Kwon.nyc

Dispatches from an in-progress attempt to get unstuck

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:42:52 -0400

Hello and welcome to the latest chapter of my midlife crisis, where I’ve done something somewhat impulsive, which is to sign a commercial lease on a (very modest) studio space in Brooklyn.

I have felt creatively stuck for a while, and also just generally disconnected and ungrounded from the immediate physical world around me. So I’m hoping that having a dedicated space to make stuff will encourage me to get myself unstuck. (Also paying a monthly subscription fee a.k.a. rent to another landlord in order to hold myself accountable to fixing my own creative constipation better be enough of a fire to get me moving and stop feeling sorry for myself.)

I think part of the reason why I feel disconnected from the physical, touchable world is that I work in internet but also my main hobby is internet, so I spend a lot of time online. (There are other external forces contributing too, like the general state of the world and the fact that society is crumbling, et cetera. Apparently I’ve been since at least 2022 according to this note I found.) In any case, I’m not trying to litigate the root cause of my blehs too hard right now; I just want to work on fixing what I can control.

What am I trying to unstick, exactly? It’s not that I don’t have creative ideas. I have lots of ideas. My ideas have ideas. They’re just not manifesting themselves into existence. Whenever I have time and space to actually act on a creative idea, I either forget what the brilliant idea was thanks to brain fog, or, if I do remember what it was, it suddenly feels stupid or like I can’t do it and I don’t want to work on it anymore. Or I get distracted by some other thing that seems more urgent and important but in the grand scheme of things probably isn’t. Or I just don’t have the energy. And then before I know it, months have passed and I feel guilty that I haven’t made anything.

I miss the feeling of making or tinkering with or fixing something tangible and getting so into it that I lose track of time and my mom has to tell me to stop and go to bed otherwise I will be tired at school the next morning. That’s the feeling I’m chasing.

This is roughly the sequence of events that led me here:

I was on my subway commute home on a Friday after a somewhat frustrating day at work. The train was delayed, and on top of it I knew I was just going to go home and eat dinner, maybe go for a walk, and then probably mindlessly scroll to try and distract myself from the day, and I didn’t really feel good about it.
I somehow started thinking about something that felt kind of original and was also the first idea I’d been excited about in a long time.
- The loose idea was to have a physical space and also a digital representation of that space (a website like kwon.space) and somehow harmonize them.
- I didn’t think about it too deeply but shared a half-baked version of the idea on Mastodon (which has lately been my digital third place), just to throw it out into the world.
- People were super encouraging, enough to make me take the step of casually looking up studio spaces in Brooklyn and domain names in cyberspace, while on the train on the train.
I bought the domain, kwon.space, that evening¹.
- I initially wanted kwon.studio but that one is already taken, by an artist named Suki Kwon in Dayton, Ohio. I went down a small rabbit hole exploring her art while browsing domain names.
Two days later I was touring a physical studio space.
After seeing a few spaces, I signed the lease on one of them that more or less felt right.
Three weeks after that initial idea on the subway, I had keys in hand.

So it’s been about a month, and I’ve had 9 or 10 short studio sessions so far, usually less than two hours long. The sessions have been fairly aimless (intentionally) and I’m trying not to be too productive or anything, just have fun with it, so I’ve been working on some small scale maker stuff like building a Raspberry Pi writer deck², woodworking with hand tools, assembling a workbench and other furniture for the space (how [lowercase-m] meta!)

Not to be dramatic, but it’s kind of felt like detoxing from an addiction where the main symptom was draining my ability to focus. The last time I felt that present was when I was in the ambulance after my car accident last summer, wondering if I was bleeding into my abdomen from the blunt force trauma (spoiler: I wasn’t). I was not-so-secretly hoping that it would fix my problem of getting easily distracted and that the focus would persist and that I would magically be able to be fully present and focus forever. Disappointingly (and also thankfully in other ways, but not in this regard), it’s kind of amazing how quickly life went back to “normal” with the usual distractions of the world around me. Also getting into a car accident every time I want to focus on a creative project doesn’t seem like the most sustainable strategy.

I knew I’ve been using my business brain a little too much because one early thought I had about the studio was, oh, I could create and track a metric called “time-to-flow-state”, ttfs, defined as time in mins it takes for me from entering my studio and closing the door to achieving flow state, which would dictate how “successful” I’ve been in any given session. But then I decided I didn’t want that pressure and that wasn’t the mindset I wanted to have.

The very first time I was in my studio space after getting the keys, no furniture, sitting on the hard cold floor under a bright fluorescent light, thinking about my intentions for the space, I felt that I absolutely made the right decision, which was a conviction I haven’t had lately about anything. I was basically sitting in an unglamorous empty white box with a hard gray concrete floor (it really does look like this except a little more industrial) and it felt good to just… imagine possibilities.

There are lots of things to noodle on relation to setting up the physical space and I’m enjoying the process. The biggest project I’ve been working on this month is the studio itself. There has been no shortage of decisions to make and it’s kind of fun and empowering to think about what I want the space to be. For example, there’s no internet in the space (I’d have to get it set up and open a contract with an ISP and everything just like getting residential internet). So I thought, maybe it should be an internet-free zone? I could build a little phone-sized lockbox by the door and lock my phone in it and not retrieve it until leaving the studio. This would mean that the studio space is only for physical or offline projects. Or the other extreme, what if I brought my home internet setup to the studio and used internet ONLY there and not at home? I remember when the internet was a place, the shared family desktop computer in my parents’ room where I would surf for hours, and that was a time when I would get lost. Or maybe I shouldn’t be so extreme — I can connect to the internet if I truly have a blocking question or something that requires the internet to solve, but it can mostly be a physical tinkering space³.

One thing I learned about acquiring creative studio space is that the first thing they ask you is “what do you do?”, as in what are you going to use this space for. That is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, but the first time I was asked I was kind of caught off guard, and “I don’t know but I’m going to use the space to find out” (which was my honest answer) didn’t seem like an answer that would inspire confidence for someone taking on a tenant, so I said something like “uh writing? And maybe some small maker projects like mechanical keyboards or woodworking with hand tools but nothing too loud or dangerous, unless that’s what people like to do here in which case I can roll with it 😅” and the guy was like “…ok so you’re a writer” and then showed me some studios.

The reality is that I have way too many things that I like to do and want to try, but it doesn’t seem like the best idea to do writing, woodworking, bike stuff, soldering, etc, in the same small space (dust, grease, and electronics seem like a bad combination), so I know I’ll need to scope it down. I really just want to be as worry-free as possible about creativity killers like making a mess and breaking things. I had seen another place, in a trendier neighborhood further from where I live, with hardwood floors and clearly new-ish drywall put up, which was more reasonably priced and a slightly larger space, but it felt too clean, almost corporate, and I realized I would be afraid to mess it up, which was the opposite of my intention for the space, so I ended up going with the grittier, sturdier warehouse-vibe space with concrete floors and brick walls.

So that’s where I’m at. The general vibe I’ve landed on so far is that my space is basically my suburban garage, where I can hang out for a couple of hours in the evening after work or on weekend days and just tinker and be loud and make mistakes. The version of me that’s the frustrated grown-up on the subway me is trying to do right by the kid who didn’t want to go to bed because she was having too much fun playing. Let’s see where it goes! (I did put something up at kwon.space as a placeholder, and while I’m focusing on the physical space for now, it’ll be fun to think about what to do with the digital space when the time comes.)

Surely, buying another kwon-themed domain will solve all my problems!! ↩︎
This is an especially hilarious project for me because I’ve had writer’s block for about ten years… *literally builds a small computer for writing in order to avoid doing the actual writing*… ↩︎
The em-dash in this sentence was lovingly handcrafted, with a gentle click on my option+shift+dash keys. ↩︎

Bye 2025

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:43:56 -0400

Honestly, 2025 has been a doozy and I’ll be glad to have it in the rearview. My year was personally very eventful, and that’s excluding everything that happened in the world. I’m still processing a lot of it, but here’s a summary in roughly chronological order, using Roman numerals for added drama:

I. Cancer scare #1 (fake)

In early Feb I had my first screening mammogram ever, in accordance with the guidelines of most major authoritative health organizations which recommend starting screening at age 40 in people with average risk for breast cancer. In my head I was thinking of it as a box to check, a way to briefly remind myself that I was still in middle age but you know, I still got it 💃🏻, and that I was a good, compliant patient with all screenings up to date. I was most apprehensive about my boobs being squished, and even that was maybe a 3/10 on the anxiety scale.

The initial result said my breasts were extremely dense (thanks), so I was recommended for a repeat study, which I scheduled because I am a good, compliant patient. When the radiologist came into the room to deliver the result verbally to my face, I knew it wasn’t going to be that I have fantastic A+ breasts. She said there was something suspicious and that the next step would be a biopsy.

From the intervening time between when she told me I needed a biopsy, to when I actually got the biopsy about a week later, and when I received the result verbally over the phone a few days after that that it was negative, I went through a whole personal cancer journey in my head, like a movie, thinking about how my life would be different if I had cancer. I cried twice. I talked to my mom and my sister and my partner a lot. I ate two hot dogs for lunch even though I rarely eat hot dogs because (1) I love hot dogs and (2) everyone knows hot dogs cause cancer so I figured if I already had cancer then I might as well eat some hot dogs.

Anyway, I got the call that it was negative, and it was definitely a relief that I didn’t have cancer (YET – my dense breasts are basically just better at hiding things, and studies seem to suggest that the density of the breasts itself is an independent risk factor for breast cancer. Great!), and I kind of filed the whole thing away in my head as something not to worry about until my next mammogram.

II. Cancer scare #2 (fake-ish)

Around the same time, though, my Pap smear also came back with something suspicious. As a small-ish Asian woman I have a specific type of privilege where I am rarely suspected of anything, so to be found suspicious for two somethings in a matter of days was unexpected, to say the least (it was my cells that were suspicious, not me… but who am I if not my cells?). Long story short, that one required a cervical biopsy, which was extremely uncomfortable (and also more unexpectedly expensive than was communicated to me which was annoying), and in the end it basically confirmed that it was suspicious, but not requiring any immediate action and is something that can be surveilled. So essentially my body is low grade threatening to kill me, but verbally, from across the room, and not moving very quickly or otherwise indicating that it’s particularly serious about it. So I also filed that away as a thing not to worry about until it was something to worry about (and to appreciate having had a good time in my 20s and 30s as an unattached woman in the big city 🤷).

III. Cancer

In May, my mom texted me that she also was found to have dense breasts on her screening mammogram and needed a repeat study. We kind of laughed about it together, and I reassured her that it was probably nothing, just like mine, we’re just a coupla broads with dense breasts. However, when hers came back suspicious, it was a different kind of suspicious. Mine was suspicious as in “ehhh you’re supposed to get a biopsy but there’s a pretty good chance it’ll be negative because it’s kind of hard to see what we’re looking at” and hers was “you need a biopsy because we see enough of what we need to see and it’s not good, and we just need to confirm what we already know so we can start treating the not-good thing.”

I flew out to California to be with my mom when she got her biopsy despite her insisting I don’t because when I had my biopsy she said she wished she could be there with me and sometimes when people say things like that it’s what they actually would want for themselves. (Why couldn’t we just be direct with each other? Because we’re Korean. More specifically, because 눈치.) I bought a one-way ticket and made the cross country trip, which would be the first of five times I would be in California before the end of the year (☁️ foreshadowing ☁️), hung out for a few days, and went with her for the procedure.

I don’t believe in fate or a higher power or anything, but I was thankful that the timing was such that I had just been through something very similar and could help talk her through it. Having medical knowledge and a higher than average ability to navigate the American healthcare system was also helpful, but honestly I was just trying to be there for my mom as a daughter. The only thing I really did differently as a person with a medical background (including having operated on and treated dozens of people with breast cancer) vs just being her kid was to just be much more direct that it was almost certainly cancer even before the formal results came back, to help prepare her mentally for the journey ahead. I was aware of that journey clinically but not as a family member or otherwise personally, but I did know that knowing more and understanding what the hell is happening to your body and what to expect tends to be helpful.

As expected, my mom’s biopsy came back positive for cancer. She got the call on Friday the 13th and my dad and I were at her side when the call came. After she hung up the phone, I gave her a big hug and asked her how she was feeling. She said she felt prepared and accepted it, but also got a little teary and asked (rhetorically) “Why is this happening to me?”, which I thought was a response that really reflected who she is and who I want to be (strong, ready to take on anything, but also vulnerable and honest).

IV. The accident

Exactly three days after receiving the biopsy results and starting to make tactical plans like finding a surgeon and booking a consultation, we thought it would be nice to go to the beach to decompress a bit. We were on Highway 1 going northbound, making a turn to find parking for the beach when the passenger side of the car was struck by a car coming southbound. I saw it coming toward us and the impact itself felt like an eternity (later when I saw the diagram of the crash on the police report, I understood why, because we were dragged across three lanes of traffic and stopped when we hit a traffic box). Everything went bright white and I assumed I was dying, although turns out it was the airbags deploying, and rear airbags look like a curtain, which I never knew until that moment. Someone was screaming and it took a beat for me to realize it was me. The immediate aftermath was a haze; I had had the wind knocked out of me so I couldn’t breathe or talk but my mom kept asking if Rachel was ok, which broke my fucking heart because I just kept thinking that out of all of us, she really didn’t need this, and I was trying my best to force the air out of my lungs through my vocal cords to try and say “I’m ok” because I thought she had enough to worry about, and I didn’t want her to worry about me.

We were transported to the hospital in three separate ambulances. I was brought as a trauma activation because I had a seatbelt sign. I remember being in the ambulance looking out the rear window and seeing that all the cars had moved out of the way and thinking “huh, isn’t that nice.” I remember being rolled into trauma bay and similarly people had moved out of the way and were staring at me, and I remember thinking “am I supposed to say hi to them?” I think that was when I knew I was probably fine (also when the paramedic presented me to the trauma team as a “paperwork trauma” lol) even though I was crying (but mostly out of shock and worrying about my mom as opposed to pain).

I was cleared of anything major pretty quickly (pro tip for expediting an ER visit – come in as a trauma), probably within 40 minutes or so. Most importantly, my mom walked away with bruises and not much else even though the impact was on her side and she had to be extricated because the passenger door was crushed. My dad was also fine, thankfully. I fractured a small bone in my lower back and had a lot of contusions but was also otherwise okay physically. I had a morbid thought that if there was a certain quota of injuries that had to happen from that accident, I’m glad I got all of them and that my mom especially was mostly unscathed.

V. Mom

About a month later, my mom underwent surgery and I took a leave of absence from work to take care of her. I had found her a good surgeon who had incredible bedside manner and genuinely seemed to care about her patients (the initial consultation was two hours and she explained literally everything about what was going on and what to expect). Again, I don’t believe in a higher power, but by sheer coincidence this surgeon went to the same random middle school in Illinois that I went to and also grew up where I did, which I feel was some kind of sign. My mom was and is amazing and resilient, and everything went as smoothly as it possibly could have. I made her Korean soup after the surgery and she said it tasted so good which was probably my proudest moment this year (a close second was when my friend Steve’s orange foster cat Rigby chose my lap to sit in at their house after dinner).

There is a very unique vulnerability to taking care of a sick parent as an adult person. You’re my mom, you’re not allowed to get sick or old or die. This is the person who raised me and made me who I am. I still can’t fully process and am dreading the day when I can’t just pick up the phone and talk to her whenever I want because it no longer feels theoretical. At the same time I won’t be that surprised if she lives another 20-30 years because she is incredibly active and (other than cancer) full of life and values health and well connected to her community. It’s the way I want to live.

VI. Getting bipped

By September I had had enough life lessons for the year. Of course, life (or that higher power I definitely still don’t believe in) had other ideas. I took a short vacation with my partner and on day 1 our rental car was broken into and all our belongings stolen. Yes, it was in the Bay Area, yes, it was a smash and grab, yes, I knew it was a risk, no, our stuff wasn’t visible, no, it wasn’t a “bad neighborhood” (whatever that means to you). I quickly learned to follow up sharing this story with those explanatory commas because there is a weird form of victim blaming that happens whenever I tell it. I don’t believe it’s intentional or personal but it seemed almost instinctual that people would immediately ask for those details. It makes me really sad that people just seem resigned to it. Not to make this a west coast vs east coast thing and unfairly lump large heterogeneous groups of people into a single stereotype, but the reaction from laid back Californians (lol) was “oh, that sucks, but this is really common here, hope you had insurance!” and the reaction from my people back home was “what the fuck!!! are you ok?! that’s so messed up. what can we help with?” I think I’d prefer the New York response every time.

