Ziwei Z | Est. 2015

Slow in SLO

Recently I went on a very solo, very socially distanced retreat to San Luis Obispo for a couple days, hoping to feel a semblance of normality and escape. My hotel had a disposable camera in the room so I opened it without thinking twice. I like the idea of having a limited number of shots when traveling, but I wasn’t confident enough in my untested film camera skills to abandon my DSLR altogether. I took photos with both. As soon as I returned to LA, I eagerly got the disposable camera developed and within a day, received the scanned version…

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November 20, 2020

Travel

Joshua Tree

A place like Joshua Tree makes me feel closer to a God that I don’t even believe in. There is an air of magic over it, almost separate from reality. Yet if anything, it’s more real than all the rest of the manmade reality in which I live. I don’t know how I haven’t been to Joshua Tree in my thirteen years of living in California, but I’m not sure I could have ever been as grateful to see it as right now. I remember dismissing a friend who said that life might never go back to “normal” a few…

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September 26, 2020

Fashion

Los Angeles

Calm in the Chaos

After a productive day at my regular job, I was unusually energetic for my live graduate school class that I started this May. The first semester was coming to an end, and I was ready learn to some more Python and finish strong. Ten minutes into the class, instead of nodding along with my classmates on Zoom, I found myself lying on the floor next to my new kitten Celine, waiting for my wifi modem to reset for the 5th time. This is the kind of scenario that could potentially turn me an anxious and tense mess. While I could…

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August 12, 2020

Travel

Some Memories

I used to remember everything. Well, not *every*thing, I didn’t have a superpower, but I remembered a lot of details, dates, encounters… There were countless occasions where I would remember the exact date something happened, but would hesitate to say it out loud so I didn’t seem creepy. That’s not the case anymore, getting older is no joke! It’s not as easy to recall specific details and more instances where I would forget entire memories that I used to hold close. Yet perhaps counterintuitively, I feel like I can remember memories, sometimes pretty distant ones, more vividly than before. They…

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May 4, 2020

Los Angeles

LA Diaries #3

What a crazy time in the world. I’ve been saying that way too much but I don’t really have any other words to describe this sometimes. It seems like every day there is a new normal. I started working from my apartment in Los Angeles last week. Of course it takes some time to adapt to all the changes, but I have never felt more grateful for all the things I have. My personal problems seem minuscule now as I am overwhelmed with empathy for so many people struggling during this pandemic. While we may be confined at…

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March 22, 2020

Travel

An Escape to Toronto

Every trip is an escape from the everyday life. But perhaps because of the coldness or my tiredness after a sleepless red-eye flight, the four days I spent in Toronto felt particularly removed from reality in the best way. From coming up with the idea of going to Toronto to booking plane tickets, it only took my friend Koki and me a few hours to plan this trip. The fact that February is arguably the worst month to visit Toronto didn’t even cross our minds. Once it did, it did little to nothing to dampen the thrill from making an…

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February 22, 2020