that's just how I am. You learn to be okay with the way you are." (X) CHASTAIN: I was the same way. A friend of mine had an ID, and she gave it to me to use to go into a club. And the second the guy looked at the ID he goes, "Is this you?" And I went, "Nope." [laughs] WATSON: Oh, I'm the worst. CHASTAIN: When choosing your roles, do you look at the part with a team? Or is it more instinctual? WATSON: People sometimes talk about me as being a brand, having a strategy and whatever else. I wish. Seriously. I wish I had it together enough to have a strategy. But it's so instinctual. It usually comes down to two things: the person I'm working with—the director is really important to me—and a line in a script. There's usually one line that I read and I'm like, "Okay. I have to say this line. I have to tell this story." It's an instant click. And if there isn't that line, even if the story is great, I'm always a bit meh. Whenever I've gone against my instincts, it's been a bit of a disaster. If there's a script I'm considering, I will get everyone to read it. I will get my mom to read it, I will get my friends to read it, I'll get the person doing my manicure to read it. [laughs] I'm someone who really needs to talk things through. And then, obviously, I have a wonderful manager and agents, and I listen very carefully to what they have to say as well. But it's a bit of a free-for-all. I would honestly get my cat's opinion if I could. Anyway, if it's something I need to say, I say it. If it's something I feel genuinely connected to, then I'll do it. But I generally feel uncomfortable being the topic of conversation and try to steer away from that. CHASTAIN: The difficult thing with that is that when you play a character that really hits a nerve, then you will be talked about. WATSON: Completely. My friends know this about me, and they're like, "You realize that's ridiculous. You're doing totally the wrong thing." I'm aware that I'm kind of a paradox, and at times a bit ill-suited to my profession. But there's something that brings me back. There's something in me that feels like I have to do this, that this is what I'm meant to be doing. If I didn't feel this way, I wouldn't do it. But it's full of contradictions, for sure. CHASTAIN: Is there anyone who gave you a lasting piece of advice, maybe on acting or how to navigate this social media society? WATSON: I remember being like, "Am I crazy? Am I masochistic? Why am I doing this to myself?" But one of my mentors was like, "In life, things happen. And as much as we can try to fight to make our lives a certain way, there are things that will keep coming back to you, and you have to follow your marching orders." I think our fears find us and force us to confront them over and over again. In terms of social media, it's a minefield! Technology is moving so fast right now. Everyone is scrambling around trying to understand what it means to have an avatar, how to live our lives on the internet, what it means for privacy, for citizens of a political universe. I think that we're trying to find rules now, as we speak, and it's difficult. But, like everything, the internet is an incredibly powerful force that needs governing—not to restrict our freedom, but to protect people. CHASTAIN: Yours is a very positive message on social media. I can't help but be grateful that young women have someone like you to look up to, someone who prioritizes education and authenticity over the empty calories of what social media can be. WATSON: Gosh, I can't even imagine what it's like for the generation after me, whose parents document their whole lives as they grow up. It's kind of crazy to think about how quickly things are changing. Doing this movie, The Circle, made me think about all of this in so much more detail. I read the book first, and I could not stop thinking about it. It's not like a dystopian future—it could be tomorrow. Someone recently said he thought it was The Truman Show meets The Graduate with a dash of Kardashians. And I said I would describe the movie as The Social Network meets All About Eve meets Panic Room. The Social Network because it deals with how technology intersects with basic human needs: to feel loved, to feel seen, to feel a connection, to feel that you belong. All About Eve because it deals with the complexity of the female relationship in a patriarchal world; usually there's only one woman or two women in a boardroom. And Panic Room because it's intense. CHASTAIN: Have you used technology any differently since making the film? WATSON: Oh my god, yes. I set even more boundaries than I had before between my public and my private lives. It made me think a lot about what I would do if I had children. A lot of children of this generation have their entire lives made public before they have a say about what they would want. I think it should always be a choice. I love social media, and I love what it can do and how it brings people together, but used in the wrong way, it's incredibly dangerous. And, increasingly, our attention is our most important resource. Before the press tour, I deleted my e-mail app from my phone and really tried to create serious boundaries from it, because it is addictive. We need to make sure that we are using technology, and technology is not using us. CHASTAIN: Besides deleting your e-mail, what do you do to relax? When no one's watching, when no one's thinking about you as a movie star or as a role model, what do you like to do? WATSON: When people call me a role model it puts the fear of god into me, because I feel like I'm destined to fail. CHASTAIN: But remember, you can teach people that our failures are our greatest gifts in life. WATSON: Very true. Steve Jobs has a great speech where he talks about how the wrong turns in his life truly set him on the path that he needed to be on. Anyway, what do I do? I bake. I'm pretty competitive about my chocolate chip banana bread. I don't think anyone can believe how good it is. It's really on another level. And I hang out with my cat. I love to travel. I went on safari before I did my tour, which I loved. I love to dance. I'm the girl who will get up and dance with zero alcohol in her system. You need give me no excuse. A great song comes on and I'm there; it's happening. CHASTAIN: What's your jam? WATSON: I like a lot of hip-hop. Everyone's always like, "Really? You know all the words to this?" I'm like, "Yes, I do." And Beyoncé, Gaga. CHASTAIN: You've got to get out of the bathtub now, because you're going to turn into a raisin. WATSON: [laughs] Thank you. See you very soon. Lots of love