To be honest, this is the kind of thing that would have REALLY bugged me in the past, like upended my life and become some kind of defining story about my attitude towards humanity, but in context of everything else that happened this year, when I saw the smashed-up window, I was just kind of like, oh well – at least we’re safe. Then I immediately went into problem solving mode. We switched out the rental car within an hour, were able to replace most of the valuables like electronics, and it basically ended up being a minor inconvenience, considering the grand arc of life. I didn’t care as much about the things that were replaceable, even my laptop and AirPods and stuff; I was more upset about the belongings that were meaningful to me and irreplaceable but had no street value, like my journal (have fun reading about all my stupid anxieties, thief!!) and the SD card in my camera (that had photos from my time with my parents the month prior that I hadn’t gotten to back up yet). I was also just really disappointed that it happened at all.

VII. Epilogue / gratitude

Despite all of the above, the most overwhelming feeling I have had this year is gratitude. I’m thankful that none of this was any worse than it was, because it could have been so much worse in so many ways. In my life I have noticed that whenever there is some acute event (like a literal crash), there’s the event itself, and then there’s the blast radius — the chains of events that it sets off, some of which linger much longer than expected. At the time of impact (the car crashing into yours on Coast Highway, the call that the biopsy is positive for cancer, the realization that the rental car window has been smashed) you’re not thinking about the aftereffects; you’re locked in in the moment. Weirdly, from the time I was riding in the ambulance after the car accident and being worked up in the trauma bay, I had a realization that I was feeling something that I hadn’t felt in a long time (not pain from the accident). It was the feeling of being fully, entirely present in the moment. For that hour or so, nothing was more important than making sure I wasn’t secretly bleeding out inside. I couldn’t check my phone or move or do anything except… be there.

Having had time to reflect, I’m so aware of all the privileges and resources I have that softened the literal blows. Access to medical care, insurance coverage, the ability to navigate the healthcare system – these are extremely basic things that should be universal benefits, that I have because I have a good job (and also just happened to have worked in the healthcare system), and I have a good job because I have had a lot of support and opportunities in life, and I have a lot of support and opportunities in life because of sheer dumb luck. I feel so grateful but also sad, that these things are considered privileges and not rights.

I am also grateful for many unexpected moments of warmth from strangers that reminded me of something that is hard to believe sometimes but that I do believe, which is that most humans are good and do care about each other. A few examples:

When I was getting my breast biopsy, I audibly gasped when the lidocaine needle went in (ironically the numbing was the most painful part), and the radiology tech, who had otherwise been kind of aloof, kindly looked right into my eyes and asked in the gentlest and most serious tone if I wanted to hold her hand, and I was like “yeah 😭😭” and squeezed the hell out of it for the entire procedure. That really meant a lot to me.
I have complicated feelings about hospitals and healthcare institutions, but my mom’s surgeon and pretty much all of the staff we encountered were so kind and empathetic and really helped make her feel at ease during a stressful time. The nurse in the surgery center gave very clear and detailed instructions about what to expect and when, down to when we were in the waiting room and she had briefed us about which door would open with the next nurse who would call us in. Those details seem so insignificant individually but when you’re that vulnerable and in an unfamiliar environment with strangers, even something like knowing which door is going to open and then seeing that door open does something to calm your brain and I was so grateful for that for my mom.
In the immediate aftermath of the bipping, I was kind of in a daze driving the busted car back to the rental car lot, and I was not really expecting a lot of sympathy based on my previous experiences with the rental car company and a general cynicism about people, but there was a sweet angel employee checking the car back in for an exchange, when I told her what had happened, she said “oh man” and looked genuinely sorry (and said so), which was such a simple thing to say but felt so kind in the moment. Then, when my partner who for whatever reason was having an uncharacteristic streak of vigilante justice, mentioned that the bippers had bipped my AirPods and therefore I could track their location via Find My and attempt to… confront them, I guess? (I genuinely just wanted the journal and the SD card with photos)… I asked her what she would do if she were in my shoes, and she looked around, leaned into the car to talk to me directly and said, “As an employee of [rental car company], I’d say you shouldn’t go after them. (long pause) But if were just me, I’d hunt them down, cuz I’m a crazy bitch.” I really appreciated that.
About a month after the bipping, my partner got a call from a Bay Area number. It was a man named Gary who was walking his dog and stumbled upon a suitcase label some distance from a suitcase with a bunch of clothes in it. Gary took the suitcase and its contents, ran all the clothes through the laundry, and called the number on the label. He ended up shipping everything to us and was generally just very sweet and apologetic even though obviously none of it was his fault and in fact he really turned the whole experience around, not because the stuff was so irreplaceable or anything, but it kind of restored my faith in humanity. He didn’t have to do any of that but he did.

So, that’s pretty much it. I’m over 2025. I don’t have any goals or resolutions for 2026. This sounds really corny, but I truly just want to be fully present, and ideally without requiring a motor vehicle collision to feel it. I want to be the kind stranger in a moment of vulnerability for someone else. I want to hang out with my mom and my family. If I can just keep this train on the track and live healthy I’ll consider 2026 a success. Thanks for reading.

Still unfinished, still shareable

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 16:28:46 -0400

A little while back (six months ago) I wrote about how I made a random page featuring my dad’s hats and how I want to make more evergreen content and share more photos and visual things here.

For some things in my life I have become very decisive but this website is not one of them. Lol. Maybe it’s because it’s one of my few creative practices that I do purely for fun and so I feel a lot of pressure to make it amazing.

In my work life, I have gotten fairly reliable at managing my own projects, and collaborating with other people who are managing their own. I have also taken a similar approach to life admin and organization; I am at the point in my life where managing my own health and finances are also projects that need to be managed and tracked; not because I am particularly un/healthy or un/wealthy, but more because when you’ve been around for a few decades there’s just more STUFF that you generate with regard to taking care of yourself.

Anyway, all that is fine, but I just… don’t necessarily want to feel like I’m project-managing a thing in my personal life something that’s supposed purely for fun, i.e., this website. And unfortunately that has translated to many ideas that seem exciting at first but then as soon as I’ve documented one and decided to try and execute on it, it languishes. I have also incurred quite a bit of technical debt on this website based on fleeting decisions I made years ago, which also makes me hesitate to just build something even if it’s not perfect.

The “personal website as digital garden” metaphor is one that many people have resonated with, and for good reason. “Working with the garage door open” is another one I like, especially because it unlocks some core memories of my suburban midwestern upbringing. And remember those “Under Construction” signs (gifs) we used to put on pages on our websites, before reverse-chronological blogging was a thing? I like that metaphor, too. At some point you just have to describe the thing and not use the metaphor as an entire allegory, though.

Well, the whole point of this was to share some things I have been gingerly working on lately – think of it as me working on the garden in my garage with the door open and a construction sign in the driveway :)

So anyway… I made these (throws them on the ground in front of you and runs away):

index.kwon.nyc: An index page, as a way to track updates and show the delta between what this site is today and all my grand plans for it – maybe they will materialize faster if I create some accountability for myself by publishing them there. Or maybe I’ll continue to think of fun ideas and then stare at my own belly button for months. It also puts all the random orphaned pages I’ve created, like The internet used to be fun, in some context / information architecture. (“Orphan” is probably not very inclusive; if you have a better way to refer to them let me know. Although I supposed they’re no longer orphaned now that they’re on an index page.)
kwon.photos: The beginnings of a photo site, at a domain I bought a while ago and sat on because (inner dialogue incoming) I’m not a photographer but still want to share things in the world around me that I notice and think are worth capturing but there are already too many photos online and nobody will care about mine and I don’t even know how I would start to build a photo site these days, what is a WebP and an AVIF and what do you mean <picture>, don’t you mean <img> (end inner dialogue). Anywho, I also actually wrote documentation for the first time ever (tryna look out for future me) since I am trying out a new stack including a totally different static site generator, Astro (on a tip from Robin who used it to build his cool photo site), and a Node-based image processor, Sharp. (Back in my day, we had to manually make thumbnail images in Photoshop…)
kwon.nyc/cans: A sub-site with some neat-looking cans of craft beer I have had over the years. This one is an idea I had so long ago, that took me so long to execute on, that I don’t even really drink beer that much anymore 😂 I still appreciate a cute can though.

Disclosure: I did (and do) use an AI chatbot to help me build websites, although I have pretty specific guidelines for how I use them and don’t use them. I’ll write more about my thoughts later but tl;dr I’m not anti-chatbot, obviously, but I do think they are very specific tools that have very specific use cases (ASK: can you send me any AI disclosures you’ve seen on personal sites, or if you have one on your own? I’ve seen some good ones lately but of course forgotten to bookmark them).

Slowing Down

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:35:19 -0400

It’s fall here in the northern hemisphere. Feels like the fall of my life, too. Somehow midlife feels both like slowing down and also starting new things. I haven’t been in school for years now but fall still feels like back to school.

Yesterday I just missed the subway on my way to a 5 pm appointment in the city. The display sign above ground indicated that the train was coming in 0 minutes, and the next one was coming in 9 minutes, which would have gotten me to my appointment at 5:04 pm (assuming everything else went smoothly, which at rush hour in New York is a 50/50 assumption).

In the spring or summer of my life, I would have

sprinted down the stairs to try and make the one that may or may not have actually been there
possibly tripped and fell
probably missed the train anyway
tried an equally drastic alternative like furiously Citi biking to another stop with blind optimism that I could still make it on time, and then either
- (a) make it on time sweaty and frazzled, or
- (b) be late and feel guilty and frazzled.

I’m aiming for a frazzle-free lifestyle these days, so when I saw that 9 minute delay, I just shrugged and walked to the next closest stop to my destination on the subway line (which was about 5 minutes away). On my way I called the office and told them I’d be about 10 minutes late (Google Maps had me coming in 4 minutes late, and I added some safety padding since it was rush hour) and apologized. I made it to the next station, waited on the platform for 3 minutes, got on the train, dissociated for the 20 minute ride, got to my stop right at 5 pm, then leisurely walked the 4 minutes to my appointment to get there at 5:04 pm — which would have been 4 minutes late from my original appointment time, but given the newly set expectation of 5:10 pm, I was 6 minutes “early.”

In my early adult life, my days used to be filled to the brim with stuff. I would work a full (~10 hr) day, 5 days a week, and my evenings and weekends were also stuffed with dinner plans and coffee catchups and various ticketed and unticketed events for various things around the city, or otherwise just being OUT. There were periods of weeks where I’d only be at my apartment to crash, before going back OUT. it wasn’t uncommon for me to have multiple plans at multiple locations per day (example for a Saturday: coffee with a friend in Brooklyn, brunch in the city with another friend that would turn into wandering, random drinks, dinner reservation, going “out” out to whatever party was happening that night).

I probably had a few more years of that left in me when the pandemic hit and became the forcing function for me and also the whole world to pause. These days, it’s rare for me to have more than one social event planned on a weekend.

There was a lot of movement and nervous energy (and many moments running to catch the subway) in those days, and it was often fun. But movement isn’t progress, in terms of thinking about where I wanted and needed to be in my life. Many of those people that I casually spent time with and had fun with have left the city or I have otherwise lost touch with them. That’s okay, I think that is normal in midlife. Maybe everyone else is slowing down too.

Maybe I’m not slowing down, but just readjusting to the speed at which I’m meant to be moving. Maybe being more intentional is what feels like slowing down. Especially being as intentional about what NOT to do than what to do… I feel like I can let more things just – pass by, without trying to grab them, or even look at them. I wouldn’t say I’m less curious about the world, but more that I direct my curiosity at a different scope of things.

I enjoy food and restaurants but my capacity to dog down large amounts of food has drastically decreased in my 40s, although sadly my brain has not yet caught up, so sometimes I still order or prepare the same amount of food I could have eagerly consumed in one sitting even a few years ago and then I wonder why my brain wrote a check my stomach couldn’t cash 😔. I also have way less interest and enthusiasm for trying the latest popular restaurant with lines out the door or hard-to-get reservations. I feel like I’ve been bamboozled too many times and there is a certain Instagrammification of dining out that has created a vicious cycle of consumers posting food pics to social media and restaurants tailoring the presentation of their cuisine to look good in those pics and everyone in the game is subject to the Hawthorne effect.

It’s been interesting to reflect on this lately, and the more I consider it, the more I notice manifestations of it in my life, and the more I pay attention to how I feel (usually pretty good), which helps reinforce and give permission to the slowing-down. I don’t mean to suggest that I am in some kind of peaceful zen state all (or even most) of the time; I do live in a physical environment that is generally loud and fast and a virtual world that overflows with distraction and, quite frankly, shiny junk, but I can at least try to control my own thoughts and behaviors. Sometimes when riding the subway I will challenge myself to not look at any screens or something trying to sell me something. I have not yet been successful (mostly because subway cars these days are lined with screens trying to sell me something), but I’ve noticed that it seems like more of my fellow riders are reading analog books and magazines lately, so maybe they’re also trying to slow down a little in the middle of the chaos.

Lately (July 2025)

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I know it looks like not a lot is happening here; my last update was in April of this year.

What can I say — life has been life-ing.

It’s a hot hot summer in New York. My family has been going through health challenges. A few weeks ago I got into a car accident on Highway 1 while visiting my parents in California which is the scariest thing that has happened to me in my adult life.

Overall I am fine, and clinically unimpressed by my own case: I sustained an acute nondisplaced fracture to the right-sided transverse process of my L2 vertebra, which means both that I broke my back and there’s nothing to do (other than physical therapy). I’m kind of still processing what happened and am having a lot of thoughts and feelings about it, but one unexpected and mostly positive outcome is that it’s been something of a reset that has helped me reprioritize and ignore some of the noise that I feel has been building up in my life. That is a pleasant surprise.

When I was lying in the trauma bay being worked up as a patient, it struck me (not unlike the car that crashed into ours¹) that it was the first time in a long time, maybe that I could even remember, that I felt truly present. Honestly, it was just nice to have my phone taken away from me and to have nothing to focus on other than wondering if I was dying or not. (I wasn’t.) It’s both depressing and illuminating that it took a motor vehicle collision for me to feel present, but since then, I’ve noticed that it’s much easier for me to focus on one thing at a time which is something I didn’t fully realize I had been struggling with.

My midlife crisis / perimenopause / possibly-just-normal-aging also continues. Every time I have a random mood disturbance (e.g. one day I was awoken by loud birds outside the bedroom window and was irrationally irritated by it, even though intellectually I knew it shouldn’t have been a big deal) I get to play a fun game of “is this midlife crisis, perimenopause, normal aging, or any/all of the above?” The aforementioned reset from the accident has helped me deal with some of it a little more effectively, but it’s still there and is just becoming something I live with. I guess it just takes a lot more energy, effort, and intention just to keep this train moving and on the tracks in midlife.

I’ve been looking for books about perimenopause specifically since reading other people’s perspectives on something I’m going through usually helps, but it seems like all the menopause-related books have pink covers and are written by straight white women complaining about hot flashes and husbands (no shade² but it’s just not really my experience or relatable for me). My friend Max recommended a Miranda July book which sounds promising and is on my list.

This past weekend was a long holiday weekend in the US and I didn’t accomplish much other than rest which was glorious. I’m also becoming more okay with doing nothing but relaxing, instead of trying to fill weekends and free time with social plans. My only intention/promise to myself was to chill and my only plan was to re-watch the movie 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later and then go to a movie theatre on the hottest afternoon day and watch 28 Years Later. I successfully completed the task which felt good.

For fun I also dug up an old .csv file that I keep on my computer containing all the content from my old website and found reviews I wrote for the first two films: the 28 Days Later one is dated 2003-07-19 with an addendum dated 2003-09-12 reviewing the alternate ending (presumably when the DVD was released), and the 28 Weeks Later one is dated 2007-08-31. I was going to share them here but honestly my writing was kind of embarrassing; I would have been 19 years old in 2003 and believe me, it shows, so it will just continue to stay hidden in that .csv file for now³.

Too soon :( ↩︎
, she says as she throws shade and literally judges books by their covers ↩︎
I wonder if, another 20 years from now, I’ll look back at this writing and be embarrassed 🙈 ↩︎

Unfinished but shareable

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I made a page for my dad’s collection of hats. It’s an idea I had back in 2023 and as is my nature, it took me way too long and too much overthinking to get it to a shareable state. It’s not finished, nor do I know what finished even means most of the time, and there are things I don’t like about it that need to be fixed, but if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’ll spin my wheels on the last 10% of a project that likely doesn’t even matter in the grand scheme of things. So in an effort to embrace this discomfort, here it is. I don’t know what it’s for — I guess just to share something I went through. I’m also trying to play around with more evergreen content in general, and am also experimenting with more reliable workflows for sharing photos/visuals. (This is also challenging and I’m struggling to make decisions but I’m documenting my thought process here. Work and think in public, I guess!!!

