change the pear vol. 32 16 Sep 2025

it's been three years since i started this newsletter! time flies. whether you've been here from the beginning, whether you just started reading—thank you for sticking with me for all this time, thank you for reaching out to tell me what you think about any part of it, thank you for reading. it means the world to me that people care about what i have to say. sorry for the delayed dispatch; july and august were pretty quiet months, but i'm back and ready to get into it.

on repeat

for the past ten days i have been exclusively listening to one direction. i took a short break to listen to haechan’s new album (absolute slapper btw) but apart from that it’s been one direction all the way down. i don’t know why and i’m not really willing to examine what this says about my psychological state right now, so let’s just move right on.

it feels very difficult—impossible, maybe—to write about 1d. maybe that’s because i was at my craziest about them during the years of 14 to 18 when my critical thinking skills were as undeveloped as my prefrontal cortex. maybe it’s because so many people have spent so much time trying to dissect them as a phenomenon—why they got so big, why people went so insane for this band the world over. i don’t have the answers to those questions and trying to puzzle them out would probably make this section insanely long, but i think it might have something to do with the appeal of the “rags to riches” story of five boys from the most random parts of britain and ireland being shoved together on x-factor and somehow clicking so well they wanted to keep doing it.

i remember exactly where i was the day the what makes you beautiful music video dropped. i was never a fan of 1d on x-factor (i was in my I’m Not Like The Other Girls phase, obsessed with aiden grimshaw from that series instead—if you know you know) but i watched the boys jumping around on a beach on my school friend jemma’s family computer along with a bunch of other 14-year-old girls and my fate as a directioner was sealed. what followed were days that i will remember fondly forever: replaying the music videos constantly, playing the songs over and over, going to see them at the o2 for my first ever concert, staying up late to read fanfiction, messaging friends incessantly about every tiny facial expression liam or louis or zayn made, watching every single interview they did multiple times.

and yes, looking back with hindsight, the obsessive rabid fandom and the way these boys skyrocketed to fame when they were young and dumb absolutely damaged them irreversibly. it can be hard to reconcile that with how much fun it was, how much joy it brought me. and it can be hard to remember, too, especially after zayn left and the relationships between the members deteriorated and became acrimonious, how much fun they had, back in the early days. people love to say 1d fans were delusional and we certainly had our fair share of absolutely nonsense behaviour going on (“everyone is staring at zayn but zayn is only looking at liam” “he only got two eyes” lives rent free in my brain forever) but there was real love and camaraderie there, real chemistry between them that we loved, and that only grew deeper as time went on. which made it all the more painful when it was taken away—not only by the break-up of the band, but by liam payne’s recent death. i cried reading zayn, louis and niall’s statements (sorry harry but yours sucked) because they reminded me just how real it was, how much they cared. and now listening to history is always going to make me cry: this is not the end / we can make it / you know it you know. maybe it is the end, but i’ll never stop being grateful for the time we had together.

last seen (movie)

demon slayer is BACK babey, in movie format this time! we’re onto one of the final (?? i guess?) arcs of the series; the last arc ended with our heroes plunged into the ‘infinity castle’, a crazy mind palace created by one of the upper rank demons. the demon overlord, muzan kibutsuji, has been temporarily incapacitated due to a heroic sacrifice and the injection of a medicine meant to revert him back to human form. but his underlings still have plenty of tricks up their sleeves, and everyone we’ve met so far (who’s still alive) is along for the ride.

the main three battles are fought against upper two, upper six, and upper three. upper two is challenged by the insect hashira, ms shinobu, whose powers lie in her speed and agility rather than size and strength. she has a tough fight—upper two is one of the most powerful demons to ever exist, and incredibly annoying to boot; he quickly manages to overcome her poison attacks and soon has her almost completely incapacitated. but in a moment that made me cry, she finds an inner strength that powers her through one final attack. i love this anime for so many reasons: the animation is transcendentally good; it’s frequently very funny; the soundtrack is phenomenal. but deep down, my favourite thing about demon slayer is how much it values kindness and compassion and looking after one another; and equally, how much it values determination and sheer bloody-minded refusal to give up. ms shinobu would have been well within her rights to just lie down and die: she is losing a huge amount of blood and upper two’s blood demon power has started decaying her lungs from the inside. but she doesn’t. she gets the fuck up and she goes on the attack one last time. another thing i love about demon slayer: how it makes space for anger. ms shinobu is furious; she has been furious all her life, since her parents were stolen from her by demons. and she might ultimately lose to upper two, but she gives it absolutely everything she could, and she goes well beyond her limit to do it. a noble and heroic end! someone come along and murk upper two with a quickness!!!

