inklingfair Today my “flow” consisted of obsessing over stages in a user journey in the morning and a list of outputs for the next season of DAKILA in the afternoon. By 3PM I was out of joy as well as potato chips and chocolates, so I stopped and pulled up Coffee Prince, my one of two go-to pick-me-ups (the other being Hyori’s Bed and Breakfast which sadly isn’t on Netflix anymore). Not the drama this time, but My Dear Youth, the cast’s retrospective on the drama.
I chuckled at Yoon Eun Hye and Gong Yoo’s commentary about their bright-eyed twenty-something selves, and conceded that, yes, I am getting older too. I get it. I, too, have a memory of an endless summer, a time when I spoke my mind and held nothing back and was shameless and unedited. (I won’t say how many times I stopped writing to backspace-backspace-backspace and muse if this word or that phrase made me sound lame. See? There I go again.)
The most striking part of Dear My Youth for me was the cast remembering the exact point when Eun Chan and Han Gyul magically clicked and “they started flying around and there were no boundaries between them” (director Lee Yun Jung) and the work of shooting the drama became exciting and felt like playing – while telling a damn good story – “where you wanted to go early and leave late” (Lee Sun Kyun). Korean dramas keep a notoriously toxic shoot schedule, but the clips behind the scenes of this one punctuated with the infectiously joyous laugh of the director and the crew made me think yes, I know how that feels.
It’s happened to me too, with 51_mat, the raggedy Peacetahan/DAKILA crew, early Human Nature all-nighters. We were such children then, with so much energy and courage and foolishness. Yet “I knew much more then than I do now,” as an aging rock star sang. I’m glad I was who I was then, and I’m glad for those I grew up with. We saw each other guileless and naked and we didn’t care.
Towards the end of the documentary, Gong Yoo talks about how Coffee Prince found him at the end of his twenties feeling unsure about where he was going next, and how it saved him. Ten years later, the same thing happened again to him with Goblin; in a different interview he says that the Goblin, Kim Shin, could have been Han Gyul grown up (a 900+ year old, grumpier Han Gyul). Perhaps there’s some truth to the cyclical seasons we find ourselves in – ten years ago I found myself at a crossroads and chose this career path over a different life. And now I’m back with the people I worked with, a bit more restrained, a bit less open, a bit more careful “in the clothes [I] made”. And I wonder if, when and how it will happen again, when the universe comes together just so and we can fling off the fig leaves again.
Meanwhile, here, have some joy.
Photo by Kris Atomic on Unsplash