Past selves

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Last month I had the chance to travel to two places I previously lived. In early March, I went to London for a work trip, and a couple of weekends ago I went to Chicago for a friend’s milestone birthday. It was a strange feeling to revisit these two cities where I’d lived and existed before but in the distant past, long enough ago that it felt like I was a different person.

Quick background:

In 2012, I moved to the UK for a year-long research fellowship that was part of my surgery training. How I ended up there from Brooklyn is a longer story for another day, but the short version is that an opportunity presented itself and I didn’t think that hard about it before saying, “eh, why not?” which is essentially the way I made all major career and life decisions in my 20s. (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that approach, and I have slightly more intentional decision making heuristics these days, but having the luxury of hindsight, I can say that it at least made for some fun stories.)
I was in Chicago from 2006-2010, for medical school. It was my first time being an adult (kind of) in a big(ish) city. I had grown up in suburbia, so I had spent time in the city before, but mostly on day trips, like family trips to the Korean grocery store.

There’s something about returning to a location after having been separated from it in place and time, both generally (the city or town) and specific places.

My prevailing memory about my time in London is of general penny pinching given that I was on a resident salary and living in an expensive city with a lot more free time than I was used to. Obviously, I was living on a resident salary at home, too, but I was working 100 hours a week (some weeks), 80 at minimum (most weeks), so at least my spending potential was timeboxed. In my research year, I was working less than half of that¹, so I had a LOT more free time to faff around. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because I also remember being pretty depressed. I think the root causes (not that depression needs to have a root cause other than itself, but in my case it did) were (1) having been operating² at 110% for the two years prior and living the epitome of “work hard play hard,” and then all of a sudden having to put the brakes on, or the air taken out, or whatever physical analogy best indicates an abrupt and rapid change, and also (2) the beginnings of questioning my career path but not consciously, and just feeling the discomfort of starting to acknowledge that I might not be suited for life as a surgeon, and (3) isolation from the community of people I had just started building up back home, which felt especially tough because it had taken me the better part of two years to even start to feel like I belonged somewhere.

Most of what I remember about my time in Chicago, other than medical school which obviously took up a lot of time and energy, is going out and (sometimes) being rowdy. I went out with my classmates, but I also had core friendships and a community outside of school. I also had a lot of formative experiences for my queer identity (which felt “late in life” at 22–26 years old at the time but now my perspective is that the value of learning things about yourself doesn’t have to be judged by its timeline), the beginnings of dissatisfaction with my career choice, and also just generally going through the sort of chaos that can happen in early to mid 20s. And also somehow building the foundations to be a physician — all I can say about that dichotomy is that this was also the time in my life when I was the most expert at compartmentalizing. My time in Chicago was also when I started to develop my interest in riding single speed and track bikes. Even though I had a car, I used it mainly just to get to school in the winter, and to rotations that were outside of the city. For everything else I rode my bike.

Being back in both of these places was like going to visit a past self that didn’t exist anymore but whose memories I had downloaded into my brain with a location tracker so whenever I passed by a place that they knew, or did something knew that they weren’t able to do, something inside my brain would buzz and a memory or feeling would be pulled up.

In London, I had limited leisure time since I was there on a work trip and was mostly confined to central London, but I did intentionally try to revisit some of the areas I remembered from my time there, and do some of the things I felt I couldn’t over a decade ago. Some highlights:

Taking a black cab for the first time ever, which I’d never done when I lived there because it felt prohibitively expensive
Walking through Liverpool Station and remembering the leg of my work commute that used to start there
Walking across the London Bridge on a sunny day, remembering biking across when it was cold and gray
Walking near Oxford Street and remembering a random memory of riding my bike in the dark in very early morning one time and seeing a fox cross the street and thinking I was hallucinating
Going to a West End play for the first time ever, which I’d never done when I lived there because it felt prohibitively expensive
Taking lots of selfies because I realized that I don’t have any pictures of me in London because I was so depressed when I lived there, which made me both sad (about how isolated and lost my past self had felt) and proud/grateful (about how she clawed her way out of that to give me the life I have now)

In Chicago, I was only there for a short time (Friday plus a weekend) but similarly tried to make the most of it and kinda did the same exercise I did in London taking a tour with my past self:

Riding a bikeshare bike down Milwaukee, remembering the hundreds or possibly thousands of times I had done that ride
Getting a four wings dinner, salt and pepper on it, sauce on the side, from Harold’s Chicken Shack (a meal I also probably had dozens of times in my life)
Walking by the river down to Lake Michigan, grabbing a bikeshare bike and riding down toward the planetarium and soaking in that view of downtown plus the lake
Taking the Blue line to Logan Square and marveling at the tap-to-pay and train time estimates like a country mouse lol
Grabbing a beer at the Gingerman (the only bar I’d go to in Wrigleyville) with the only person I’d be there with (my good buddy who used to work next door), but instead of binge drinking and getting rowdy we each had one drink and lots of water and he cried telling me how much he loves raising his young son and that he forgives his parents because they were just doing the best they could

The other thing that felt palpable in both places was the absence of something, which was the anxiety of youth³, needing to feel cool and not wanting to be noticed for anything uncool, including being or appearing to be a tourist (god forbid!). I think I fully embraced being a visitor, and it was kind of fun knowing that I was carrying these memories that no one else knew I had. I took a tourist selfie next to Cloud Gate and in my head was like “hehe no one knows I was here when they were installing this thing.” (Coincidentally, there is another bean sculpture by the same artist that was installed on the block I lived on in lower Manhattan during the initial Covid outbreak, so I also have many pandemic memories of walking by half of a giant bean with its gaping insides exposed.)

I vaguely remember signing some sort of agreement or contract that stated that I would be working 37.5 hours a week, and that stuck out because it seemed so suspiciously low in comparison. 37.5 hours a week? I’m pretty sure I was working 37.5 hours a day in residency ↩︎
Intentional surgery pun. ↩︎
Now I just have the anxiety of middle age. ↩︎

My name is

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 18:30:00 -0500

What’s in a name? Lots of things.

Primary name

Most people call me Rachel. A certain subset of friends from a certain time in my life call me Kwon. I’ll respond to either.

Professional name

My coworkers call me Rachel. From 2010-2016, a lot of people called me Dr. Kwon. Infrequently these days, some people in certain contexts still try to call me Dr. Kwon, or ask me if I want to be called Dr., but most of the time I say “just call me Rachel.”

What my loved ones call me

My sister used to call me Way-ddee (like “wait-dee”)¹ when I was a baby and she was a slightly bigger baby, because pretty much all of the consonants in “Rachel” are difficult for a baby to pronounce, so that was how she said it. It became something of an inside joke in my family and my parents would sometimes call me Way-ddee even when I was an older child (probably also to lightly roast my sister).

These days my family generally calls me Rach, Rachie, or Rachel. Sometimes people I don’t know very well will shorten my name to “Rach” unsolicited, which bothers me.

My partner has lots of sweet and silly nicknames for me and almost never calls me Rachel (and yes, that trope of your partner calling you by your government name meaning you’re in trouble is true 😅).

Other nicknames bestowed upon me

In school, some of my sister’s friends called her Kwon. When I showed up (she was two grades ahead of me), they started calling me Lil’ Kwon. It wasn’t meant to be diminutive — they were all really nice to me. My sister wasn’t a mean jealous older sister, she was protective and kind, and they followed her lead.

A childhood friend occasionally called me RayRay. A group of English and Scottish friends on my hall when studying abroad called me Razza.

Various people I know in personal and professional settings who have an appreciation for the Wu-Tang Clan have called me Raekwon or The Chef². (At one of my previous employers, one of our legal counsel asked to speak with me after a meeting, and I was like oh no i have caught the lawyer’s attention… this cannot be good, but all she said was “I was just wondering if anyone calls you Raekwon”).

A colleague/friend in residency used to call me Ra-hel (he was Bukharian and spoke some Hebrew). Other creative colleagues/friends in residency made up nicknames that would riff off of Kwon, like “Kwonton Soup” or “Kwonicles of Narnia” or “Kwontum Leap.” You get the picture.

Not quite my name

I’ve had my name mispronounced as Raquel and Rachelle, and incorrectly spelled as Rachael or Rachal. 🤷🏻‍♀️

My dad will sometimes do this thing where it takes him a few tries to correctly land on “Rachel” when calling me or referring to me — he’ll try my sister’s name, my nieces’ names, and, inexplicably, sometimes our childhood dog’s name (Phoebe) 😭. All of our names have two syllables. When I was younger, I found it annoying, but now that he’s older I think it’s pretty sweet because he’s just cycling through the names of his babies who he loves (again, I’m not sure why Phoebe is in the rotation given that they didn’t have a particularly special bond, but maybe he liked her more than he let on).

Actual origin

My Christian parents named me after a biblical character who was essentially the favorite sister-wife of another character who had been tricked into marrying his first wife (her sister), and she had fertility problems and basically said she wanted to die if she couldn’t have kids with him. Relatable, amirite? Well, I can’t say that any of that resonates with me personally, an unmarried woman living in sin with my lesbian lover and happily child-free, but in any case, that’s where “Rachel” comes from. The name itself means “lamb.” I also have a Korean name, 어진, which ChatGPT said means “warm-hearted, thoughtful, and morally upright.” When I asked my mom if that was accurate, she said:

Text response from my mom about my Korean name

The only people who ever called me by my Korean name, and always as 어진이 or 어진아 which are affectionate ways of saying my name (similar to Rachie) were my grandparents. I haven’t been called by those names for a long time.

Why all this now

I’ve been taking a beginner ASL (American Sign Language) class and we had a lesson on names, specifically sign names, and it got me thinking about names, what they represent, and how they differ in different languages and cultures.

Korean names, as above, are very intentional and seem to have deep and somewhat dramatic meaning (which is also consistent with my experience with Korean people — I mean, just look at the concept of 한). They also all have 3 syllables (one for the last name and two for the first name), with very few exceptions, which also sort of reflects the homogeneity of the people. American English names seem largely based on the namer liking what the name sounds like, or cultural/generational trends (met any Mildreds under the age of 90 lately, or a woman named Taylor over the age of 40?).

For sign names, my current understanding (which is almost certainly incomplete, as I’m still a beginner in ASL and not a member of the Deaf community) of the Deaf cultural norm around names is that a sign name isn’t something you choose for yourself, especially not as a hearing person, but is given to you by a Deaf person and often (but not always) incorporates something descriptive about you like a physical feature or personality characteristic. This seems unique compared with spoken languages because the recipient gets their sign name after they have been at least somewhat acquainted with the person who’s giving the name. That’s very cool.

This naming-after-knowing paradigm seems to have some similarities with the experience of trans people who choose a new name as part of their transition³. If you think about it, the approach of being named after you or someone else actually knows who you are makes a lot of sense. When you receive a name as a baby (effectively a blank slate of a human), how do you know that the name itself doesn’t influence who the person becomes? (I think there is actually quite a lot of research out there that names do in fact have that effect, at least for some people to some degree.)

So, if you ask me my name, know that alllll of the above is probably what’s running through my head in the split second before I say (or fingerspell) “Rachel” 😅.

I just realized I have literally never written this out because it’s a nickname that has only ever been spoken to me. ↩︎
One time, I met the actual Raekwon at my neighborhood wine store, and I said, “Hello. My name is Rachel Kwon. Sometimes my friends call me Raekwon” and his face lit up and he said “What?! Rachel Kwon!” and then started chanting “Rachel Kwon! Rachel Kwon!” He also insisted we take a selfie together, and then also corrected my camera angle when I tried. Alt for linked image: Selfie of two smiling people, me (Rachel, a Korean woman with glasses) on the left and Raekwon, a Black man with a salt-and-pepper beard on the right. Raekwon is wearing a red Yankees cap and in the background there are signs in the background that suggest we’re in a wine shop. ↩︎
This is my understanding and what I’ve learned or observed from friends or people I know who are trans, so I’m not speaking for them, just relaying what I know — definitely do not take this as an authoritative or representative opinion. (I also know trans people who kept their birth name.) ↩︎

Blog questions challenge

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:38:21 -0500

Two of my favorite people on the internet, Naz and Katherine, tagged me in this challenge, so here I am filling it in.

(By the way, [hikes up grandpa pants], we used to call these “blog memes,” and because we didn’t I didn’t have many IRL friends who were also internet culture, at least not that I knew of, I’d never heard the word out loud and definitely thought it was pronounced “meh-mehs.” And then memes evolved into something different — what we now commonly think of as internet jokes and viral trends, rather than these early “blog challenges.”)

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

To be honest, I don’t remember. I was very enamored by computers and the internet as a teenager in the late ’90s and early ’00s, and I saw personal homepages that real people were making and putting out there, so I made one, too. The concept of weblogs/blogs didn’t become popularized until a little later. For a short glorious while, a blog was synonymous with a personal blog. I have kept a paper journal since my teenage years, so my blog was like my online journal.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I use a static site generator, Hugo, for my website. I landed on the SSG approach because it seemed to best fit my priorities for the site at the time (lightweight, fast, text-heavy and image-lite), and I landed on Hugo for no particular reason other than it seemed like one of the popular ones so I figured it work well enough. It did take a while to learn how to use it and to set it up since it was a whole new technology and mental model for me (I still struggle to wrap my head around the concept that the whole site gets rebuilt and republished even if I just change one word on one page), but I’ve been pretty satisfied with it. I do sometimes miss having a web-based UI to write posts in. And I occasionally break my site (oops), but I get to learn something new each time I fix it.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I have used a variety of technologies and content management systems in the past, including (roughly in chronological order):

Handmade HTML and CSS files manually uploaded via FTP
Greymatter
Movable Type
Textpattern

I also tinkered with (read: built an entire site with and then abandoned 😭) Craft CMS and ExpressionEngine and some point just to try them out. Both were fine, but waaay too heavyweight for what I was trying to do. It was like whatever the opposite of a bandaid for a bullet wound would be. (Robotic-assisted surgery for a 2 cm laceration, I guess?) I was proud of myself for getting each of those set up and successfully running, although I don’t think I would ever have a reason to do that again.

I also used to love signing up for any new web service, including most of the bigger social platforms and some of the smaller ones that had some component of blogging, so (concurrently to my personal websites) I have also been on MySpace, LiveJournal, Tumblr, and at least a few others that I can’t remember.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I write in Markdown files in Obsidian or Sublime Text. It’s fine.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I usually like to write in the morning. Unfortunately I have lately been stuck in a cycle where I’m pumped to write something up to share and can only get as far as a skeleton draft, thinking I’ll pick it back up after work, but then inevitably my brain has turned to mush by the evening and I think, I’ll pick it back up the next morning, and then it doesn’t happen.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I do some very light copy editing but generally publish pretty immediately after writing. Sometimes I write a post that’s more like an essay where I work with the idea for a while, cut it up and rearrange it, kick the tires a bit before pushing it through the intertubes. (That’s a lot of mixed metaphors.)

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Things I observe or experience in my daily life and what I think about them, I think. Technology, culture, work, my bicycle, how I make decisions, how I break down problems. There is probably a small gap between what I like writing about and what I actually end up publishing. I’d like to publish more long-form essays that require more structure, thought, re-working, and additional eyes on ’em before publishing.

Who are you writing for?

You and me, I guess! In my mind, “you” are collectively the people on the personal web, who also have sites and blogs that I myself visit, although I am aware that lurking is a thing (reading but not interacting, which is fine — I’m a lurker in some spaces, too). I sometimes forget that, though, and am reminded in surprising but nice ways. From a previous job, one of my colleagues who I didn’t work with super closely but had definitely intersected with on specific projects reached out after I left to say that they didn’t want to disclose when we were working together because they didn’t want to make it weird, but they remembered reading my old blog (i.e., the one I had in college, which had been well over a decade at the time). I was immediately both mortified and flattered, and also, very appreciative that there’s kind of this unspoken rule or honor code that if you meet people IRL and know about their nerdy internet life, you don’t blow up their spot and say “hey I remember you from your blog (blogname.com/blog) which you wrote as a teenager/twentysomething when your brain was not fully formed.”

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I don’t really have favorite posts but I think entries like this one represent my personality pretty accurately.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I have a very long “roadmap” of things I think would be cool to add. Most of the items on the list are things I’ve seen other people do or make that made me say, “dang, that’s cool, I wish I’d thought of that.”

