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| Me and my freshman dorm |
This month marks the 28th anniversary of me moving to NYC. My boss was moving his daughter into the same NYU dorm I lived in yesterday. While it was probably emotional for him, it stirred up a lot for me as well.
Living in NYC is never easy.
At every turn, it challenges you to leave. To stay is a fight—a financial,
emotional, and logistical one. You put up with roommates, mice, roaches,
ridiculous apartment layouts, questionable landlords, sticky subway poles, sweltering
subway platforms just to survive. And in those moments, you wonder why.
But then you stand on a rooftop on a summer night and hear
Broadway performers singing Sunday in the Park with George and it’s
unbelievably magical. You and your roommates all laugh and scream standing on
the sofa with broomsticks fruitlessly chasing a mouse around the room. You
overhear someone telling a story on the subway so good that you wish you could change
subway lines with them to keep listening to them tell it. You meet one of your
favorite playwrights and tell them how much their work meant to you and then
you go out on the street and burst into tears. And these odd little bits add to up
to the reasons why you stay.
I’ve lived in Seattle, Los Angeles, and the suburbs of DC.
None of those places every felt right. When I left for Seattle, I sobbed as the
plane took off. But as my friend Laura
said recently “I’m never sad to come home to NYC.”
When I first got here, arriving from a small town, I felt like I did not speak the language. Over time I acclimated. A veneer of jadedness covers us all as a coping mechanism. There are too many people. There’s too much life happening around you. Alas, you cannot take it all in and process it and still keep your sanity.
I was visiting Boulder Colorado once and as I walked down
the street everyone said hello to me. It was terrifying. New Yorkers are not more mean or callous. But
you just cannot smile and say hello to everyone walking down the street (nor
should you). Whenever I have fainted in
public, people have rushed to my aid. Whenever I have cried on a subway car, I
have been left alone to do just that.
I’m not sure I recognize the girl who moved here 28 years
ago. There have been a lot of unexpected tangents in my journey from that day until
now. And what this city is, what it means to be here, and what it means to stay
has taken on a whole different gloss since March 2020.
But when I circle my local park practicing my Korean
vocabulary aloud, no one looks at me funny. Kids are playing on the swings and
running though fountains. People play
volleyball, soccer, basketball all at the same time and all somehow manage to
share the limited pavement. Intrepid neighbors are selling food and drink out of
coolers to the players and their onlookers.
And this feels like home.
Nevertheless
In honor of my youthful memories of being a young idiot in
the big city, I give you Nevertheless about twentysomethings making bad
choices.
Song Kang deserves a grown-up vehicle after acting in so
many teen dramas. Nevertheless delivers on mature themes but in a half-cocked
way. It feels like someone thought a sex drama with half-naked Song Kang would
be enough. But it turns out you need to invest in the characters a bit more.
Yu Na-bi (Han So-hee) is a struggling art student who is
humiliated by her first boyfriend, an older man and art teacher. She swears off
love after this. When she encounters a
flirty metal sculpture student Park Jae-eon (Song Kang) and known-bad boy she’s
not sure how to navigate her lust for him and what she knows she needs. So, she gives into the lust and they have a
no-strings attached fling. But the red flags add up to too much for her and she
calls it off. But she cannot avoid him at school completely. The show also
follows several other couples in her art class and their struggles with being
casual, having secret crushes, and slow-burn discovering their feelings for
someone else.
At ten episodes, this show is uber-horny but lacking in story.
We are left with a lot of internal monologues from Na-bi that never say or
express much. Or are so literal I almost punched the TV.
She’s got some baggage from her mother which informs why she
may be running away from this relationship, but also why she struggles to live “passionately.”
Park Jae-eon has some mom issues too but they are barely explored. Also, they
opt to shoot him frequently from the back of the head showing off his butterfly
(na-bi in Korean) tattoo on his neck. This
turns him into a frustrating faceless cypher.
His entire character is set up to be a carefree, maybe-or-maybe-not
two-timing jerk. He’s a fuckboi and yet the series thinks it can somehow redeem him but having him change zero percent of his ways. Do not make me root for THIS GUY even if he is played by the
precious Song Kang.
I wish I could say that choosing lust over reason feels
liberating or sex positive here. But the way the characters are written it
feels like toxic, self-harm. And while we’ve all been dumb in our 20s about the
wrong people it’s hard to cheer for anyone else doing the same.
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