next, our attention is turned to upper six, who turns out to be zenitsu’s old senior, back when he was learning thunder breathing from his grandfather. i love how much emphasis demon slayer puts on hard work; the entire previous arc was focused on levelling up our heroes, kind of like a supercharged training arc. we get to see how that pays off here, with zenitsu digging deep into his training in his clash with upper six. upper six—a grasping, greedy piece of shit who was never satisfied with who he was and always thought he deserved more—is shocked at this, but he’s levelled up as a demon too, and he gives zenitsu a pretty good whacking. but, again, we see training and determination pay off: zenitsu comes back with an entirely new thunder breathing technique he’s invented, in a move upper six never saw coming. he finishes his enemy off with a strike that sends them both falling into an abyss. upper six rejoices, thinking that zenitsu will die with him. but yushiro appears at the last second to whisk zenitsu out of harm’s way, telling upper six: “Someone who never gives to others will someday become unable to receive anything from them. Only wanting is, in the end, the same as having nothing… because one is unable to create anything. Such a pity to die alone.” PERIOD! i cried a second time when zenitsu, hovering near death, sees his grandfather across a river and is struggling to reach him there—until his grandfather tells him he’s his pride and joy, and sends zenitsu back to life.

and finally, we come to our last battle: upper three. i’ve been waiting for this one. upper three’s killing of rengoku, and dismissal of him as a loser, was a flashpoint for tanjiro, a pivotal moment that motivated him to get stronger and stronger after rengoku’s instruction to “set your heart ablaze”. and now, here he is, levelled the fuck up and fighting alongside the water hashira, giyu tomioka. are their combined forces enough to defeat upper three? what follows is an absolutely spectacular fight scene, with animation that almost had me leaping out of my seat. i genuinely can’t believe how good it was. shoutout to giyu for some iconic lines during this fight (“i hate talking so please don’t speak to me”, “my back is absolutely killing me”) but as always, the real hero is our boy tanjiro. it’s satisfying to see him become so powerful beacuse we’ve been there every step of the way through his journey; we’ve seen how hard he’s had to work, how much blood sweat and tears has been poured into his breathing techniques. but upper three is not a walk in the park. he’s got some serious powers too, so we get to see tanjiro level up IN the battle itself, digging deep inside himself in order to journey to what his father used to call the Transparent World, where tanjiro can rid himself of any killing instinct (something that upper three can detect) and go in for a stealth attack at inhuman speeds. and still it’s not quite enough: upper three begins to regenerate even his head, which is supposedly impossible for demons.

what actually gets through to upper three is something tanjiro says to him during the battle. upper three taunts him, saying that he hates weak people, that only the strong are worthy. tanjiro tells him he’s wrong: strong people become strong to protect the weak; everyone is born weak and so we need the strong to look after us, and then when we become strong we protect the weak in turn. this reminds upper three of his past, how he in fact failed to protect the people he loved—but instead of starting over, of trying to find new people to love and protect, he lashes out and turns to darkness, becoming strong not to protect but to destroy. tanjiro, with his typical empathy and compassion, manages to reach through to upper three’s repressed memories of his family. his family, in turn, release upper three from this twisted life he’s been living. he is frightened, because he knows he won’t be reunited with his father or his mentor and his wife-to-be. but they all reassure him in turn that they will be there for him. his mentor tells him, “no matter how you turn out you will always be my son and student” and his fiancee says, “i’m so glad you came back to being the man i knew”. guess who cried again, oh yeah it was me!

the battle leaves both giyu and tanjiro utterly spent and exhausted (tanjiro, after blacking out during the fight and then not even having the strength to hold his sword: “not good! not good! not good!”). something demon slayer is very good at doing is showing us the cost of these battles. how it takes everything our heroes have and then demands more, demands them to get up and try again. and they always do. next arc let’s go! i can’t wait.

last seen (tv)

i made hana rewatch sk8 the infinity with me, because the only anime she’s ever seen is yuri on ice and sk8 is essentially the yuri on ice (teenage skateboarders remix). well, it’s different, but there’s the shared ingredients of: completely tapped individuals obsessed with their sport; overcoming insecurities and fear; gay as hell. our main characters are reki, our happy-go-lucky sunshine boy who loves skating more than anything and is an enthusiastic participant in late-night beefs at “s”, the underground skateboarding community. enter transfer student langa, who discovers his snowboarding past might just make him a great skateboarder. reki is one hundred percent on board with this—spending hours teaching langa how to push off, how to do an ollie, even making langa a custom board with feet holders like on a snowboard. as langa gets more comfortable on the board, we meet some of the other underground skaters: cherry and joe, divorcees and queer elders; miya, a hissing wet cat of a twelve-year-old; shadow, a fundamentally unserious person who loves dress-up and somehow gets himself landed with babysitting duties for the adolescents.

it’s all goofy antics and silly banter until reki suddenly finds himself suffering from deep insecurities, as langa’s skateboarding prowess skyrockets. he isolates himself from the others, refusing to come to the underground battles and avoiding langa’s attempts to reach out. meanwhile, langa breaks a promise he made to reki to never battle the evil and nefarious adam, which only drives a further wedge between them. it isn’t until reki finally realises that what he loves about skating isn’t being the best, or winning the competitions, it’s that it’s fun, and that that’s more important than anything else—that he’s able to come back to skating, and langa, and they have an emotional reunion, promising to skate together forever infinitely (okay gayass…). in turn, langa uses what reki teaches him about skating to defeat adam in the race of his life!!! we love to see it. it’s everything to me: tomfoolery with an emotional and heartfelt core, that in the end is about loving what you do together and loving each other.

reading

in august i participated in kat’s annual readathon: trying to read as many books as i could that would satisfy 20 different prompts. i loved trying to find books that i both wanted to read and that would fill a prompt; i ended up reading some books that i would probably never have come across. and then i got to do rereads of some of my favourite books, including into thin air by jon krakauer to satisfy the prompt: written in the year you were born (1997).

the introduction to this book, particularly the final couple of pages, is something that i read out or send to people often. forgive me for the long excerpt, but when you begin reading a book and it starts out like this, you know you’re in for it:

Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. But I hoped something would be gained by spilling my soul in the calamity’s immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment. I wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish.