Tag ‘em.

If you read this and think it would be fun to do it yourself, consider this me tagging you!

Wintering better

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 16:55:06 -0500

Everyone loves summer. If you have to name a favorite season (which you absolutely don’t!! Who says you do?), summer is a non-controversial option. Bright sun, long days, beach time, et cetera. And spring is a close runner-up, with its warmer weather, greenery and flowers, and of course the anticipation of summer. If you want to be alternative and edgy (i.e., me in early adulthood lol), you’d cite fall (or 🍂autumn🍂, to put some extra sauce on it) as your favorite season, for its foliage, cider, pumpkin patches, sweater weather.

Winter is arguably the least popular season (again, who decided we have to even pick favorites and least favorites?! We don’t!) — it’s cold, dark, and has a penchant for hosting various wildly communicable upper respiratory illnesses, which nobody likes.

In the last couple of years, though, I have started to more consciously embrace wintering for myself, and deliberately taking the time to slow down (and reflect more) over colder months. Like a hibernating bear, or a bird doing torpor (torporing? does one “do torpor”? Idk, and I can’t ask a bird right now). Part of me always secretly liked taking a slower pace, staying inside for longer, sleeping in a little more. Especially in the city, and being a generally active person, there is often a certain pressure to go out and DO STUFF and be productive (both in a work sense and a social sense). In most of my adulthood so far, I aggressively spent 120% of my time work-work-working to exhaustion partly because I actually like work for the sake of work (not necessarily a bad thing) and also because I believed that was what I was supposed to do in order to be a productive and valuable member of society (not necessarily a good thing).

But, I’ve been trying to reframe my attitude toward winter. This means:

Instead of thinking…	I am trying to think…
No daylight is miserable	Earlier sunset and later sunrise means I can rest more. I can (try to) stop working a little earlier, go to bed earlier, wake up later, and not feel so much pressure to Go Out and Do Things™ after work or on the weekends. I don’t have to feel guilty about not being productive.
It’s too cold to go outside (and takes too much effort to put on all those winter layers)	I get to put on my winter layers, and I don’t have to stay outside longer than I want to. It’s generally quieter out than in the summer (I really do not like crowds). There are no bugs outside and I don’t have to feel sweaty and gross every time I leave the house. Falling snow can be beautiful. If I want to, I can stay inside and have a hot drink and wear fuzzy footwear while watching TV or internetting.
Winter sun is weak and depressing	The light of later sunrise and earlier sunset is kinda soft, beautiful, and unique. I can have warm lighting that’s not too bright inside that sets a cozy mood.
Warm weather is so much better and more pleasant	I appreciate the warmer months when they are here, and the colder months when they are here, and I like having a balance

Is this toxic positivity? Am I just gaslighting myself? Maybe. Sometimes when the sun truly hasn’t been out in days, it feels extremely gloomy, hopeless, and like winter will never end. But it always does. I think ideally society would better support this type of slowdown or semi-hibernation for everybody. Like how in western Europe a lot of businesses shut down in August (because people are out relaxing and vacationing because it’s summer). North America and especially the US are like the young adult cousin still trying to hustle and overwork itself no matter the season. We could decide as a collective to just chill out a little bit more, instead of pockets of individuals trying to do so, but we don’t.

Part of the shift in my own mindset is also a general personal shift towards being more in tune with my own body, which is something relatively new for me (or at least noticing it and being intentional about it is new-ish). If I’m tired, I sleep. If I’m hungry, I eat. If I’m full, I stop. If I’m thirsty, I drink water. If I have to use the bathroom, I go. I don’t default to an alcoholic beverage at meals or as a social activity anymore (although I do enjoy a well-made cocktail, a shower beer¹, or a hot drink with a shot of dark liquor from time to time).

What wintering doesn’t (or shouldn’t) mean — two things:

It doesn’t mean being disconnected or isolated. While winter can certainly feel isolating because we are generally out less, it just means I have to be more intentional about keeping in touch, with the people who matter. To be honest, I have had trouble making social plans since the lockdown period of the pandemic (independent of the seasons), even though I used to be quite socially active. It’s like a muscle that has atrophied that I’ve forgotten how to use, which feels discouraging sometimes. Lately I have started making “appointments” to call or FaceTime friends, which feels annoyingly corporate and I’m still trying to get over that part of it, but it has been nice to check in and see how people are doing and talk about how I’m doing.
It doesn’t mean being cooped up inside and never going outside, or being physically inactive. I go for at least one long-ish nature-ish walk a day. Last year I did 30 days in a row of nature walks between December and January, sometimes multiple times a day. I think winter nature (snow, no mosquitoes, audibly quieter) is in some ways more pleasant than summer nature (sun and humidity, hella bugs). Having good weather-appropriate outerwear and access to nature are things I had not really prioritized until recently but it makes it a lot easier to be physically active in the colder months.

(I have also tried very hard not to be a hater on summer in my discourse here, but I really do think it is unnecessarily glorified. I won’t say no to an occasional beach trip, but I feel like it is not as chill as people romanticize it to be. I feel like I just have to accept that there will likely be sand everywhere ([whispers] EVERYWHERE), I’m going to miss an obvious spot with the sunscreen, and no one can ever guarantee that when wading or treading water, someone else has not urinated in my vicinity, which I suppose is the case outside of the water as well, and urine is sterile and everything, but — hey! I don’t have to justify not wanting to be peed near!!) Although summer is also a time for slowing down in a sense, wintering feels different in that it’s not necessarily rest and relaxation in a vacationing sense, at least in my mind. Maybe because it coincides with the end of the year, it feels more like a time of reflection and turning inward in order to look ahead.

In any case, I’m glad to have an opportunity to take it a little bit easier and get cozy.

Winter walk

A shower beer is when I bring a beer with me in the shower. I can’t explain why, but I just really enjoy it. Something about a hot shower and a cold beer just refreshes me more than either alone. ↩︎

Eyeballs

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:01:53 -0400

I recently got contact lenses, for the first time in 34 years, as someone who has required corrective eyewear since the age of 6.

I have attributed the decision mostly to my ongoing midlife/existential crisis — as a way to prove to myself that I’m NOT set in my ways and I CAN do new things — and for whatever reason I had increasingly been thinking that my eyeglasses are my whole personality and I was interested in experimenting with a different look.

Some other, more peripheral but still valid reasons for why I decided to try contact lenses in middle age include, in no particular order:

Sometimes I feel like a nerd at the beach wearing thick glasses
My glasses slip down my sweaty face when I’m doing athletics
If I wear a cap, the corners of the brim compete with the corners of my eyeglasses frames for space, so i can either have my glasses squarely on my face, or my cap squarely on my crown, but never both (yes, life is hard)
If I want to wear sunglasses, I have to wear prescription sunglasses, which involves a complicated switch and the need to carry a bag to store whichever eyewear is not on my face, and I’ve always wanted to do the thing where you casually flip your sunglasses onto the top of your head when you temporarily go from the sunny outdoors to the indoors, like when walking on a boardwalk and then going into an ice cream shop
My glasses fog up when i’m eating hot noodle soup, which can interfere with the overall dining experience, both due to the temporary lack of vision and also because I just picture myself looking like Marcie from Peanuts and feel a bit vulnerable

The reasons why I had not tried them before were the same ones lots of diehard glasses-wearers don’t: seemed like a hassle, didn’t like the idea of touching my eyeballs, didn’t like the idea of dry eyes, thought my face looked better with glasses, etc.

The eye doctor who did my contacts exam (who knew there was a different exam for contacts? Not me) was a tall Korean guy who looked like a K-pop singer¹. I asked him a lot of questions about contacts and thankfully he didn’t seem to think it was weird that I was getting contacts for the first time, unlike the front office staff, who repeatedly kept assuming that I had already been wearing contacts for years and also entered my birth year in the system as 1994 instead of 1984, which I had to correct. Unintentional acts of micro-ageism, I guess.

Anyway, I didn’t realize I had to make an additional appointment for a contacts fitting, and that apparently it could take an hour or more to put them in for the first time. Honestly, that was the most surprising part of the whole thing for me (as well as seeing the cost of contact lenses without a vision plan). How hard could it be?

Well… it wasn’t exactly the eye scene from A Clockwork Orange, but it also wasn’t a quick dab-dab quickly followed by perfect vision either. It took me a good 5 or 6 tries to get the first one in. (Embarrassingly, I couldn’t keep my eyelids open, which sounds like an obvious mechanical blocker to getting a contact lens onto my eyeball but at least my reflexes are healthy, I guess.) I also kept having intrusive thoughts about how an eyeball is just a bag of water floating around in a skull socket, which did not help.

The associate at the eye shop² was very encouraging and kept saying “You got this!”, which was kind, because I clearly did not got this. Eventually I did get them in, and was even able to keep them in for a few hours that first afternoon.

So, I now have the option of wearing contact lenses. I wear them about once or twice a week, for less than a full day at a time and usually only when doing the aforementioned activities including bike riding and hot noodle eating. Honestly, it’s… fine. Not earth shattering or anything, but it is nice to have the choice, even if I don’t use it very often.

(I wore my contacts to a New York Liberty basketball game a couple months ago, and on one particular play the referee declined to call a foul on one of the visiting players despite what the crowd felt was an obvious hit, and somebody yelled out “1-800-CONTACTS!!!” which made me laugh. The hecklers at women’s basketball games are refreshingly nontoxic.)

I have to say there was a moment as the K-poptometrist and I stared deeply into each others’ eyes (him to assess my astigmatism, me because my head was in a cage) where I momentarily forgot that I am quite happily partnered with my girlfriend and in my head was like, wait, Dr Lee… what are we? Then he told me that I should be on the lookout for impending presbyopia due to my age, which brought me back to earth. ↩︎
That is definitely not what the establishment is called… what is it called? Glasses store? Eyewear market? Vision place? Oh dear. ↩︎

Radicalized by a soap dispenser

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 09:01:00 -0400

I get frustrated when things don’t work.

Increasingly I have been getting especially frustrated when things that are fancy don’t work, because I feel bamboozled.

The other day, I went to wash my hands in the bathroom at work, and the automated soap dispenser/foamer didn’t work. I was awkwardly placing and retracting my hands under the sensor repeatedly like please sir… just a bit of soap to wash my bathroom hands… and nothing. No soap for you. I looked a little more closely and saw a 🪫 low battery icon on a small LED indicator at the base of the dispenser. I sighed and moved over to the next dispenser, which did work.

My initial thought was, who decided that soap dispensers needed automation? (Relatedly, I have long railed against analog soap dispensers that foam the soap as you manually pump the soap out — I’m not too good to foam my own soap, thankyouverymuch! What am I, a Rockefeller?)

If I were to think about the main benefits of automatic soap dispensers, I would say they are:

perhaps a lower risk of spreading infections by not making people touch a pump
perhaps marginally easier to use, especially for people with physical disabilities, shorter people, kids, older adults, etc
perhaps less soap waste over time in that a consistent aliquot is dispensed with each wave

I think the first one is probably not that meaningful and more theoretical than data-driven compared with actually washing your hands effectively regardless of the soap pump mechanism. And the third one might be true and help buildings and businesses that purchase and maintain these dispensers in large volumes save on costs, but I can’t help but wonder about the environmental impact of dispensers that become electronic waste after they’re past their prime, and the battery waste, which the customers of these products don’t directly deal with but all of humanity does, eventually.

(No notes on #2 — if we spent more time thinking about designing for this group of people as a starting principle, I think we could avoid a lot of what I’m complaining about here.)

Anyway, this is pretty much where my brain goes on a daily basis. I go for a bathroom break, the soap dispenser doesn’t work (a minor inconvenience for me, all told), and I immediately jump to “humanity is at risk.”

I have a similar feeling about things that are marketed as “smart” just because they are connected to wifi. We didn’t have heat or hot water for the first week of living in our current building (it was winter) because the apartment lord¹ had renovated the building prior to our lease. When we pressed for an answer, the reason given was that “the boiler was not connected to wifi.”

The boiler

was not

connected

to WIFI.

This really irrationally upset me because NOBODY ASKED FOR A SMART BOILER. We literally just wanted to not freeze and to have a hot shower. It was especially infuriating because the apartment lord presented the building as nice and newly renovated which was also reflected in the mildly exorbitant rent.

To add further insult, when we investigated the apartment lord, they turned out to be a real estate investment firm with a private equity approach. The language on their website describing their mission statement was that they exist to “strategically acquire, smartly redevelop or reposition and opportunistically exit undervalued mixed use and multi-family properties in and around major cities.” I think, in lay language, this is what I would refer to as bullshit.

Besides finding this incredibly concerning and disappointing from a societal standpoint (don’t get me started on private equity firms that are buying up healthcare practices), fundamentally it really just bothers me when things that should work don’t work. These things that are minor inconveniences and annoyances to me are obviously amplified for more vulnerable people. And the thing that bothers me most is when a thing (like a private equity owned apartment building, or to a much lesser degree an automated soap dispenser) has a shiny exterior but fails to deliver on the basic function it is supposed to provide.

In other words (I’m telling you, I ruminated on this for long enough to generate a 2x2 matrix):

	Not fancy	Fancy
Works	functional ✅	beautiful 🤩
Doesn't Work	useless, meh 🤷	useless, infuriating 😡

I think I have gotten to the point in my life where I equally value the functional and the beautiful. It’s rare to find truly beautiful (by the definition above) things, but functional is the next best and in many cases it’s not even worth the lift to make something fancy if it works.

At the apocalypse, I wonder if we will be sitting around as the world crumbles, thinking, hey maybe we could have just used a fireplace and a manual soap dispenser more often.

New York City landlords don’t actually own the land ↩︎

Lunch break

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:08:42 -0400

I never had a regular “lunch break” until recently. Early in my career it was not by choice — in surgery training there’s really no such thing as a break, only a stolen minute or two here and there to pee or wolf down whatever food you can scrounge or nap in a chair if it’s the middle of the night and you’re on call. We did get a $5 meal coupon for the hospital cafeteria which could get you a cup of terrible coffee and a bagel drier than a bag of silica gel in the Sahara desert.

In my first job after residency, at Small HealthTech Company, I did get to eat lunch most days, which felt like a luxury compared to my previous life, but the team norms were to grab something quick and eat while continuing to work. That was the first time I experienced workday lunches in Manhattan (that could be a whole essay in itself, but let’s just say if I never wait in line to pick up an overpriced salad in a hexagon-shaped cardboard bowl, it will still be too soon). I probably could have set a boundary that I would take a true 30-minute lunch break, but I didn’t have that muscle back then.

In my next role, at Unicorn Digital Health Startup, it was more common to have lunch with colleagues in the beautiful kitchen area with the living plant wall and cold brew on tap, but I was only there for 6 weeks before the pandemic hit and we all had to eat lunch at home (and also live and work and play and do everything at home). Some days I would forget to eat lunch and then at 3 pm be like, why do I feel so horrible? Oh yes, I forgot to eat or drink or go to the bathroom (also, there’s that general crushing sense of dread from the state of the world). It was the same feeling I had in my surgical residency when I hadn’t met my basic human needs, except this time my body said no, we’re not doing this anymore, whereas in my twenties I would just power through.

When we went back to the office two days a week, I was much better about taking a break for lunch, although I still generally ate by myself at my desk while working, which on the outside seems kind of depressing, but wasn’t really. The reasons were, predictably, (1) habit (2) minor social anxiety about finding a spot in the cafeteria and having to make small talk with coworkers, and (3) still having internalized grind culture from the previous decade and a half, but there was also a new reason that was only recently uncovered, which was (4) I realized that if I was able to take a 30-minute break for myself, which I was, I would rather spend it outside walking and clearing my head, not eating lunch.

This type of boundary-setting and exercising autonomy mirrors how my general attitude towards work has shifted (and perhaps that of some industries at large, or pockets of some industries, and also that of younger generations, who seem much more hesitant to accept the notion of giving up your life and your self for a job, which is very encouraging). Although previous jobs felt much more restrictive to me, and in a capitalist society it is hard not to internalize that we have to be productive or else we’re not valuable, I also see in hindsight that at least some of my reluctance to take a break was self-imposed. Nobody ever said “you can’t take a lunch break” (except in residency), even if that was the culture. Culture tends to be more accurately reflected by what is tolerated versus what is openly stated anyway.