What even was this interview? It was both boring and ridiculous at the same time.

[bandonggarciajalandonisainz]

SA 21: Module 1 Posted by: Jay Sainz

My understanding of well-being is a person’s mental stability, physical fitness, emotional security, and spiritual connection with what one has faith in. It is generally being healthy and positive in every aspect of life. Well-being is often what one answers when asked, “How are you?” Though it may come from a simple question, the answer can be quite complex. To further expound my idea of well-being given that my situation is being in a new environment on my own and the rest of my family and peers are far away, I will be presenting two objects that are unique to me and relate them to how I understand and practice well-being. 

First, the reality is that I am really far away from my home, Cebu. It has been my situation ever since August 2016 when I came to Manila to study in the Ateneo de Manila University. Initially, I felt anxious entering college, being alone and that I was the only Cebuano in my block. I had thoughts that my blockmates might think that this ‘probinsyano’ lives on trees or something like that. To makes things worse for myself, I had a severe case of dengue shortly after arriving in Manila. I missed my OrSem and the first week of classes. I only got to meet my blockmates in our first Intact session, and I was nervous then.  I was afraid of what their first impression of me might be. Based on the cultural construction of emotions, as I entered a new environment, my emotions were actively constructed to meet the demands of the respective cultural environment that being the unfamiliar culture of people in Manila. Through cognitive appraisal, I was quiet, shy, and merely observing everyone. It took a while for me to open up myself to everyone. Even after being more open, there still have been times of boredom, loneliness, and stress. 

This brings me to my first object, the image of the Child Jesus, the Santo Niño. I brought it with me because it represents a part of my Cebuano culture, and it played a significant role in my life as I grew up. As early in my childhood years, I would attend the week-long Sinulog fiesta honoring the Santo Niño. I would join the fluvial parade where hundreds of boats full of people would follow the image displayed in one of the boats. This was done very early in the morning so you could see the sunrise and the Santo Niño perfectly align in the most picturesque moment. Then I would attend the procession for the Santo Niño. Every year, more than a million people would attend and would wave their hands, sing, and shout, “Viva Pit Senyor,” as the Santo Niño passes by. It still gives me goosebumps every time. I grew up seeing a Santo Niño in every home. I have a corner of the house dedicated the image of the Santo Niño with flowers beside it, a candle always lit, and a spotlight on top of it. This was the culture I grew up with so it was only fitting that I brought one to Manila and placed it in my mini altar.

