Same Day Last Year
By: Hansel Huang
Tags: Instagram, Los Angeles, Time, Progress, Memories

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

If you go to your archive on Instagram and choose “Story”, you will be reminded what happened on the same day in one of the previous years. Of course you have to be an active user to enjoy this privilege of accessing to your own memory. It’s basically the only term on the social media contract–to be fed, you have to feed. Also, you have to be timely. If you’re one of those people who happen to do #tbt with your posts, this is not gonna work. Well, I don’t know what you do with this feature. But there are quite a few options:

You “share” it to your story with a heartfelt caption typed up, tagging whomever might be involved in that time capsule, usually a friend you haven’t contacted longer than you’d like to admit. You click on “x” to hide it. Because it’s about your ex and you were embarrassingly and stupidly in love. You share it to your story quickly so you can click through to that post and edit the caption while you obviously posted it drunk and there is a typo. P.S. Don’t forget to delete the story later. You keep this moment to yourself and start spiraling how much/little progress you’ve made ever since.

Today is Dec. 22, 2020. I have been reminded that I was in Los Angeles two years ago on the same today, and I choose Option №5: Keeping it to myself and writing about it. So, not really keeping it to myself.

It was a trip I took on a whim, which is something that I too often claim I rarely do but actually often do–book a last-minute trip, stress my inner planner self out and secretly enjoy the fuss. Some goings-on around that time: I was on winter break in grad school. I was casually seeing a guy in New York who is now engaged (to someone who is not me). I started reading a lot of Joan Didion. On that trip, I stayed at an Airbnb in DTLA for a couple nights and a few more at the Line in Koreatown. I got on Grindr and investigated the gay demographic in West Hollywood, Venice and Silver lake, and of course respectfully sent some (actually not so) tastful nudes.

I had known two men in LA prior from Instagram, with whom I occasionally exchanged flirty DMs. One of them saw the Airbnb picture I posted and asked me where I was in Spanish, which I had to Google translate, and saw my picture at Chateau Marmont and told me to order the stuffed olives from off the menu. “It’s an acquired taste,” he said, which really turned me off. We would later become friends and he would invite me to the showroom of the high-end furniture shop he worked for, and keep giving advice I did not ask for, to which I always politely said thank you. I was once again reminded exactly how precarious that social media friendships were after he deleted his Instagram this year for obvious reasons. The other man said he would like to meet but blew me off, twice.

As you can see now, I was not in a great place. But I had fun nonetheless. I wandered around town on foot, examined by the drivers waiting for signals like a homeless person. I went to all the museums, LACMA twice, where I witnessed a man kneeling on one knee, opening a tiny velvet case and asking for a woman’s hand under “Urban Light”. I took an Uber up to the Griffith and paced down to Los Feliz on a day when the air quality almost made my lungs explode. I got ice cream and wound up in Skylight Books and have forgot about the rest of the day. I dined alone and took more Ubers (This is embarrassing but I grew up in cities my whole life and never found the need to learn to drive.) and chatted with some drivers who just seemed to be better adjusted Asians than those raised on the East Coast. The Latina woman who drove me to Venice one day told me how much she loved “Crazy Rich Asians”, which came out that summer, and shared stories about an ex-boyfriend who knew the former president of Warner Brothers, which would lead to a conversation about the private school tuition in LA and her moving to Las Vegas for a job she was super excited about. It was such an intimate car ride, and I realized that you can love many things at the same time, even when they seem conflicted, like New York and LA. In Venice, I met a young woman with crooked teeth who said she was from New York and told me to go to Sunset Tower, where she saw Jennifer Aniston, and warned me to never approach a celebrity there. I never went. I crashed a dance party in the Original Farmers Market and gazed upon the Pacific and watched “Pretty Woman” in bed (It felt appropriate). Traveling alone, I could genuinely do whatever the fuck I wanted.

In spite of my appreciation for this feature on Instagram, which evidentally summons memories hidden in the deep dark corners of the mind, it seems that I haven’t made much conspicuous progress at all. Well, I stopped sending nudes. I’m training my mind to be attracted to good boys. (Trust me. I already tried to train it to be straight. That went well.)

Our notion of time has been slotted for as long as we can all remember, into centuries, decades and years, upon which we have constructed scaffoldings of meanings for each age. “Where do you see yourself in five years” is the one laborless question I hope they’d stop asking after this year, because the answer will be nothing but a scripted lie. In Chinese culture, there is a vague “benchmark” for every ten years in your life: have independence for your 30s, get clarity for your 40s, know your fate for 50s, be better at listening for 60s, do whatever the fuck you want in your 70s, because who gets to live till their 70s in ancient China?

Our notion of time also lies heavily on the cultural, philosophical side, instead of the scientific side, even though they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” manages to make the science of time sound poetic. If you truly “believe in the universe”, you should know that there isn’t one absolute time in the universe, because time is only meaningful when it’s relative.

So, if ever asked again, I would say: five years from now, I see myself doing exactly what I’m doing now–growing, failing, doing the work, relatively speaking.