Fast forward a few years to now, I am working at Big Tech Company, where my employer provides lunch every day, which is nice, but perhaps more importantly, the team and company norms are to break for lunch regularly. It’s the healthiest working environment I have ever had in my career and something that I hope I never take for granted, and even then, I STILL often eat and work, but these days it feels completely voluntary and self-imposed, and I fully appreciate having options. Which is what most people want anyway, really — I think a lot of us glorified the idea of working from home before we all were forced to do it, and then we realized that it’s not so much doing our jobs from home that we liked, it was exercising agency we didn’t really know we had. What nobody likes is being told they have to work five days a week from an office. Or that they have to work five days a week from home. Or even that they have to travel to some glamorous location and work.

Anyway, one funny thing about all of this is that I laugh internally and marvel at how far I’ve come when I tell my younger greener colleagues about that $5 meal ticket to the hospital cafeteria, because I probably sound like a grizzled veteran talking about being in the literal trenches. When I was that young green person talking to older surgeons, they grumbled that my generation should be grateful to be able to leave the hospital and go home every once in a while because they used to have to live in the hospital. Everything old is new again, I guess.

Stubs

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 08:51:52 -0400

An interesting blog post. I liked this note about trees in Johannesburg by Herman. In our last apartment, the bedroom faced a quiet tree-filled backyard despite the apartment itself being on a major two-way avenue, so I woke up to birds chirping and almost non-existent street noise, and a view of lush greenery. In our current apartment, the bedroom faces a brick wall and a one-way side street adjacent to a one-way main street, so now I have a classic New York wakeup call which is horns honking, garbage trucks rattling, pigeons cooing and flapping, and occasionally people walking.

Random thought. Personal health and personal finance are similar in that there’s a lot of information asymmetry, but knowledge can be an equalizer and very empowering (and at the same time, having complete or near complete knowledge can only get you so far, even though that distance is quite far, because you can know everything about health or finance and still be physically or financially unhealthy)

Nice things about winter hikes:

No bugs
Fewer people

Another random thought. The difference between the best option and the “good enough” option is often marginal — consider body temperature measurement. Technically, rectal temps are the most accurate, but oral or even optical is often good enough (can you imagine if temperature screenings at major events were done rectally?), depending on the scenario and the consequences of being wrong

A moment. Riding my bike up the Hudson River Greenway the other day, a pedestrian and his dog stopped suddenly in the crosswalk, and I decelerated pretty quickly to pass behind them. The pedestrian didn’t see me, and angrily said “Hey!!” I looked him in the eye as I passed and said, “I see you!” and kept riding. I heard him say “Thanks!” in a somewhat surprised tone as I rode away.

Pride. This past weekend was Pride in NYC, and a truer meme was never meme’d than this one (if you don’t want to click for reasons, this is a tweet with the caption “Pride in your 20s vs pride in your 30s” and two panels side by side, one with young Kate Winslet removing her clothes in Titanic and one with weathered Kate Winslet as Mare of Easttown, on a gloomy day fully dressed no makeup leaning against a railing clutching a styrofoam cup wearing fingerless gloves). We didn’t do anything glamorous or special, just lived our lives.

Spring tune-up + ride

Sat, 18 May 2024 08:51:55 -0400

Since transitioning to a more or less Monday-thru-Friday, 9-to-5 work week, I often feel my brain is pretty fried on Fridays (fried-days?), as well as a general depletion of energy for socializing, so for the last several years I have kept Friday evenings open for myself. I try to spend that time doing something chill, by myself, and mostly screen-free, and then I go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Yesterday I took my bike apart for a moderate tune-up and brought the parts up to the rooftop to work on them along with a can of Makku (a trendy✨ brand of makgeolli a.k.a. Korean rice wine which is freely available in Brooklyn bodegas, lol).

It was really nice to just zone out with my bike! I focused on the drivetrain (basically the parts labeled #7-11), removing the lockring, rear cog, and chainring, and cleaning off as much accumulated sludge as I could. I discovered not one but TWO (of five) bolts missing from the chainring (oops) and ordered a replacement set online. I also found a brand new chain in my bike toolbox that I had forgotten about, so I installed that too. It felt good to disassemble everything and get it squeaky clean and then put it back together. (I wish I could do that with my bones sometimes, hehe.)

Today I took the bike out for a spin—a lot of spins, actually, about 26 miles’ worth—and took a long ride around the city. I loosely planned a route around the goal of covering multiple boroughs, and ended up hitting four of the five¹.

I started on the earlier side, around 8:30 in the morning, because I don’t like being on the roads with other people. (Why do I voluntarily live in the most crowded city in America when I hate crowds? Idk.) I kicked it off in Brooklyn, making my way through downtown Brooklyn (gloriously quiet, even near the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridge on-ramps), Williamsburg, and Greenpoint.

Kent Ave in south Williamsburg

Next I crossed into Queens on the Pulaski Bridge. It isn’t the most scenic of crossings, but it does have a nice separated two-way bike path. I don’t know why I always think Queens is so far away, because it took me about 20 minutes to get to this bridge. Of the four bridges I crossed on this ride, this one was the shortest and had the lowest elevation grade, which was a good way to ease in to the ride.

Pulaski Bridge into Queens

I took a short detour in a nice green park, which turned out to be Queensbridge Park. It was pretty quiet, other than a person playing catch with their dog, a few joggers, and a family setting up for what appeared to be a quinceañera.

Queensbridge Park facing Roosevelt Island and Manhattan

The next bridge I crossed was the Robert F. Kennedy bridge, which goes through Randall’s Island. This next leg was probably the most interesting part of my ride, because it didn’t even feel like New York City.

The bridge was totally empty of pedestrians, so I didn’t feel too bad being That Guy riding a bike and snapping this pic 😎

Randall’s Island is technically part of the borough of Manhattan. It has a park and a wastewater treatment facility. I always get it mixed up with Roosevelt Island in my mind, which is the one where people live and the F train has a stop there.

Bike path on Randall’s Island

Randall’s Island was nice and quiet, almost felt suburban, although unfortunately there is a fairly obvious stench of sewage, which is maybe why it is not residential. There was a stretch of bike/ped path under the bridge which was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in New York City.

Nice long-ish bike path under the bridge with dramatic archways

After my brief (~10 min) jaunt on Randall’s Island, I found myself in the Bronx. I assumed I would take another long bridge, but after a short path (I don’t even remember crossing water), I was in South Bronx.

I got very lost and confused trying to find the right bridge to cross back into Manhattan (I kept going in circles around the Third Avenue Bridge, which almost looked like a highway, and it triggered a memory I’d forgotten about from this one time when I lived in Chicago about 15 years ago when I was much more risk tolerant and adventurous on the bicycle and I accidentally got on Lake Shore Drive which is basically a highway and does NOT have bike lanes).

Bronx love

I found a coffee shop and decided to treat myself to a second espresso (I had had one at home to start my day as I do every day) while I figured it out. When I ordered, the barista (a tall Black guy with wire-rimmed glasses and a cream colored beanie, what we would call a hipster ten years ago but is now just a guy lol) said, “Oh man, I KNEW you were gonna ask for that! You’re on your bike [I was carrying my helmet], you probably just need a quick burst of caffeine, and I was like ‘she probably wants an espresso’!” It was pretty sweet and wholesome.

Espresso stop

I sat outside in the sun and enjoyed my espresso. There were a couple of kids pushing each other on what appeared to be an ergonomic office chair on the sidewalk outside an auto body shop next door. They were having a good time One kid was wearing a Steph Curry jersey (although weirdly it didn’t have “Curry” on it, just a Warriors #30 jersey).

I kept it moving and rode into Manhattan on the Willis Avenue Bridge. It had a nice wide path for both pedestrians and cyclists, although it was just me and a bunch of delivery drivers, probably making their way into Manhattan for their workday (it was around 10:30 am at this point). I landed in Harlem on the other side of the bridge and was glad to be back on the familiar grid, although I always forget where to get onto the bike path on the west side. I wandered in Riverside Park a bit.

Riverside Park

Once I made it to the Hudson River Greenway, it was a pretty straight shot downtown ~100 blocks or so. By this time more people were out since it was a non-rainy Saturday late morning.

Hudson River Greenway, along the west side of Manhattan

I made it downtown in pretty good time, although I was starting to get a little tired, annoyed by people, and hungry.

One World Trade Center, facing downtown

I stopped for a Taiwanese pork chop in Chinatown. There was a food festival happening on Pell Street, which is one of the smaller off-the-grid streets in Manhattan Chinatown.

Pell Street, Manhattan Chinatown

I hopped back on my bike and rode across the Manhattan Bridge back to Brooklyn to complete my ~26 mile loop. All told, it was a great ride! And as I was crossing the bridge, it started drizzling, so my timing was pretty good. If I hadn’t made any stops, it could have taken about two and a half hours, but I enjoyed doing it a little bit more slowly and appreciating the journey.

Epilogue

Also! I have also been meaning to put together something like the customized map above to document and share my rides for a while now so I am kinda proud that I finally did it! The high level steps were:

Track ride in an app called MapMyRide (it’s made by UnderArmour and is similar to Strava)
Export ride data (basically a bunch of longitude, latitude pairs) as GPX
Convert to GPX to GeoJSON
Import GeoJSON data to Mapbox Studio
Create tileset (which as far as I can tell is essentially a dataset that can be used as a Mapbox layer) in Mapbox Studio
Create style (or use an existing style) in Mapbox Studio
Embed into this webpage with javascript

I got it to work but don’t look under the hood; it’s held together with duct tape right now 😅

Nothing against Staten Island, which often gets dumped on even though parts of it are very beautiful and it’s ethnically diverse and has beaches and a nice Chinese Scholar Garden and is also the only borough I know of with good affordable Sri Lankan food — but it would have added over 10 miles and/or a ferry to my journey, so I left it out for simplicity this time. ↩︎

Net positive, maybe

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 11:02:10 -0400

This is a half-baked thought I’ve been preheating for a bit.

Technology has changed the way we consume and create media, and considering all the benefits against the drawbacks, sometimes it doesn’t feel like a net improvement to me. Or maybe it’s just that things evolved too quickly, we got excited about all the upside and didn’t think enough about second and third order effects, and now we’re still figuring out a way to catch up. I haven’t decided how optimistic or doomsday I feel about about all of it yet.

Photos

It’s very easy to take (and store) photos. Having a smartphone means having a high quality camera and unlimited “film” in our pocket at almost all times.

Sometimes it feels like being able to take photos so easily means we also end up creating a lot of lower value photos that don’t take up much physical space but do take up mental energy to delete, deduplicate, etc. Or they’re useful for some practical and ephemeral but in the long term unimportant purpose. I don’t want to be that cranky old guy comparing everything today to the “good old days” but I do remember as a kid my family had a Canon AE-1 and we used it to capture a lot of memories and fundamentally the point of taking a photo is to have a snapshot of something you want to remember, right? When I look at old photo albums it really does feel like every photo is special. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a photo of the coat check tag from a restaurant from 7 years ago taking up 1MB of space on my phone and in the cloud, in the old days I would just have to not lose the coat check tag — I didn’t have any other option — and even if I did, my life would only be minorly and temporarily inconvenienced because I’d somehow have to prove which coat was mine and that I wasn’t a coat thief or whatever. But here I am scrolling through old “memories” and wondering if that photo that seemed important at the time really needs to exist anymore.

The problem technology was trying to solve for was that maybe sometimes you’d have a moment you’d want to remember with a photo and just didn’t have a camera on you. Is that problem solved? Sure, mostly, but now I have a lot of digital junk.

I think part of what I’m struggling with is that we’ve stretched the very essence of what a photo is. We can even easily capture our screens and create “pictures” that way. Does a screenshot count as a photo? Not in the sense that it captures light on some kind of sensor or film, but it does create an image file that I then have to be responsible for. Is a live photo a photo or a video? Either/both (and again, the technology is cool and felt magical when that feature came out). Sometimes I do find an old screenshot of a nice text message that someone sent me and that does evoke the same nostalgic warm feeling that a photo does.

There are now apps that you can pay for (as a subscription, of course) that help you dedupe and delete photos (which I find de-stopian¹). And if you don’t want to make any decisions, ever, about photos to keep or delete, you can just pay more (as a subscription, of course) to store them in the cloud, forever. So is it technology or is it capitalism that’s to blame, because the default solution for any problem is to create a product or service that solves it and then make the person who cares most about the problem pay for said product or service?

Books, magazines, and other “print” media

I won’t go as deep into this one but I think there’s an analogous evolution happening here that’s driven by technology, where writing can be published online with very little overhead or gatekeeping. In general I do feel like this is a good thing because very talented and smart people you’d probably never otherwise hear from can share their work broadly. (I guess you could say the same thing about video and film.) Of course, some people choose to publish things that are actively hateful and dangerous and incite very real negative consequences in the offline world in a way that wasn’t as easy to do before, and that is concerning. And, of lesser severity but still real, the experience of reading anything on most media websites is exhausting because it’s just constantly being on the defensive against ads, auto-paying videos, paywalls and signup walls. I’d say e-books are a net positive, mostly because it seems like they’ve remained relatively untouched by ads within the reading experience, and the ability to get library books on an e-reader is amazing and wonderful (although I still enjoy the physical experience of going to public libraries and browsing books and am sad that the libraries are severely underfunded).

Music

Streaming music technology is very cool. The sheer availability of every kind of music ever recorded, at the click or tap of a button, constantly astounds me. The “if you like this you might also like this” algorithm is especially cool tech. However, I feel like it discourages other forms of discovery and connection. In my peak music-consuming years, going to live shows was my primary way of finding new music, because I could talk to other people or see what band t-shirts they were wearing or patches they had on their bags or check out the opening acts. As far as I can tell, algorithms that suggest new music based on what you already like are based on predictable things like genre and mood that can be determined systematically (and again, the technology that determines that is cool), but those programmatic algorithms probably wouldn’t suggest ’90s R&B to someone who predominantly listens to pop punk. But many people who like music like multiple genres, and orthogonal genres wouldn’t necessarily be suggested by a recommendation engine.

It also seems like it’s very difficult for artists to earn a living if their music is on Spotify. I guess you could argue that this was always a problem because of major record labels and that it’s never been easy for artists to make a living.

Music is the topic here that I feel the saddest about because for whatever reason I just don’t listen to music that much anymore, but it used to be one of my main interests. I loved listening to music, going to shows (at my peak I was going to 3-4 shows a week), talking about music, discovering new music, recommending music to friends, all of it. About 20 years ago I went “fully digital”, ripped all my CDs into mp3 files, and got rid of the discs. I was really proud of myself for being so tech-forward (and for saving precious square footage in my apartment). Now I kind of miss them and wish I still had them. The other day I randomly remembered a song that I liked years ago² and wanted to listen to it, and it wasn’t available on Spotify, and I had to ⏸️ pause my brain because I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

Am I wrong?

I feel like I’m biased about all of this because I remember the Before times, and like most humans I’m wired to prefer the familiar and fear the unknown. I think it’s okay to enjoy things and also be critical of them (in fact, I believe it’s important to do so to be a good citizen), and I do genuinely enjoy these things and marvel at the technology that enables them. Part of me thinks, “Hey. Don’t worry about this. Worry about things that matter more. It’s not your problem.” But what is the internet if not a place to complain about things and then do nothing concrete to change anything? 😬 I still pay for Google Photos, iCloud storage, various digital publication subscriptions, Spotify… (I did cancel my subscription to the photo-deleting app because was a bit depressing to pay with both my time and my money for something that in the grand scheme of things is a very low value activity.)

Edited 2024-05-19: revised bad grammar in first sentence

I’m not sure if this homonymous joke lands well in writing as opposed to if I said it out loud, but I meant to say “dystopian”. ↩︎
I ended up finding it on YouTube — it’s a song by a band called Eagle Seagull and it was a very catchy pop rock tune, although listening to it now the lyrics are actually kind of misogynistic and kind of seem like an insecure man upset about a woman not being interested in him anymore, so maybe it’s a good thing that I’m not still listening to the music I enjoyed in my 20s ↩︎

Lately

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 22:03:43 -0400

I’ve been a little less online lately, but not to worry, I have just been living my life :)

Several weeks ago, I gave notice at work and left. Some people in my life were surprised, because it was a good job at a good company, I generally enjoyed it, I got to work with wonderful people, and I was paid money to do it. The younger version of me who hadn’t yet figured out a career direction would be curious (and more than a little skeptical) about why I would quit such an objectively good job.

I think the short version of why is that my relationship with my work has evolved as I’ve gotten further along in my career journey and this is probably the first time where I made a career transition driven more by a pull toward something else, and less by a push away from where I was.

Also in the past several weeks, I turned 40, which I had been not-very-lowkey dreading but now that it’s here I am actually… enjoying myself? I took a few weeks off between jobs, during which I traveled across the country, stared out the window of a train for hours, saw various family members, spent 24 hours in Las Vegas, hiked in the desert, and other nice things that were mostly rejuvenating and fun, and then I concluded it with a relatively chill birthday gathering here in the city.