There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.

The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.

following this remarkable opening, a lesser writer than krakauer might begin the book proper at the very start of the journey to everest. instead, he puts us right on the summit with him, a moment he has been fantasising about for many months, and we get this staggering passage:

But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care. It was early in the afternoon of May 10, 1996. I hadn’t slept in fifty-seven hours. The only food I’d been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&Ms. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs that made ordinary breathing an excruciating trial. At 29,028 feet up in the troposphere, so little oxygen was reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired.

i’d never seriously thought about climbing everest (i’m a hiker, not a mountaineer) but i confess that before reading this book, if you’d asked me, i’d probably have said “never say never!” immediately after reading this passage i was like: nope. no way. not if you paid me. and this is before anyone has even died, before the true disaster begins, before the horror and devastation of the disaster is laid out in excruciating, intimate detail. if you can read about rob hall’s final hours, stranded on the south summit in the “death zone”, in communication with the ground but with nobody able to battle the gale-force winds to reach him and rescue him; if you can read about the way climbers have to step over the frozen corpses left on the slopes, the callous abandonment of some people in dire straits to their deaths by japanese climbers intent on their selfish pursuit of the summit—and you STILL want to go to everest? genuinely what the fuck.

i agree with krakauer that:

I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace.

it’s understandable to me, on some level. last time surina and i went on our hiking and camping trip, she said to me, “isn’t it crazy how we literally spend our holidays doing this rather than, i don’t know, relaxing or something?” and yet, putting your body through quite a lot of pain in service of Going Far or Climbing High is appealing. i love our hiking trips because of how beautiful the mountains are, because of how much i love spending time with surina walking and talking and swimming in lakes, but on some level it is also because i enjoy the feeling of satisfaction after doing something hard, and, more than that, the state of grace that comes from the act of doing something really fucking hard, of pushing your body to the limit.

but, the hikes that surina and i do are far, far less dangerous and deadly than everest. climbing above 8,000m takes you into the “death zone”, where oxygen is too thin to sustain human life—the longer you’re up there, the closer you are to death. and krakauer points out that, as dangerous as this is in and of itself, it becomes frequently fatal when climbing is linked to money, fame and making a living. there is much controversy about the events of 1996, but i respect krakauer’s humility and integrity in examining his positionality and cupability as a journalist on that expedition, as someone who could potentially give his guides a lot of needed publicity.

on this reread, i was struck by the viscerality of the descriptive language krakauer uses throughout this book: the gangrenous right hand of my teammate beck weathers; the night had a cold, phantasmal beauty; the crepuscular gorge; achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete; the enigma of mortality. it gives everest and the attempt to summit it a sense of grandiosity, distance, that contributes to the slow, snowballing horror of the disaster. truly a magnificent book, and a horrible tragedy.

miscellaneous

seeing a platypus in the wild (!!!!!) with sophie, carla, ash and morgan! morgan wanting to ride in our car and saying visiting the nature reserve with us was her rose of the day. the flock of king parrots that took up residence in the trees on our street. meeting hongjian and having korean hot pot with him and ping. watching fellowship of the ring and hongjian, hana and i all reciting the lines. making dumplings. sofia excitedly zipping and unzipping her jacket. amy and biyan's birthday. lost coast live! searching for seaglass and smoothed shells on the wollongong beach with bee. bee treating us to incredibly delicious balinese food. meeting chiara and adara and walking barefoot on the beach! hearing a koala bellow (?!). hana piggybacking ash and his big smile. ash entreating us all to watch him slide down a pole. patrick's solo gig. big rainbows in the morning! platypus spotting with amy and weggs (sadly unsuccessfully). sending some yellows and v6 projects at the bouldering gym. wildflowers on the muogamarra nature reserve. bright green moss and big tall ferns. hiking to the mangrove forest. visiting a big cave and seeing a scarlet myzomela. my $5 star trek mug purchase. looking after sima's silly cats. preety's delicious cooking. michael turning into an auntie as he loaded up our plates and glasses. watching glee episodes with amy and weggs, and moulin rouge for the first time. discussing co-writing with zoë at length for hay's article. climbing outdoors with patrick. amy and weggs' orange almond cake. marjory and kostas' orange syrup cookies. ranking every single one direction song in order. talking over claire and stella's exciting writing projects. the bright beautiful yellow wattle everywhere. this g. c. waldrep poem. these quotes by fidel castro.

take care of yourselves out there. see you soon.