change the pear vol. 30 6 Jun 2025

welcome to a whole new newsletter! (elete: the pear has literally been changed...) thanks for being patient with me while i battled web development and email services and eventually managed to code and host this new site. there might be some teething issues (let me know if you spot any!) but it's been a while since i wrote a newsletter and i really wanted to get one out as soon as i could. it's winter here and i've been struggling to keep my head above water. i'm hoping that writing this keeps me tethered; reminds me that joy is never far away. let's get into it.

on repeat

for shinee’s seventeenth anniversary, all their old concerts were being streamed on youtube towards the end of may. i don’t feel like i’ve been around long enough to claim shawolism for myself but hana was basically born ready to watch a three hour shinee concert every evening and hayley and i were happy to support my beautiful shawol wife by watching with her. guys, shinee are so good. has anyone else heard of shinee??? the vocals are CRAZY, the performances are impeccable, they give absolutely 1000% to every song and it’s just a delight to watch. highly recommend watching this performance of why so serious? to inject a bolt of pure joy into your day. honestly it’s just shinee all the way down at the moment. some current favourites:

• sherlock (clue + note)
• why so serious?
• SAVIOR
• good good feeling
• girls girls girls (live). side note: the producer who sat down and went, for THIS song the the baby homosexual is going to ask the older four homosexuals in the band how to chat up girls? THESE men? talking to girls? you're sick. you're twisted.

last seen (concert)

just over four years ago, hayley started feeding me BTS content. a lot has changed since those early, exciting days of throwing myself wholeheartedly into obsession, but i was brought right back to them by seeing j-hope (also known as hobi, or by his government name hoseok) live in singapore. i’m half-joking when i say you don’t pick your kpop bias, your kpop bias picks you, but hobi genuinely took me unawares. i went in primed to be a jimin stan, but from the moment i saw hobi in BTS’ tinydesk concert i knew there was something about him that would always make me feel happy. so, attending the show and finally seeing him live? crazy, insane, life-changing, etc. hobi’s solo music is, by turns, fun, angsty, introspective, hopeful; i enjoy it a lot, particularly his most recent EP, hope on the street. but seeing the songs performed was something different. it’s not often you see someone on stage who is so perfectly at home there. when hobi is on stage dancing, performing the music he made for the express purpose of performance, you can’t imagine him being anywhere else. he loves what he does and he is incredibly, spectacularly good at it.

there’s something about hobi that is so purely joyful; maybe it’s his talent for dance that means he’s so easily able to let happiness permeate his entire body, maybe that’s just how he was born. but for all that expressing happiness comes easily to him, i love how hard he works to generate it. sarah once said to me that hobi is unafraid of letting us see how hard he tries. his fervent sincerity, the way he listens, how much he cares; nothing less than perfect is acceptable in all areas of his life and he is meticulous about achieving that. nobody works harder at, or has a bigger capacity for, love and joy; and it’s all for others. he offers it all up so freely, to the rest of BTS, to his fans, to anyone who is listening. his catchphrase is “i’m your hope, you’re my hope, i’m j-hope”. [hana, in my ear: HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE] truer words have never been spoken!

hayley and i, through the years of our friendship, have thought a lot about how to be in the world and how to be in relation with others, and our love for BTS (and their love for each other) has helped us figure it out. that’s a precious thing and not something i take lightly. it was incredibly special to be at the concert with them and hana, to dress up in our silly hats and grab our keychains and scream our lungs out for our number one boy. in the days that followed i’d sometimes stop dead and say, “wait… we saw j-hope live” and hana and hayley would echo “we saw j-hope live!!!” wow. what a world.

last seen (tv)