I don’t know if turning a milestone age has changed anything material about my brain or body but I have noticed a shift in my mindset and perspective on certain things.

One thing I noticed is that lately I haven’t encountered too many situations where I have NO idea how to approach the problem. I guess that’s because of LIFE EXPERIENCE, which I didn’t realize I was accumulating?!

Not to say I know everything — if anything, I feel like the more I know the more I realize how little I actually know. The only difference lately is that somehow I have gotten much better at (1) formulating the right questions to ask, (2) deciding which questions are important to answer versus those where it’s sufficient to just have a good question articulated, and (3) for the ones do need answers, whether it makes more sense for me to try and answer it or if someone else is going to give a better answer. But I don’t know that I’m any better at giving answers.

Being a new person at a new job comes with a lot of discomfort, the discomfort of not knowing things. But knowing the feeling of not knowing things IS something I have felt many times before. I felt it very viscerally (still do) and, being somewhat avoidant, would overindex on learning as much as I could as fast as I could about whatever the thing was so I wouldn’t have to feel the feeling. I think part of that was why I did okay in medical school because I had to quickly learn a lot of facts I had never known before. Now I’m trying my best to embrace the discomfort, and also being able to say “I don’t know” full stop (as opposed to “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” which is what you’re supposed to say as a medical student).

Of course, being able to say “I don’t know” with any regularity is something of a perk that comes with being mid-career because there are enough things I do know in my areas of expertise. But in the grand scheme of things there is much much much more that I don’t know, so it’s been a good push for me to not be too comfortable.

I have tried to channel my niece, who, like most little kids has no shame about being wrong and is excited to learn things and therefore learns fast and without any emotional scarring (hopefully). Adults (me) often try too hard to look cool and smart and like a font (baptismal, not typographic) of wisdom and as a result we learn more slowly and painfully. Also sometimes we think we know everything which is probably a bigger blocker to learning. But I have noticed that my niece is perpetually just stating her assumptions plainly, and if she’s wrong, some adult will almost always correct her, which she internalizes, and then moves on. I’ve started doing that more often — stating my assumption even when I know it’s probably wrong — and once I get over the initial hump of thisIsProbablyAStupidQuestionBut¹, it’s actually much faster for learning and somewhat psychologically safe.

Another nice thing lately is that spring is FULLY SPRINGING here in the northern hemisphere and sometimes I forget how much the weather affects my mood but when the air is crisp and the sun is out and the trees are flowering and I can wear a light zip-up hoodie without an overcoat I feel like things are so possible!!!

I stopped saying the “this is probably a stupid question” preface verbatim a while ago because allegedly it’s more emotionally healthy to be kind to yourself and avoid saying things about yourself that you wouldn’t say about a good friend like “I’m stupid” or “I’m lazy” but to protect my own ego I will often say something like “I am new here and trying to learn quickly, so I am going to state my assumptions and you can tell me where I’m wrong” so the person doesn’t think I’m stupid. I’m learning (or in this case, trying to unlearn a bad habit). ↩︎

Which self is this?

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:20:16 -0500

Last month Katherine called out the tension inherent in a “personal” website which is that it is both public and personal, and one’s public (or professional) persona is often different from that of their personal life. Robin Rendle riffed on the concept and said that it’s totally fine for personal websites to be messy or imperfect or weird (i.e., not necessarily how you’d want to present a “professional” front) and declared, in a pretty great and punchy/pithy statement, “You’re a poem and not software”. Manu also picked up the thread and brought up a good point which is that people are complex and are allowed to have multiple selves that they present in different ways (and one great thing about your website is that it’s yours and you can choose which self or selves to present, and how).

So much of this resonates and, like many online discourses, it got me excited and saying things like “yes, THIS” and “oh, I hadn’t thought about that” and “dang, I wish I had said something that insightful” and ultimately pushed me to get out of my head and put my take into words. Specifically, exploring the answer to this question for myself and this space: “How do I want to present myself here, more professionally or more personally?” or, “Which self is this?” I think I’ve landed on something, but to get there I had to reflect on my own story of being Very Online over time and how my respective personal and professional selves have evolved.

First era (circa 1999-2002)

In my first era of personal website-ing, I was an angsty teenager and young adult, and it was the early web. Most of us used aliases or first names only, perhaps out of instinct but also by design (since services like message boards and Internet Relay Chat and AOL Instant Messenger asked for a username, not a first and last name) and were not actively trying to be “professional” and certainly not thinking about our online presences as a way to earn a living. The web was a new place, and when choosing a username and knowing that you had full control over how to present yourself in ✨cyberspace✨, why would you choose FirstnameLastname (boring) when you could be any combination of letters and numbers that you felt better represented you online?

I have a lot of nostalgia for this time, booting up the Compaq desktop in our family’s computer nook, literally spending hours at a time on the web. My parents were totally baffled about what could be so interesting and would constantly ask me what I was doing on the computer for so long and I would be like, “ugh, it’s the Internet, dad, you wouldn’t understand” [puts on wired Sony headphones and fires up a Taking Back Sunday MP3 on Winamp at full volume]. I don’t remember the first personal website I found or how I found it, but I had a general curiosity about how the web was built and started tinkering with websites myself, without calling it web development or front end software engineering or anything, just having pure fun. I represented myself as Rachel, and whatever my URL was at the time.

Second era (let’s say 2001-2012)

When I went off to college, I was more excited about the blazing fast wired ethernet connection, pirating movies and music on BitTorrent, and redesigning my website with astonishing frequency than I was about academic and intellectual growth, setting up the foundation for my career, developing my professional network, and other things I was supposed to be doing. In my mind I very much separated being online (fun! exciting! a bastion of creativity!) from growing up and having a career (tedious. obligatory. dull). I assumed they were mutually exclusive, which I now see was a flaw in my thinking. My contemporaries on the internet were starting to grow up and get real jobs, many of them in design and software engineering which was probably the most logical choice given their interest and skill in the internet and technology as well as a smart bet that the market for the technology running the internet would explode.

I chose a different career path from many of my peers, to become a physician, and specifically a surgeon which is itself a different beast within medicine. My approach to that decision and the factors that informed it could constitute a much longer note, but for now the short version most relevant to this context is that I did very briefly consider working as a designer or web developer and while I was never 100% sure what the best decision would be, my 21-year-old self figured it’d be “easier” (and less illegal) to be a surgeon who dabbled in design as a hobby than a designer who dabbled in back-alley surgery as a hobby. 🤷 But I never seriously considered that my job could be fun or that fun could be my job.

Concurrently, platforms like LiveJournal and Tumblr were being developed, and I joined them out of curiosity. Those platforms of course optimized for the social/connectedness component more so than individual customization, including having a friends-only visibility option (and therefore the opportunity to be more candid about things including work and career), at the cost of full control. At the time I was spending a lot of time writing and designing and building my personal webspace — first hopping around my friends’ domains, then on my own space when I bought my first domain in 2002.

Going quiet (2010-2016ish)

Like knowing to use an alias to represent my online persona in my first era, I instinctively knew before and during medical school that my online self, who, while earnest and genuine was also a bit messy and still figuring herself out, was not and never could be the self that was expected to show up to see patients. (At the time I saw that as a required tradeoff, that I necessarily had to give up one thing in exchange for something more important, a noble self-sacrifice that I was willing to make. Now I’d reframe it in less zero-sum terms and more as a type of code-switching: I don’t have to be a martyr or hide the core of who I am; I get to have different selves and speak different languages, which is a good thing! But along with that comes the responsibility to choose which self is the best, most appropriate one for the situation. I could say a lot more about the environment of medical training and the institution of medicine but this note was supposed to be about websites, so I’ll stop pulling on the thread for now.)

Anyway, because of this and also the general time and energy limitations of working up to and sometimes over 100 hours a week, I wrote online with much lower frequency and mostly behind walled gardens throughout most of my clinical years.

Third era (~2016 on)

So here I am in my third era of being Very Online. Even though I’d spent a lot of time consuming stuff online during the previous phase, it was mostly through social media and, like everyone else, I shifted from desktop to mobile as a primary mode of accessing the internet. I also stopped doing any form of web development entirely, and coming back to all of that was kind of overwhelming. The last time I’d maintained a personal website regularly, I was designing layouts in a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop, Chrome developer tools didn’t exist, and I had never used any form of version control (didn’t even know what it was). I ran my site on Textpattern and assumed I’d have to choose a CMS again; I had no idea what a static site generator was.

Around the same time, I got my first job outside of clinical medicine working for an online medical reference. I certainly wasn’t hired for any technology expertise, but I wanted to be around people building tech products so I could learn from them, and I think my sheer unbridled enthusiasm, plus a psychologically safer environment where kind people were willing to teach me things, did help me learn a lot on the job. For the first time in my professional career I felt like I could be more like the version of myself that I was most comfortable being, and instead of just barely being tolerated, that version of myself was celebrated.

I also continued to be online, for fun, outside of work, and in the past several years, instead of presenting different selves personally and professionally that I have to toggle between, I feel like each of those selves is becoming more congruent with the other.

I have a few more things to cover but this feels like a good place to pause, so would ya mind holding my spot? I’ll be right back. (Part 2 coming soon.)

Things I don't have to do

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 22:14:03 -0500

I spent a lot of time and energy in my life worrying about things I felt like I had to do for one reason or another. Either everyone else was doing the thing, or specific people were pressuring me to do the thing, or I never saw real examples or models of people who didn’t do the thing, etc.

At some point I started to realize that, if I really challenged myself, I didn’t have to do some of the things I believed I had to in order to win at life (and I would include the idea of having to “win at life” on this list). I also couldn’t really blame anyone for making the decisions that I did because I felt I had to; no one was forcing me to do these things.

I mean, yes, societal pressure is very real, for some people more than others, and in some parts of the world it would be more than just frowned upon for me to not do some of these things. You know the allegory of the baby elephant tied to a stake with a rope, who even when he grows up and can easily break the rope, he doesn’t, because he’s been trained to believe he can’t? I’m just trying to constantly remind myself that I can break the rope.

Things I don’t have to do:

have my job be a calling
be happy all the time or even most of the time
buy a house just to buy a house
marry a man
get married at all
be in a long-term partnered relationship at all
be a mother
act like I hate kids just because I don’t want to be a mother
pick one thing to do or be
explain myself
wear a bra with an underwire
wear a bra at all
be active on social media
delete all social media in order to make a statement about not being active on social media
be a doctor just because I went to medical school
be a surgeon just because I did a surgery residency
drink alcohol at a bar or a party
spend vacation time traveling to expensive and exotic locations
apologize if I’m not sorry
get a degree (or otherwise pay money to an institution in order to learn stuff)
choose between e-books or paper books
feel bad about paying more for something I value more
remove any of my body hair for anyone except myself
wear a skirt suit for job interviews
work in a field that requires suits for interviews
know the answers to everything
order from the menu
jump into solving everyone’s problems when they tell me about their problems (it’s okay to just listen and be there)
choose sides
be busy, productive, accomplished in order to have worth as a person
run (for exercise)
have a gym membership in order to exercise
have an opinion about everything
date someone for a specific amount of time before moving in with them
eat breakfast food at breakfast
wait in line for a Cronut
act like I’m too cool to wait in line for a Cronut
respond to every email

My lil' midlife crisis

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 13:49:35 -0500

For the last several months I have been experiencing something, first in the background and now very much in the foreground, and that thing is what many people would describe as a midlife crisis, although it doesn’t feel so much like a crisis mode and is in fact both exciting and exhausting, and fun and terrifying, and lots of other things.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, because I sort of thought I had already had my midlife crisis when I dramatically quit my career in my early 30s to TAKE A PRINCIPLED STAND and CHANGE THE WORLD and that from then on I would be sailing off into the sunset.

But life doesn’t work that way, I guess.

It feels like there is a default picture of a midlife crisis (or I have one in my head) as something experienced by a Straight White American Man™ turning 40 or 50 who goes out and buys a red sports car because he’s balding and gaining weight and society has told him those are Bad Things that he has to compensate for.

I don’t see myself in that picture… but I do relate to the underlying feelings of inadequacy and a dull sense of slow impending doom about not having accomplished enough by XYZ milestone in life, and feeling like my body is changing without my approval.

What my midlife crisis looks like:

Feelings of inadequacy and a dull sense of slow impending doom

This is a very different feeling than the insecurities of my teens and twenties, which was more about worrying what other people think. I mostly got over that in my early 30s (though I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to worry about what people think, I’ve just narrowed it down to worrying about what the important people in my life think and forgetting about everyone else).

Maybe “inadequacy” isn’t even the right word for it, because it implies a deficit or something missing. On the contrary, in many ways I feel like I have everything I thought I would have wanted at this point in my life, even having surpassed my wildest dreams in some ways, and I am grateful every day for what and who I have in my life. I have family and friends who I care about and who care about me, and a partner who is my ride or die. I have a job where I get to do things that I do well and actually enjoy, that pays me money (in American dollars!) to do things I do well and actually enjoy. (I can even do it in my pajamas from home at times. How lucky can one guy be?!) If I have a need for some physical object or product, I can pretty much get it fairly easily. I have time to pursue hobbies and interests outside of work.

And yet!! I feel even more pressure to do something Great with a capital G and that something is missing but I am not sure what. I also have been ingrained from my childhood and upbringing to believe that I should always be grateful for what I have, but that wanting more means that I am ungrateful and don’t deserve what I have (we can talk more about that later but spoiler alert, I was raised by immigrants), and there’s an inner voice somewhere saying that I am being both boastful and ungrateful but having these thoughts.

In recent years I have been teaching myself to embrace and reframe such conflicting feelings. Seemingly opposite feelings can coexist in one brain, and sometimes just changing the BUT to an AND makes it feel more kind to myself than conflicting: I feel lucky for what I have, BUT I still want more versus “I feel lucky for what I have, AND it’s valid for me to want more in some areas of my life and to continue self-improvement.” It can also sometimes be paralyzing.

I admit I may be a bit histrionic in characterizing this feeling as one of slow impending doom. Speaking of conflicting feelings, it is both that (scary) AND also kind of exciting. I guess the unknown is often scary and exciting.

Feeling like my body is changing without my approval

At my most recent annual doctor’s visit, my primary care physician notified me that I would need screening mammograms starting next year after I turn 40.

Oy.

(Pan to the protagonist, who looks directly at the camera with wide eyes, “mAmmÔgRam” echoing and repeating at 0.25x speed on the audio track)

We also talked about menopause (“mENopäu$e”) and routine colon cancer screening (“c0LonóScoPy”), both of which are also on the horizon for me, and it was all kind of overwhelming. I believe there’s a trope about previously healthy adults starting to complain about health and health problems after a certain age, and I have to say (agnostic of me previously working in healthcare and caring for sick people, which I think is a slightly different beast than what Im referring to here)… I get it. It’s all true. You young people DO take your youth and health and good looks for granted and my lower back DOES hurt at baseline now and I AM farting more for no reason and get your damn skateboards off my lawn!

My lipid panel and hemoglobin A1c were also the worst they’ve ever been, though when I say “worst they’ve ever been” I mean they were still within the normal range and as a friend very astutely put it, it’s like my blood work has always been an A+ and now that it’s an A–, that’s what’s really bothering me… but it did scare me enough that I hard pivoted to an entirely plant-based diet. For about four days. Then I realized that I enjoy all types of food too much for that to be sustainable—but in the past few months I have been more intentional about consistently eating more plant-based meals (at least one a day), and while I still indulge in my favorite comfort foods (I did not write a whole love letter to sandwiches just to break up with them a month later!!!!), I definitely try to savor them more and make it more special than just “hey, it’s Tuesday, how about a fried chicken sandwich and a hot dog to round out the day?”

I also learned, in an internet research black hole, that it turns out that dietary cholesterol does NOT really meaningfully affect lipid levels for most people, or at least in the ways that doctors used to tell patients (and the ways that I remembering being taught in medical school), which added insult to injury because then I was like, “Great, I’m so old that even SCIENCE is different now.”