Whenever I was mad as a kid, frustrated at my brother, or had a bad day, my mom would bring me to the corner of the house with a Santo Niño and tell me to sit down and just pray or talk to it. It felt good to talk to something that wouldn’t fight back, talk back or do anything to me. It felt very calming that you can talk to something about all your pain and problems. It gave me a sense of peace. Now my System 1 way of thinking associates the Santo Niño as a religious figure that helps me. Every time I see it, the Child Jesus also comes to my mind and I often relate it to the Sinulog festival. Deeper thoughts lie when I engage myself with the Santo Niño. This is when System 2 comes into play when I try to figure out my problems usually over stressful situations in colleges. I try to see possible scenarios and think of how to respond to them. The memories of my childhood are then triggered by the stressful mood. These memories of the past usually evoke my feeling of peace afterwards. As stated by Williams in “Mind, Body, and Emotion,” thoughts and memories related to whatever came to mind or in our life to make us happy will come back quite automatically. Thus, it became a mixture of both the systems that led to the overall promotion of my well-being. Peace comes to my mind when I see the Santo Niño, but it is only achieved when I engage in deeper thinking. 

As I started to open myself more in college, I met someone who helped my well-being. This brings me to my second object, a polaroid of me and my girlfriend. I have always wanted to send this back to my family as much as I wanted to keep it. The reason being is that I want them to know that I am in good hands. Her name is Marga Antonio. She is from Davao and is currently taking up BS Health Sciences in the Ateneo. She can speak and understand Cebuano as well. We share the same ideas and passions. Meeting her helped me become more mindful, to become more aware of the thoughts and feelings of others. I paid more attention to not only my own well-being but also to her well-being. Sending this polaroid to my family will hopefully give them the affirmation that I am doing well, and more importantly, it will give them a sense that I am capable of taking care of someone else aside from myself. I found a new understanding of well-being as something we can all share if we help each other achieve it. Well-being deserves attention from everyone.   

In my new environment, I have learned to balance homophilous and heterophilous interactions. Homophily with other Cebuanos and heterophily with Tagalogs and Chinese Filipinos. As a Cebuano in Manila, my emotions continue to be updated as cultural construction happens throughout life and everyday interactions, thus guiding me on how to act and conduct myself in new and current situations. As interactions continue to take place in this environment, I can practice well-being by receiving help from others while giving attention to myself as well. This is the task mentioned in Michel Foucault’s chapter, ‘The Cultivation of the Self,’ in the book “The Care of the Self,” known as to di’ allēlōn sōzesthai. It can be done by having a constant support system found in the family and sharing a hug every now and then. Furthermore, well-being can be improved by having a “retreat of oneself” as stated by Marcus Aurelius. With the help of my first object and what it symbolizes for, I occasionally have morning and evening meditations on how I plan to go about my day and reflecting on what actually happened. Through praying, reflecting, meditating, breathing, sleeping, and enjoying the Filipino fiestas, I continue to practice well-being through personal and social activities.

References:

Batja Mesquita, Michael Boiger, Jozefien De Leersnyder. (2016). The cultural construction of emotions, Current Opinion in Psychology, 8: Pages 31-36, ISSN 2352-250X, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.015.

Foucault, M. (1986). The cultivation of the self. In The Care of the Self (Vol. 3 of the History of Sexuality, pp. 37-69). NY: Pantheon Books.

Gross, J.J. (2008). Emotion regulation. In M. Lewis, J.M. Haviland-Jones, and L.F. Barrett (eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 497-512). New York: The Guilford Press.

Hermans, H. (2015). Human development in today’s globalizing world: Implications for self and identity. In L. Jensen (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Ch. 3, pp. 28-42). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kahneman, D. (2011). The characters of the story. In Thinking, fast and slow (Ch. 1, pp. 19-30. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Williams, M., Teasdale, J., Segal, Z., & Kabat-Zinn, J. (2007). Part I: Mind, Body, and Emotion. In The mindful way through depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness (pp. 11-49). New York: The Guilford Press.