THE PITT!!! of course it’s the pitt. i first heard about it from arenike, possessor of the most immaculate taste in media of anyone that i know, but it was only when i saw a gif of robby and langdon captioned “his alpha” that i really got interested. then kallie messaged me, “bestie are we libbing out to the pitt” and i knew it was time. i’m not usually a medical drama person so this was actually my first foray into the genre, and i was captivated from episode one. the format—every episode is an hour of a shift in the emergency department, the titular ‘pitt’—helps the show accurately capture the chaos of an emergency room that’s chronically underfunded and understaffed. the tension builds through the snowballing scenes of doctors rushing from patient to patient while more pile up in the waiting room and the next case that rolls through the doors from the ambulances could be anything from a drowned child, a gunshot wound, mysterious seizures, a heart attack, severe burns… a few dear friends of mine are hospital doctors and the show really hammered home that their jobs are so much more intense and insane than i could ever imagine. seeing scene after scene of what healthcare professionals have to stay calm, professional and level-headed through… i couldn’t even survive one hour of it.

the show’s realism, its focus on the medical part of the medical drama, is one of its major strengths and part of what makes it so gripping, but if that was all i was interested in, i’d ring up surina or sakina or lucy and ask them to describe their days to me. the magic and joy of tv is that it gives us a fictional world to live in for a little while, shows us flawed characters who are challenged and questioned and confronted by the scenarios they’re in. the show presents us with several interesting, complex people who each have their own vulnerabilities and failings, both individually and professionally, and shows how those two spheres intersect, in moving and empathetic ways. there are no villains here, only people who are trying their best, sometimes failing—sometimes failing spectacularly—fucking up and picking themselves back up. the format of a single shift does limit how much character growth or development can take place—it’s only one day! they ain’t got time to develop—but where it lacks in change, the pitt delivers depth in spades. langdon and his drug-stealing, dana and her moment of I Can’t Do This Anymore after getting assaulted by a patient, santos and her abrasiveness and lack of humility, robby and his inability to confront his own grief. every character is so rich, has so much to offer, and is given space to show all the facets of their personality. i can’t wait to see where they go next!

reading

early june in the southern hemisphere = early december in the northern hemisphere. needless to say, i’m underneath a blanket and i’m back on the tana french train. i’m on book 5/6 now and i am once again blown away by how talented a writer she is. not only are the books filled to the brim with lucid, gorgeous prose, but the way she navigates first-person narration is actually genius. each book clearly, subtly shows the gulf between her narrators’ own perceptions about themselves and what they are actually like. even the most self-aware of the lot still gets deftly deconstructed like a frog on a dissection table. the tragedy and pathos of these novels comes from the fact that most of the characters, despite being forced into some kind of reckoning, still return to take refuge in their own fantasy land of self-perception, because to step outside of it would mean utter annihilation of everything they believe to be true about themselves and the world. chills!!! the only two who manage to come out better are conway and steve, because at the crucial moment, when they are about to step directly off the precipice—they reach out a hand, and they trust in someone else. and after reading the trainwreck of cassie, frank, rob and scorcher’s narrations, what a bloody relief that is.

cassie/rob are the biggest steve/conway foil, obviously, because of the partnership, but also because both cassie and rob are predestined for tragedy yet are offered so many points to get out of the speeding car before it hits the guardrails and wrecks itself. rereading in the woods (rob’s book) is 10000x worse and emotionally torturous when you know what’s coming. rob’s self-flagellating narration means it’s obvious that he fucks it all up, even when though you don’t know how, but upon this reread, knowing how it ends meant i could pick up more keenly on the stupid wallowing-in-my-own-misery hints he drops the entire way through. i was struck again by how he is actually quite self-aware, just not enough not to fuck everything up irredeemably. on some level he knows what’s wrong with him, but he can’t stop it. it’s almost like he wants to be this way, like he can’t see a way to being happy or well-adjusted or loved. and that’s why he’s so vulnerable and easy to manipulate because he’s terrified of anything real, he’d rather believe in a fantasy. he has no concept of the reality of relation—he can’t, because to reckon with it would be to properly reckon with everything that he’s lost. he can’t let it slip that he’s actually not in control of anything, because to confront that would be to confront the moment when he had the least control of all—when jamie and peter were taken from him and he was left behind. ugh. CRAZY!