Anyway, reckoning with my health and overall wellness¹ has also been especially weird for me because I happen to look significantly younger than my age due to my Asian ethnicity, compounded by a mild obsession with sun protection for the past ~15 years, and a penchant for backpacks and sweatpants. So it feels strange to feel “old” internally but be clocked as a “young person.” I went to a basketball game at Barclays Center a few months ago and ordered an $18 beer and two equally overpriced water bottles and got carded² and when I showed him my ID he kind of did a double take at my birth year and said “wow… you’re… doing really well” and I said thanks, but in my head I was thinking “Sir. I need two waters to offset the effects of this ale, I am paranoid about my cholesterol and I am going to need a mammogram next year.” When I was in Copenhagen for leisure checking into a hotel and the Danish Gen Z’er behind the front desk checked my passport, she also did a double take and said “Wow! You are from 1984?!” and I was like “(well I didn’t time travel in a Delorean or anything but) yes, I’m turning 40 next year, can you believe it?” and she said “No! That’s sick!”

I’m definitely not complaining about looking younger than my age especially because in Western culture it is more of a benefit than a disadvantage, that I will milk for as long as I possibly can, but I do also have a particular fear as a woman that I will be forgotten and ignored because I see it happening to women (in broad strokes as a culture, not necessarily totally pervasive in every scenario). And I also have a particular sadness as a queer Asian woman that I have never really had role models for what older versions of me look like, both literally as in do they exist and in the sense of what do their lives look like.

If you relate to any of this or have crossed the threshold over 40 and have any perspective to share with me, especially if you also don’t see yourself in “traditional” pictures of midlife crises, I would really welcome it! I’m reachable on Mastodon at @rjkwon and via email at kwon@fastmail.com.

I started seeing a therapist earlier this year too, and believe it or not this novel I’m writing now is a FRACTION of what I talk with him about) ↩︎
…and before you tell me that he was carding EVERYBODY, he was not, he was definitely profiling, although I wasn’t mad about it because he was just doing his job ↩︎

Seven sandwiches

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 09:52:57 -0400

I love sandwiches. Below are some of my favorites and why.

First, a few constraints I will impose to keep it to a reasonable number of sandwiches: these are limited to New York (not that I haven’t had amazing sandwiches elsewhere), sandwiches I’ve had at least 3 times, excluding burgers (are burgers sandwiches?), excluding falafel sandwiches (not that I don’t love them but I can’t pick a favorite spot and also then we get into wrap territory which is going to introduce too much scope creep), and excluding chain restaurants (not that I won’t crush a Subway or Potbelly sandwich if the mood strikes me).

Okay, here I go.

Sandwich #1

Pastrami and pepper jack on a roll with lettuce, tomato, hot peppers, pickles, mustard (hot) from the deli across the street from the medical center where I did my surgery residency

This is the sandwich I have almost certainly consumed the most number of times in my life. I don’t know how I decided on this particular sandwich, but I did. I’ve eaten this sandwich for lunch, dinner, at 2 am on call, in the deli, on the street on the way back to the hospital, in the call room, et cetera. One time I gave my medical student $10 and asked her to go to the deli and ask the deli man to make the Kwon sandwich and that he would know what it meant. I wasn’t actually sure he would, but a big part of being a surgeon is saying things with extreme confidence even if you’re not actually certain about the thing. In this case, it worked out (as a general rule, you’d be hard pressed to find someone more reliable than a deli man), and the student came back with my sandwich.

I think more than the sandwich itself I am fond of the deli and the people there because it was often a bright spot at a stressful and dark time in my life. One time I was on call overnight and somebody came in with a rectal prolapse, and one of the tricks to reducing a prolapsed rectum (and avoid surgery) is to cover it in sugar before attempting to push it back in (the sugar osmotically draws water across the rectal wall which reduces the swelling). The hospital cafeteria was closed so I went to the deli and asked if I could have as much sugar as they would give me. The (overnight) deli man didn’t blink an eye or ask any questions, just brought me a bunch of sugar packets and charged me nothing. (Maybe I wasn’t the first resident to have that request.)

Anyway, wasn’t this supposed to be about sandwiches? I digress.

Sandwich #2

House special banh mi, spice level: spicy, from the banh mi shop on Broome and Grand

I had this sandwich a lot during the depths of the pandemic and recently went back and it was just as good as it was then. The guy behind the counter is really nice and when it’s summer and I wait outside for my sandwich after putting in my order, he comes out and brings it to me when it’s ready, which I think is a nice touch because he could just yell for me to come pick it up like a lot of other delis (which is also fine!).

Sandwich #3

Italian sub, Faicco’s Italian Specialties (there is an outpost on Bleecker Street, but the original deli is in Brooklyn)

This is just a giant sub that could probably feed 4 people. When I was younger I could eat the whole thing by myself sitting in Washington Square Park which is a short walk away.

Sandwich #4

Fried eggplant, prosciutto, mozzarella, roasted peppers, Defonte’s sandwich shop in Red Hook

This is the sandwich that made me like eggplant.

Sandwich #5

Reuben sandwich, Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop

This was one of my frequently ordered sandwiches at my first job after leaving medicine. I didn’t realize this place was such an institution until after it closed. Apparently it reopened under new ownership, though I haven’t been back yet.

Sandwich #6

Sausage-egg-and-cheese on an everything bagel (toasted), any reasonably reputable bagel institution

The correct way to order is with sausage-egg-and-cheese as one word, and to basically almost shout it (don’t worry, nobody is going to think you are rude, but they will get slightly annoyed if they can’t hear you the first time). I don’t order bagel sandwiches that frequently (hot take, but I just think a lot of bagels are too big and too bagelly), but sometimes I get in a mood where I need one, often on a Saturday morning. This is also my breakfast sandwich order at any deli (on a roll if they don’t have bagels).

Sandwich #7

Vegitalian (roasted butternut squash, greens, and a bunch of different cheeses on a hero), Court Street Grocers

Sometimes when something sounds too weird, you just have to try it. This sandwich is one of those things for me. It’s also the only vegetarian sandwich that made this list. I would not liken it to an Italian sub because it’s an entirely different vibe, but it’s a delicious sandwich. The bread-to-filling ratio is a little higher than I generally prefer but all in all it’s a great sandwich and it’s always nice when the vegetarian option is just as tasty as carnivorous counterparts.

Internet is fun

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 21:02:50 -0400

I made this:

The internet used to be fun

I feel like more people these days are starting to reject the notion that the internet is made up of Big Websites that represent Big Companies that are trying to take either the attention or the money of their visitors while adding minimal value to the lives and well-being of those visitors.

Because a lot of us remember when the internet was mostly just fun, and the good parts of the old internet were by and large created by real individual humans who had no motives other than to explore the internet and just put stuff out there that was interesting and fun and random. We were just being curious about technology and the web.

Anyway, I had what I thought was a BRILLIANT and UNIQUE idea a few years ago to write some kind of manifesto or call to action about taking back the web or something about my nostalgia for the old web or how a personal website is like a lived-in home on the web or something along those lines… but turns out a lot of other people have had the same ideas and already shared their thoughts while I was over here patting myself on the back about my ideas but doing nothing actionable about them 😅. So all I did was start collecting a bunch of those links into a JSON file, and then build a single page mini-site at the link above.

(I’ll write up how I ended up setting up the page in a separate note later because it was both straightforward and not. Hugo made it pretty easy to do conceptually; in essence I just spun up a new site locally, created a new subdomain, pointed the site at the subdomain, and that was it, but it was way more roundabout than that description makes it sound and I ended up going through a lot of trial and error.)

Comfort food

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:05:25 -0400

One of the main reasons why I would find it hard to leave New York is that I have grown accustomed to having what feels like infinite food options and over the years have cultivated my list of good food spots in the city down to a tee.

“Good” is a super subjective designation, especially for food. It can also be a sensitive and sometimes classist thing to talk about good food, so I would start by saying that I do not consider myself a foodie (even though objectively speaking I do think about food a lot and talk about it a lot and probably definitely spend an embarrassingly disproportionate amount of my disposable income on food because I genuinely enjoy eating so much).

Also, what is a foodie, really? I tend to associate the term with either (a) a person who is a bit snooty about food and is obsessed with gourmet Michelin star restaurants that serve tiny portions and try to be gastronomical and whatnot, (b) an Instagram influencer who takes pictures of food that looks good but truly solely for the ‘gram.

For (a), I would say that high-end food has its place (I think of it more akin to art, which I can appreciate but I wouldn’t say I necessarily CRAVE it) and I’ve had some amazing meals at those types of establishments in my life, but none of my absolute favorite restaurants are of that ilk.

With regards to (b), no thank you. That just makes me sad. Some of the best food I’ve had is ugly food. Life is too short! (No shade to people who can make a living off of that, though—that’s amazing and you go get your coins.)

When I say my absolute favorite restaurants, I’m talking about the spots where:

I get intense cravings for the food
I have patronized them multiple times
I would recommend them to people I like
I dream about them when I’m traveling and don’t have access to their food
I get defensive if people try to knock them

(This sounds suspiciously similar to a list of characteristics for someone struggling with an addiction or something.)

So, lots of places have delicious, well-made food. And at baseline I think that restaurants in New York that merely exist here (i.e., have been able to survive here over time) are probably pretty decent. BUt the attributes I believe I index on particularly strongly are the following:

Consistency. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to a new restaurant (new to me and/or new to existing in general), had an AMAZING meal, and then come back only to find that it’s just not as good. I think I value this a lot more as I get older and fear change more and therefore become more risk averse 😔. Kinda like how I tend to re-read books I’ve already read instead of reading new ones—about 2/3 of the time I’d say I would rather go to a restaurant I already know and like than try a new one. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but it just is.)
Value for money. I feel privileged to be able to prioritize this, because it means that I am in a position where the dollar amount is not as important to me as the relative value (quality) of the food, and service (see number 3). Not that I’m Daddy Warbucks¹ over here or anything, but you know. The days where my drink of choice is Miller High Life are over.
Service. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had genuinely bad service in New York (again, by virtue of it being New York (god, how many times can she say new york in one post?? we get it, lady, you’re in new york 🙄), the service is probably going to be pretty good). What I mean is that a lot of my favorite spots have what I would consider exceptional service. I feel like I might have to explain this one more separately at a later date because I probably sound like a crazy unreasonable patron but I promise I’m not, I think I actually steer too far in the other direction (I’m such a people pleaser that if the server seems short or cranky I will tip MORE because I feel like it’s my fault, or like, if I drop my fork I’ll be like it’s fine I can eat this hot noodle soup with my hands!! 😭)

Also!! One thing that nobody asked but I feel very strongly about is that I have never and will probably never wait in a line for food in New York because there is NO REASON to do that… literally just walk to the next block and I guarantee you will probably find equally amazing food!

Hmm, maybe “Father Warbucks”? Sometimes the use of the term “daddy” weirds me out a little. I don’t want to appropriate gay man culture or little kid culture. ↩︎

Pushing pixels

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 07:46:59 -0400

I made some minor CSS tweaks on mostly spacing here that have bothered me since the beginning (though not enough to get me to fix them until now, hehe).

This is extreme minutiae and probably doesn’t even warrant a note here but I did spend over an hour working on this so I feel like I have to document it. (I woke up at 5 am and couldn’t sleep so I journaled and internetted for a while before deciding to fire up the old cascading stylesheet.)

(Sidenote: how did we ever design/build websites without Inspect Element??)

Anyway, the things that bothered me were (1) spacing was a little too tight between the top of the page and the header/navigation, (2) emoji to toggle light/dark mode were not properly vertically aligned, (3) superscript footnote links were pushing the lines out of whack, (4) superscript footnote links were inheriting the dotted bottom border which looked messy when the text itself was also linked, (5) on mobile, the note title, date, and body were uncomfortably crowded.

Desktop (may click to embiggen)

Mobile

(Sometimes I wish I had gotten a design degree or a computer science degree instead of a medical degree, and I do distinctly remember having that fleeting thought before deciding on the path that I did, because I really loved making websites, and I remember thinking, “Well, I guess it’s easier to be a surgeon who dabbles in some design on the side than a designer who dabbles in operating on the side.” Turns out I’m kinda both and neither?)

(A cleverer title for this post coulda been “Dr Pixel Pusher,” like Dr Pimple Popper)

Artificially intelligent thoughts

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:07:23 -0400

I am reading and hearing a lot of discourse about AI, machine learning, and more specifically, ChatGPT. It seems like a lot of people have a lot of opinions and things to say, and, like ChatGPT itself, they seem to be often wrong but never in doubt¹. From what I can tell it seems like a lot of it is noise (generally when people make blanket statements about AI being bad and dangerous) but there is some real signal (generally when people use more precise verbiage, detailed use cases, and less sensationalized/more nuanced thoughts and conclusions such as potential for bias at a large scale with large language models and generative AI causing harm²).

I’m in an information gathering stage right now (if the knowledge contained in the brain of the world’s leading expert on generative AI were represented by a complicated, elaborate, structurally sound bridge, my level of knowledge is a piece of rough lumber slapped between two puddles) so I don’t have much to add to the discourse that is of consequence.

(But I’m going to, anyway, because this is the internet!) Based on my observations, it seems that many laypeople have made a lot of assumptions about ChatGPT without ever having used it or read any of the materials from OpenAI. I know because I did that. I heard about it and saw some of the more ridiculous examples on social media and some news sites and such, and rolled my eyes a bit.

Then I figured if I’m going to be skeptical and pooh-pooh an emerging technology, it would probably be good for me to try it out so I can REALLY knock it. So I did!

The first thing I asked ChatGPT was what happened to the hole in the ozone layer³. Its response seemed right, and I used Wikipedia as the source of truth to verify facts, like confirming that the Montreal Protocol was in fact adopted in 1987. Because if ChatGPT had told me it was 1989, I would have believed it.

Basically, it behaved mostly as I expected it to, and it was kind of useful, even with what I think is a healthy level of skepticism. I also appreciated that it’s pretty clear from the various disclaimers that it can be wrong, dangerous, biased, etc.

I’ve used it a lot more since then, asking for guidance on gift ideas for my notoriously hard-to-shop-for parents (I ended up going with my own initial idea, a gifted trip to the Korean spa, which actually was on ChatGPT’s list as well), something thoughtful to say to a coworker about to go off on parental leave (I mostly used my own words except one suggestion from ChatGPT to encourage them to take care of themselves in addition to the baby), and, what has become a pretty frequent use case for me at work lately, debugging SQL queries.

My early conclusion based on this limited experience (since May I have used ChatGPT approximately once a day on average) is that ChatGPT is mostly like any other tool—if it’s used for the right scenario in the right way, it can be incredibly useful, and if not, it can either just not add much value (best case scenario) or actively cause harm (worst case scenario). If I need a flathead screwdriver and all I have is a Philips head, the best decision I can make is to not use an inadequate and ineffective tool for my use case. Even if it’s the fanciest, most technologically advanced Philips head screwdriver, powered by drill with wifi connectivity, rainbow LED lighting, and adorned with sparkles, it doesn’t really matter if it’s not the tool that I need.

What about disclosing use of ChatGPT as a tool? I think it depends. When I use it to debug a query, I don’t necessarily report that out when reporting on whatever finding I was investigating in the first place. (I have been excitedly telling anyone who will listen to me that I’ve been using ChatGPT to debug my SQL queries (and then the cleaning staff are like, please, lady, I just want to mop this floor, okay?), for whatever that’s worth.) If it were being used for looking up and reporting on facts more quickly and easily (such as in publishing content), such as my ozone layer question, I would say it should absolutely be made explicitly clear that the content was generated using a tool developed based on a large language model and list the known limitations.

(I had a flashback to working with this one thoracic surgeon who was really adept with the surgical robot and kind of took issue at the operating room staff for insisting that his patients’ informed consent documentation state SPECIFIC permission to do a robotic-assisted wedge resection of left lung or whatever, instead of just wedge resection of left lung, and his argument was that he doesn’t have to get permission from the patient or even tell them if he were using a 11-blade versus a 15-blade; the robot was just a tool at his disposal and he as the surgeon had a responsibility to use the right tool for the job. I could see his point, but at the same time, it also didn’t seem totally right to not have a documented conversation with the patient that the robot would be used—and of course he had had that conversation, but the OR staff didn’t know that, so in that case maybe the informed consent was a tool being incorrectly used to represent all communication with the patient.)

ChatGPT seems to have the most potential for harm when there isn’t reliable feedback on its accuracy (or if the user does not care to actively seek feedback). With a prompt like “debug my SQL,” I can immediately judge the quality of the response because either my SQL runs or it doesn’t. For that lawyer who didn’t verify that the case law ChatGPT quoted was real before submitting it in a court filing… oy.

Anyway, obviously we need to learn more, but with the right guardrails and oversight, we shouldn’t fear technology. If anything, we should fear unchecked capitalism, because that’s what has ruined and snuffed out a lot of the exciting potential that technology offers, but that’s another story for another day.

