After months of scheming, trying to figure out how I can get my music to occupy two artist names on all the streaming services—both 11:17 and eleven seventeen—today it occurred to me: I just gotta choose one.
So, it’s eleven seventeen. The spelled out version is the most versatile, imo. You can represent it as 11:17, 11/17, 11×17, eleven_seventeen_, 1117…whatever fits the moment. As time has gone on, that’s how I’ve chosen to view it anyway: as manifesting in whatever form I happen to encounter it out in the world.
After six months in Austin, I’m back in Busan. Today I rode my bike past a coffee shop where I used to post up in the evenings to work. This past winter, when I tried to visit again, I learned they had shortened their hours. Maybe he was just tired and getting ready to go home, but when the owner told me he was set to shut the place down in a few minutes, he looked defeated. I guessed business had been declining since my last visit.
I got so caught up in this memory, and in making sure there was no cross-traffic at the intersection where the shop is, that I forgot to turn my head and check whether the place was still in business. Instead, I started daydreaming about what it would be like to be the owner of a high-turnover enterprise like a cafe. If the place had gone under, I wondered whether the last day of operations felt liberating or defeating, and whether he would try again.
The guy was young, and he’d been inspired to open his doors after a trip to the Philippines, where he learned to make one of the country’s traditional desserts. If I had to guess, even if someone like that realized their current venture wasn’t working out, they’d likely be inspired to try again. Maybe in another place, maybe under a different name. But someone that young and driven wouldn’t likely just give up, and everything they learned on their first attempt would inform their second, and third, and on and on.
So it is, I realized, with eleven seventeen. There have been four incarnations of this project so far, if not more. I’m gearing up to embark on the next one. Whether it’s “successful” or not doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that I do it, because it sustains a part of me that I can’t express through any other means.
I also learned a new phrase in Korean today: 마음먹었다. It means “I made up my mind” but the literal translation is “I ate my mind.”
So that’s what I did today. I ate my mind.
It’s eleven seventeen.
11:17 