don’t even get me started on cassie. you read rob’s book and you feel so bad for her being collateral damage in rob blowing apart his own life, and then you read the likeness and you’re like oh okay this bitch is crazy too… she’s so traumatised and she wants to belong so desperately and she’s hurting so much from losing rob that she launches herself immediately into another insane codependent relational scenario that is obviously, painfully doomed from the start due to the fact that she is an undercover police officer impersonating one of the members of said fucked up codependent relational scenario who has just been murdered. and when that all goes to shit she goes home and is like, well i guess belonging irrevocably and completely to someone ain’t for me, go on sam (her boring yokel boyfriend) put a ring on it. utterly balls-to-the-wall INSANE. cassie… relation doesn’t have to be like this… i promise… but again, to throw yourself openly into the breach of relation when you know you could be hurt so badly—that’s the hard part of being alive. it’s so much easier for cassie to settle and chain herself down, much easier for her to believe that she can’t ever have such pure, sweet belonging without pain.

on a different note, i also finally finished the long transition towards socialism and the end of capitalism by torkil lauesen and loved it. a clear-sighted, incisive, balanced and—crucially!!—dialectical critique of previous attempts to build socialism (NOT the social democracy kind) and the form of socialist transition taken by revolutionary movements once state power has been seized. in particular the strength of lauesen’s analysis comes from his clear articulation of contradiction. he outlines how contradictions on both a global scale and a local scale (typically within a nation-state) interplay and require careful thought to identify what the principal contradiction of a current time period is; and ensures that he himself identifies the contradictions at play when he writes about historic and current attempts to build socialism. honestly guys, not to be lame but i love being a marxist. i love reading analysis like this that makes so much sense, that is able to ruthlessly criticise while also moving towards something constructive. lauesen doesn’t idealise previous attempts at socialism, but nor does he tear them down; rather he explains their gains and successes, the conditions under which countries were operating, and looks to understand why mistakes were made and how they might be avoided in the future. towards the end there are sections that could do with expansion (e.g., the section on brics was fairly brief) and the editing gets a little sloppy. still highly recommend for anyone calling themselves a marxist and hoping for the end of capitalism.

miscellaneous

wandering round bookstores with hayley and asyi in singapore. roosters roaming the streets. climbing with hay. tempura mang! fresh orange juice vending machines. beef rendang. mee soto. delicious grilled fish. the fried rice and beef noodles that saved our life on evening 1. visiting wares infoshop. robert zhao renhui's seeing forest short film. kenneth tay's essay on singapore and the violence of global logistics. hainanese chicken rice. walking through the rainforest nature reserve. crying with hay across malaysian food. seeing holly and siyang in beijing!!!! hana's shock at the size of the beer we were offered on our first night. the 'beauty of toilers' exhibition at the art museum. the statue of marx and engels. li xueming and wu yueshi's paintings. sauerkraut and white meat soup. being aggressively befriended by an eight-year-old in the queue for tiananmen square. traditional chinese breakfast. the man at the breakfast place saving us some eight-treasure congee. wonton soup. yumberry bubble tea. pork belly and mustard greens. bronze age statues at the national museum. seeing the original flag from mao's proclamation of the prc. the incredible craftsmanship at the arts and crafts museum. our four-man bicycle (quadcycle?) at the old summer palace. learning about siyang's hero zhu de. li ning! seeing a model of the first seismometer at the geological museum. peking roast duck. hana crying over shinee and girls generation in the cd shop. bbq skewers. great leap brewing. pedaloing around the lake. the revolutionary karaoke booth. cold noodles from the convenience store. turning 28 on the great wall of china. our hotel besties and how much they hated the west. adopting our beautiful platypus son robby. ash's joy at the truck we got him in beijing. hana making me rice cake soup. magic friendship time with hayley in canberra! poaching a chicken (took slightly longer than planned but we made it in the end). wandering around the botanic garden and all the fairy wrens that came out to greet us. possum watch on our road! the wallaby that would not let me and hay be in a photo with it. bee visiting and having the most perfect op-shop run ever. sunset walk at mulligan's flat and spotting bettongs and quoll eyes! bee and hana's delicate climbing. watching hana turn into a football hooligan when the matildas played argentina.

take care of yourselves out there. see you soon.