Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Sometimes an entire story can be told in a single tweet.

Is it meta to do a blog post of a tweet, and then tweet out the blog post?

Or is it just FaceBook? 

Impressive Insta.

Tik Tok we don’t stop. 

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” ~ James Baldwin

For twenty years, this website has spilled my personal tea, while occasionally commenting on pop culture, LGBTQ+ culture, Madonna culture, and often nothing cultural at all. In preparing for its 20th anniversary (coming in March!) I’ve been going through some previous posts and found a few that I feel are worth sharing again. Pull up a chair, plop down on the couch, or go full tilt back on the bed and see if anything sounds interesting. I’m putting on a pot of tea and getting cozy and comfortable with this spot of ‘Tea for Two’ as we take a little trip down memory lane… 

Those links go back many years, and much of this website gets lost and buried in the passage of time. Here are a few more that have been posted more recently, because it’s usually more interesting to deal in the here and now than the past and previous.

Feeling my years – a way of bridging the past and present. 

Forty years into her game, Madonna is going on tour again.

How a year begins.

Burning it all down: the first ring of fire.

Burning it down again: the second ring.

Tea time with Dad.

Empty rooms of a young heart.

How to make the whole place shimmer.

The room for meditation and tea.

Bet I made you look.

We have made it to the last full month of winter, and this recap straddles the only months that contain winter in their entirety – next month contains the first few days of spring, so let that inspire you to carry on through the next couple of weeks. Yesterday brought a Full Snow Moon, which I and several friends and family have been feeling for longer than a day. Let’s push forward through this winter – on with the recap.

That lavender haze inspired by Taylor Swift and Tom Ford. 

A candlelight date with my husband.

A fruitful February, and a few from the past.

This hour of television absolutely wrecked me, in the best possible way. 

Still practicing the polish and poise. 

Good friends are the main ingredient of a good dinner party. 

Dark but just a game.

A little song for winter.

Hunkering down in hygge.

Mirror gazing.

On the nature of daylight.

Dazzlers of the Day included Matt Friend, Sam Smith, Chris Salvatore, Austin Wolf, Pedro Pascal, Christopher Griffin, and Murray Bartlett.

Several years ago I was introduced to the music of Max Richter, and since then it has enriched my more contemplative moments, providing an extension of the miraculous sense of stillness somehow rife with movement. Not unlike the gorgeousness of the work of Philip Glass, its richness is in its layers and motifs, holding the breath and soul still when all the world wants to do is rush and rattle. The title of this post gets its name from the piece below, which was used to sublime effect in that heartbreaking episode of ‘The Last of Us’ that everyone is talking about. 

The repetitive undulation at work here works in a meditative fashion, lulling the listener into a sense of peace, and calming the restless wanderings of the mind. It’s more difficult to tame the heart, but this can work on that as well if we let it. Some people take issue with the repetition – I find it comforting, and the ultimate illustration of the human spirit: no matter how many times we get beaten down, no matter how many times we get disappointed, we keep coming back for more, we keep getting up and trying again. There is nothing more human than that, and in our efforts I find grace and humility and love. 

There have been moments when I’ve wanted to give up on us as a species, when I watch the news and see how awful humans can be to one another, but eventually and always they are supplanted by a story or a thread of hope in some small act of goodness one of us has done for another, and I find the fight to keep going, to keep trying, to keep living and doing some little bit of goodness in return. 

The unexamined life is not worth living, or so some say. At this point, for those of us who may have lived out at least half of our lives, we might feel as if we’ve examined things enough. There comes a time when one must take a chance and simply live – in and for the moment, without consideration of danger or risk or worry. A moment of pause, in a sense, without planning or plotting or considering every possible outcome. There are certainly situations when those actions are vital, but not all the time. I’m looking into letting things go and existing in the moment, something that never came easy for my Virgo nature. Some of us are simply more comfortable with a schedule and a plan, but there are things we miss in the minute-to-minute planning, and these last few years I’ve been working on finding the magic missed.

It coincides with allowing imperfection and the idea of ‘good-enough’ into my mode of living, and letting go of the need to seek perfection and the unattainable goal of ‘just right’. To those ends, some progress has been made. The terror and discomfort I felt at first has been supplanted by an ease and joy that has helped make up for the wretched awfulness that real life has thrown at all of us in these last couple of years. Aging parents, a worldwide pandemic, and the financial strains we’re all facing have conspired to challenge many of us. Maybe it’s just the typical move into crotchety-old-man territory, but I don’t remember when I’ve felt so disheartened or disappointed with the world as a whole. Thankfully, my friends and family lift and buoy my spirits whenever I veer too cynical or pessimistic. I also assume this is what getting older does to everyone – it reveals the ugly truth about things that we could afford to ignore or pretend away in our youth. If we were very lucky, and I believe I have been, we may not have even had to ignore it – it simply was, in our ignorant appraisal, a better and easier time. Still, I wouldn’t trade what little I know now for all my ignorant bliss before.

And so I work to embrace the downward slope that cresting over the hump of middle-age is bringing into accelerated view. Taking breaks from the intensive self-analysis and reflection that has typically populated this site should make for more interesting posts and varied content. After twenty years, it’s about damn time.

If ever the weather cried out for a moment of hygge, this is that ever. While I was at the office yesterday, I watched the temperature slowly tick down through the single digits. Outside the sun was strong, but I wasn’t falling for it; you could hear the wind rushing by the windows. As the afternoon progressed, the wind chill temperature tumbled further. This, at long last, was the proper upstate NY winter we’d not yet had. No one asked for it, no one wanted it, but I can’t complain if it chose to wait until February to arrive. So long as it doesn’t linger…

It puts me in the mind for hygge – so I have stayed close to home today, lighting candles and cooking some kimchi fried rice for tomorrow. Writing blog posts like this, and doing some reading (currently I’m enjoying ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer, comprised the bulk of the day, in between cups of hot tea and a meditation at some point. This is winter – harsh outside, soft inside.