Raf's archives

January Recap

So one of the things I want to do in this blog is take a moment at the end of each month to look back on how it was, what I did, and reflect a little on the art I consumed (movies, books, songs, TV shows, whatever). I still have some sort of mental block when it comes to casually commenting on them (like tweeting or leaving Letterboxd reviews), so I thought that taking some time at the end of every month to do this seems like a good exercise. I have 4 topics to talk about today so let’s get started:

Personal Life

It always surprises me how January always feels like a humungous 60-day month. This year, I think it felt even worse than normal because I was so busy with work and all the hassle of looking for an apartment.

On the work front, I spent basically the entirety of this month in a cycle of trying to release a huge feature on the app I work on. But every build we sent to be QA'd came back with some pesky bugs, and I ended up having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. I literally rewrote the same gigantic feature 3 times in one month! Then when it finally passed QA, we ended up releasing it during a giant surge in users (when the surge started, signups were 300% higher than the week before!) and of course, the new feature broke something in the signup flow, and I had to work basically a 12-hour day trying to patch things up. So you can imagine how I've been ending my days pretty exhausted. Still, I feel engaged with my work and more hyped about this company than I've ever felt in the entire year I spent at my previous job in 2024. Even though it's been a struggle, I'm still very happy with it.

IMG_5478
How work has been feeling lately.

Another thing that's been draining my energy has been visiting apartments. As I mentioned in my last post, I'm hoping to buy a place for myself this year, and I've been in contact with a couple of real estate agents who've been setting up visits and sending me links to possible places. I honestly don't get how there are people who actually enjoy apartment hunting because I think it sucks so much. Trying to find something I can afford, in a walkable neighborhood (something very important to me since I don't drive and have no interest in it), and that's not in terrible condition has been looking more and more like an impossible task. I was genuinely considering stopping the search for a couple of months until I visited a really cool place last Thursday. And ,after some deliberation, I made an offer to buy! I'm really hoping the owners accept it, not only because I fell in love with the place but because I cannot wait to stop visiting apartments and dealing with real estate agents lol.

Also, this month I did another thing I mentioned in my last blog post about goals: I started taking Japanese lessons! I might go into more details on a later post but I'm really happy about this and it's been so much fun!

Movies

I didn’t watch as many movies this month as I usually do, but here are some of the ones I saw that spoke to me most!

IfIdHadLegs

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025) - dir. Mary Bronstein

I went into this movie completely blind, except for the fact that Conan O' Brien was part of the cast, and it turned out to be one of the most intense experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. The movie is basically about a series of terrible things happening to a woman who's already in a very difficult situation she doesn't control. Her daughter has some unspecified condition that requires constant care, a giant hole opens up in her house's roof and she has to move to a motel temporarily, her husband is on a long work trip and he's a complete asshole every time they talk, she's a therapist dealing with multiple patients going through heavy stuff, etc. All of this builds a gigantic sense of dread that makes both you and the main character (played by Rose Byrne, who delivers an amazing performance btw) feel suffocated to the point of exhaustion. I swear to God that I almost had a panic attack during the movie and, even though it was a horrible experience, a movie that can provoke this kind of reaction is definitely worth watching.

tumblr gif

Soy Cuba (1964) - dir. Mikhail Kalatozov

This movie has been on my radar for a while. I've heard people praising the famous funeral scene and its honestly unbelievable camera work but I wasn't expecting the entire movie to look like that! Every single scene has some of the most extraordinary camera work and overall amazing mise en scene I've ever seen. A couple of days after watching, I was in a coffee shop searching for a specific scene to show a friend who was there with me and even watching it on YouTube on a cellphone, I was kind of mesmerized by how great this movie looks. It's basically an anthology of different stories about the Cuban people and their struggles before the Cuban Revolution. It has amazing performances, some very emotional moments, and it's one of those movies that sticks with you for a long time as soon as you finish.

thetrip

The Trip (2010) - dir. Michael Winterbottom

So this is a weird one to talk about, especially following the other two. It's definitely not an intense experience or any kind of virtuosic work of art, but it just spoke to me. I've been on multiple trips with a specific friend of mine, and I could just see us on that screen: the incessant riffing, the friendly jabs, the pointless discussions, the love and aggravation that comes from a relationship where you're really good pals that don't necessarily see each other all the time, but can take a month to stay together every day, experiencing something new and different while traveling through a bunch of places. This is definitely not a movie that everyone will enjoy, it's just Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan going places, eating, drinking, and cracking jokes about whatever, but damn, I really like those two and I really miss traveling with my friend, so this movie spoke to me way more than I anticipated.

Books

The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023) by Rick Rubin

I'm honestly not entirely sure why I decided to read this book. I mean, I am actively trying to create more stuff and engage more in artistic activities this year, so it makes sense that I picked it up. But I never expected that fucking Rick Rubin of all people would make something that would guide me or help me be a better artist. I think this is the main reason I didn't hate this book like most of the folks who reviewed it on Goodreads. I knew what I was getting into. I was fully expecting some esoteric mumbo jumbo about energy and an extremely romanticized version of what it is and how to be an artist and that's straight up what I got. I think I went into this book because I wanted to see an artist talk about being an artist and the creative process, and for better or worse, I kind of got that. Rubin does describe the phases of his process, from gathering inspiration (or "seeds," as he calls it), to experimentation, crafting, and finally completion. He mentions some techniques he uses to experiment with material or get out of creative ruts, and that was a little bit interesting. It was just padded with a lot of unnecessary cosmic debris and uninteresting anecdotes that could 100% be made up (because he never mentions any names it's just "a musician I know had X" or "an artist once did Y"). Anyway, it's a very mediocre book that hasn't moved or influenced me in any way, but it's also not a huge pile of trash like I've seen people calling it. Not everything has to be an amazing piece of art that changes your life, and this definitely isn't.

This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days (2025) by John Darnielle

This Year is a book where John Darnielle (the primary and originally sole member of the band The Mountain Goats) goes through one song he wrote each day and talks about it. Either the lyrics, his method of making songs, what the inspiration was, or whatever comes to his mind. My girlfriend and I decided we'd read a song from this book each day as some sort of ritual (something many people are also doing, which you can see in the youTube comments for each song, where people are basically forming a migrating book club to talk about them.) I think it's very funny that we decided to read this book this year just as I started The Creative Act, because they're almost antitheses of each other. While Rick Rubin talks in a very abstract way about what being an artist is and its many aspects, Darnielle describes in detail why he made the choices he did for a specific song, what inspired a certain theme, or what was going on in his life at the time. It's honestly a beautiful glimpse behind the curtain of one of the, in my opinion, best songwriters of the 21st century. It's an absolute joy to read, and the fact that during the entire month of January he didn't go through a single song I already knew makes it even better for me. I look forward to an entire year of discovering more songs and learning more about one of the musicians I admire the most.

One thing I wanted to do with this book since I am going to be reading it through the entire year is highlight a couple of my favorites songs from each month, so this were the ones that most spoke to me in January:

Music

I wasn’t originally planning to write about music since I tend not to hyper-fixate on one artist/album and instead, I'm always listening to a bunch of different things. But ironically enough, in January it was pretty clear I had three different periods where I focused on specific artists, so I thought it was worth shouting them out here. The three bands I listened to the most this month were:

I think that’s about all the things I wanted to talk about this month. This ended up a much longer post than I anticipated, and I'm already three days into February so the lesson here is that I should start working on the next one before the month is over! Thanks for reading!