That is a joke about surgeons, the original gangsters in perfecting the art of being confidently wrong. ↩︎
I’m thinking of experts like Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, etc. ↩︎
The context is that I was talking to someone in their 20s and mentioned something about Aqua Net and CFCs and how we made a hole in the ozone layer real bad in the 1980s but then we fixed it, and they were like, “What is the ozone layer?” After I recovered from a mild generation gap-induced heart attack, I turned to the internet for help. ↩︎

Optimize

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 23:06:33 -0400

After I quit medicine and went corporate (as corporate as tech startups can be, which I guess depends on your vantage point; for me it was and is extremely corporate coming from doctoring), I got really into it and became particularly fascinated to learn how business leaders operate and spend their time (at work and in life) in order to be the most efficient and effective they can be. I guess a lot of people who came up in corporate work (and maybe the culture at large which is often dictated by creatives who may pooh-pooh the corporate life) think MASSIVE EYEROLL when they hear what the latest tech bro thinkboi has to say about optimizing their life and their time, but I actually found it pretty refreshing that in business a spade is called a spade and that spade is a dollar and nobody pretends that we aren’t trying to make money. Whereas when I was a doctor it was like someone was telling me out of one side of their mouth that I should take care of patients and money isn’t important but out of the other side they were whispering (but really shouting) that the patient doesn’t matter, just make money for the hospital.

Anyway, I really latched on to the concept of ✨optimizing time✨ and “time is money” and thinking of every hour as having an equivalent value that could be estimated in dollars and taking those quizzes that would tell you how much your time is worth and all of that, mostly because in medicine it’s beaten into your brain that money is evil and making money is greedy and you should just take care of the patients out of the goodness of your heart and because it’s a calling (obviously I’m oversimplifying and also in retrospect I wonder if I was also overly idealistic as a young doctor). When I think about it now, it’s kind of crazy that I spent 19,200 hours¹ training to be a surgeon but probably at least half of that was spent doing tasks that (from a strictly labor efficiency perspective, not a taking-care-of-humans perspective) were below my pay grade or what I maybe should have been worth considering the level of training and experience I had, like rote data entry in clinical documentation, wheeling patients to the operating room, drawing labs on my patients because I wanted/needed them faster than the phlebotomist could come draw them, et cetera. And I did all that with a spring in a step and a smile on my face (less so as I got more senior, but I never complained) because I thought, I’m kind of a hero for doing whatever it takes to get these patients the care they need!

And then I burned out. Hard. (It seems obvious that that would happen in retrospect, but when you’re running on fumes for years, you don’t even pick your head up to look around.) Which was a confounder (or maybe the accelerant) for what really happened, which was my early mid-life crisis that led to me thinking, hey, maybe I don’t actually have to keep doing this and maybe there is some other way I can contribute to the world without draining my internal battery every day and only getting to charge it back up to 5 or 10% before having to go out and do it all again.

(I started out writing this based on a seed of a thought which is “Hey, you know how all those thought leaders are always trying to optimize their time and money and time is money and delegate anything you can to someone else so you can focus on the thing that makes you the most money, and they run that principle into the ground and use it to justify outsource every task in their life? Are they happy? What do they do with all that incredibly valuable time that they’ve freed up for themselves?” and then in very typical Kwon fashion have been setting context for the past three business days of writing this note.)

Anyway, that’s the short version of how I got a little bit into this cult of optimizing my time and my life. When I say optimizing, I mean I did things like:

move to Manhattan from Brooklyn in order to optimize my commute (from ~40 minutes on the Q train at rush hour to a 10 minute crosstown walk)
optimize my wardrobe to only have neutral colored clothing (a lot of black and grey) so that everything would match, and also keep it limited to a few, high quality pieces in order to reduce decision fatigue from selecting an outfit to wear each day or having to shop frequently
order a sandwich (or some other easy-to-eat-while-ambulating food) for pickup, go pick up the sandwich, and then eat it while walking to whatever my next destination was to optimize my transit time
send extremely efficient, businesslike messages to friends when making social plans in order to optimize for reducing the amount of back and forth (and get very annoyed if they did not do the same)—like, “hey [friend], it’s been a while! would love to catch up over coffee next week. i’m available tues 3 pm, wed after 5 pm, or sat before noon—any of those times work for you? feel free to send alternatives if not, otherwise i’ll send a calendar invite for whichever time works!” (but of course all lowercase so as to SEEM incredibly 💅🏻chill💅🏻, easy breezy, just a cool chill guy doing cool guy stuff over here!!!).

I have to point out here that while these behaviors are not specific or unique to New York, I do think they are common here, and also reading this (and having LIVED it), OBVIOUSLY New Yorkers are a little bit VERY ridiculous and often insufferable and if that is what you are thinking—believe me, I know, and I do not disagree. I am chuckling, slash cringing, while typing this out. But in general I have also learned to be kinder to my younger self since she was just doing the best she could.

Anyway! The pandemic shook a lot of this up, and one silver lining of it was that I really chilled out a lot in this regard. I don’t chastise myself for not being at PEAK PRODUCTIVITY 1,000% OF THE TIME and I even enjoy zoning out every once in awhile. I’ll take the long way to my destination if it’s a little bit more scenic. I am more likely to make looser social plans and it doesn’t feel like being flaky if it doesn’t happen or if it takes a while to solidify things (obviously for things like ticketed events or also with certain friends who I know value the firm commitment made efficiently I try my best to do things the “old way”).

The pendulum may swing back at some point; I don’t know. Busy feels different these days because I don’t constantly feel like I have to DO something so visible in order to add value. It’s okay to take a moment to think about things or to say “I’ll get back to you on that” if it can wait and I’m not equipped to answer the question or do the thing right this second. I also wear colors in my wardrobe even though it means it takes longer to get dressed in the morning (but also my wardrobe is now 90% sweatpants and linens so it’s basically changing from my bed pajamas to my work pajamas these days, hehe).

There’s another thread in here I want to pull on (but later because it’s late, this is already getting kind of long, and I have a show queued up on the telly a.k.a. the Netflix window behind this text file) which is that perhaps the bigger tide in which my small boat is getting swept up in but trying to resist is society’s move toward specialization (as a way to optimize efficiency), but that maybe we are sacrificing something along the way, which is a general self-sufficiency (thinking specifically about this very highly paid law partner I know who doesn’t know how to cook but also doesn’t have to because she can just pay someone to make her food… but is that a good thing or a thing to be proud of?).

Here’s the math: I logged 80 hours a week for each of 5 years, which is 52 weeks a year minus 4 weeks of vacation per year (which by the way sounds great but residents don’t really get weekends or holidays and there were periods of up to 3 months at a time where I was in that hospital every single day), so 80 hours/week × (52 - 4) weeks/year × 5 years = 19,200 hours. This is almost certainly an underestimate since I definitely went over my hours very consistently, sometimes up to 100 hours a week, so it very well may have been closer to 20,000 hours. But 19,200 is what was on paper. ↩︎

In-between moments

Tue, 23 May 2023 08:35:29 -0400

In addition to my attention span, another pandemic-related loss not immediately obvious to me (probably because I was too worried about all the other losses, like the human lives, and the general erosion of mental health, and the ability to pretend that the institutions holding up our society would be able to take care of our most vulnerable), which I am only now realizing, has been the in-between moments.

The 30 minutes between leaving work and meeting up with a friend for drinks is an in-between moment. The subway commute that was too crowded to even think so I’d have to mentally check out is an in-between moment. The time spent standing on line at the post office during a quick lunch break is an in-between moment.

I feel like my days used to be so full, too full, but it also created a lot of those moments, which could be magical because they were often opportunities for connection or discovery. I could stumble upon an open art gallery or exhibit, or strike up a conversation with another person standing in line about something mundane. One time in the aforementioned post office line, I started talking to this older Hungarian woman who told me her life story and then gave me a laminated poem she had written about her Jewish neighbors that she lost in the Holocaust (I guess she carried copies of them around and would give them to people she talked to).

I think we are all a little more withdrawn and lonely. New Yorkers were always a little more withdrawn and lonely, but this feels next level to me. And in some ways we have forgotten how to take advantage of these moments. It’s hard to even catch anyone’s eye these days, because we have to compete with their phones.

Being intentional about connecting (reaching out to friends, setting up time to do something) is a good thing, a necessary thing to tend to relationships and keep them alive and growing, but intention takes work, which can honestly feel exhausting sometimes. In-between moments create temporary boredom and sometimes I’m just bored for a few minutes, which is fine, and sometimes I can make something good happen.

Maybe now that it’s (almost) summer, people will be out more, and then there will be more opportunities for these moments. Then I will probably complain that it is too hot and crowded, and want to go back inside. 🙂

Chinatown breakfast

Tue, 16 May 2023 07:50:55 -0400

When we lived in Tribeca, I could walk to Chinatown for breakfast. In general I am a morning person who avoids crowds and noise where possible¹, so I especially enjoyed being in the usually crowded and noisy neighborhood when it was on the quieter side with mostly just the residents of the neighborhood out and about, getting ready to open shops and stands and whatnot. You can get a great breakfast—you can get great food at any meal or snacktime—which is too often classified as “cheap eats” just because the prices are generally very reasonable (which feels pretty reductive, and dismissive of the skill required to consistently make a perfect soup dumpling or pumpkin bun or hand-pulled noodles or what have you). The other day we made the long and arduous journey from Brooklyn² to have breakfast at Big Wong which is one of my favorite spots because it feels like a diner and I love diners. We ordered the crispy roast pork, which felt decadent, especially for breakfast, along with a salted pork and preserved egg congee, rice rolls with shrimp, and a plate of greens. (I’m getting hungry thinking about it again.) I’m pretty sure the meal fueled the rest of my day.

Mott Street, looking downtown

BIG WONG

A table of comfort foods

I don’t think I’ve ever had an egg roll or a spring roll from Big Wong

Iconic sign

I know what you’re thinking: why do I live in New York City? I’m still trying to figure that out hehe ↩︎
I’m being dramatic. It took 15 mins on the train ↩︎

Lo-fi changelog

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 07:38:45 -0400

I made a changelog.

This was a fun little morning project for me. I’ve seen others do a thing where the changelog is simply a list of all commit messages in reverse chronological order, so I decided to try it. With any “small” coding project, I find that I generally grossly underestimate the time it will take to accomplish a seemingly simple thing, but I learn a lot and also have fun with all the side quests.

In this case, I did some googling and found some articles this Free Code Camp article is the main one I used, and immediately found out I have been writing bad commit messages (apparently the best practice is to use the imperative mood, e.g. “add changelog”, not the past tense, as I’ve been doing). Okay, noted!

Since my web skills are self taught, I am trying to be more intentional about identifying and developing good habits and hygiene with coding. (I feel like there is a parallel to surgery here, where even though the end result of a procedure by two different surgeons might look the same, the one who throws their stitches meticulously and ties their knots perfectly square has “better” technique—although that might be less important for, say, a trauma laparotomy for a patient who’s exsanguinating versus an elective plastic surgical procedure. Context matters. I wonder if it’s the same with coding.)

I also read a little bit about pretty formats for commits.

In the end, this is where I ended up code-wise:

`1`	`git log --pretty=format:"* %as %s" > CHANGELOG.md`

which generated this: https://github.com/rjkwon/personal/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

I like this solution for now because it’s lightweight but does the job.

I also learned how to use the highlight shortcode for displaying that code using Hugo. Now I just need to figure out where blob came from… and look into further automating this (potentially with a cron job?)… and maybe making it a page on the website instead of just a .md file…

Logging TV

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 07:54:17 -0400

One of the many open tabs in the browser of my mind is to find an effective way to track the television shows I watch. Unlike tracking books read or movies watched or music listened to, for which there are several good options for products to use¹, I haven’t been able to find a good product for it.

When I was on the internet in what could be considered my first act (a.k.a. the early internet, my teenage and college years from the late 1990s to early 2000s), if I’m currently on my second act as a citizen of the internet, none of these media tracking services existed², and the way we consumed television was still mostly on… the actual television set. We’d have to wait a week between episodes of a show. It was basically the Bronze Age.

In college, I got a subscription to Netflix and watched probably hundreds of movies and TV shows on DVD, and also pirated quite a few media types of media (I didn’t really have any real life friends because I was very emo and shy). For TV that was airing contemporaneously, episodes were still released on a week by week basis. I remember watching the show Alias with my hallmates, and I also had a secret Alias recap blog with two of my internet friends, but god forbid I tell my IRL friends about my blog (I was afraid they’d make fun of me).

Anyway, what even is TV these days? Netflix (and streaming more broadly) basically obliterated the previous television production model, which is both a marvel of modern technology, a case study in how to evolve a business to achieve massive growth, and also kind of a sad state to be in in terms of media as art—I feel like shows these days are largely formulaic, and the business of entertainment is very evident in the relative absence of TRULY original content (and shows are essentially given one season to succeed or not, and if they don’t, they’re cancelled).

I’ve also noticed that episodic TV seems much less common than it used to be, in favor of more limited series, which are essentially films that are drawn out to 8-10 hours long, and they all seem to have a similar cadence where the first episode grabs your attention, and every subsequent episode thereafter ends on some kind of cliffhanger to keep you watching. As if you had a choice in the first place—autoplay makes that choice for you, and then also somehow has the audacity to ask if you are still watching.

I am aware of at least one service, Trakt, whose major value proposition seems to be the convenience of syncing across all (most) streaming services, which sounds fine but when I tried it, it was a bit buggy (this was a while ago so it might be better now) and the interface felt quite bloated.

I meant to just write a quick note here about how I’ve decided to just track my TV watching manually, but I’ve had decision paralysis around trying to come up with a smart way to display what I’m watching here. My internal monologue has been something like this:

Does every episode deserve a post or line item? Probably not, that feels too granular and unwieldy.
But what about all the shows I start and then abandon (which are a lot; my attention span has been shot these past few years)? I don’t want to forget that I’ve started a show, which I’m prone to. Hmm, feels like each show needs to have a status.
It’d be nice if there was an app that tracked all the different streaming sources I use, like Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, etc. You say that, but you know you don’t really want that level of surveillance from an app. I know, I’m probably right. I am. That’s what I said. Ok.
What about all those streaming comedy specials I watch? Or concert specials. Well, they’re not TV shows per se. But they kind of feel like they should count… if the main purpose of tracking this data is to serve as a way to not forget that I’ve watched it. What about all those comedians that turned out to be problematic in some way? Oof, there is a lot to unpack there with too much nuance for me to write about on the internet.
What about all those food shows? Those should count.
What about if I’m re-watching something? Hmm… maybe just list the last date watched? It would be nice to capture number of times watched, but probably not essential. Most shows I do not watch more than once.
Should I use a ratings system? I think there are pros and cons to using something like a 5-star ratings system. Letterboxd and Literal.club both have that system (with the inclusion of ½ star ratings, which means it’s really a 10-point system). If individuals are using a 5-star system to rate stuff, I love seeing other people’s detailed explanations and interpretations of what each rating means to them, like Anh’s for her watchlist, and Wesley’s for their bookstore ratings (I also love the idea of rating bookstores in general). My approach to TV watching is similar to that of my bookreading in that to watch an entire series or read an entire book is enough of a time investment that I have a fairly low threshold to quit/abandon watching or reading if I’m not feeling it (for a show I usually give it 1-2 episodes and for a book I try to at least read the first chapter before making that decision). So the fact that I finish a particular book or series is basically an indication that I thought it was at least good enough to keep watching or reading to the end. And then of those, there are some that I particularly love and would very enthusiastically recommend

And so on and so forth.

For now, I’ve been tracking my TV watching in a Google spreadsheet which is currently temporarily-but-maybe-semi-permanently serving as the tracker until I can do something cool with it. (I kinda feel like my whole approach to this website is about sharing or documenting things that aren’t complete and are far from perfect but meant to capture slices of life, so maybe I’ll never do something cool with it but at least it exists.)

This whole note was a very long and navel-gazey way to say “here’s a spreadsheet,” eh?

Somewhat related: my note on reading, re-reading, and tracking reads

I use Letterboxd for movies, which I adore, Literal.club for books, which is fine for my needs for now, and Last.fm for music, which I’ve been meaning to divest from given that it now sits under a ginormous media conglomerate, but downloading my data and closing my account just never makes it to the top of my mental TODO list. ↩︎
Last.fm did exist at that time, as Audioscrobbler. ↩︎

unpolished

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 10:36:58 -0400

when visiting my parents a few weeks ago, i picked up one of the books on my mom’s bookshelf, the first of barack obama’s presidential memoirs. i started reading it, but it was kind of hefty and i was only going to be there for a week and didn’t want to start a book i couldn’t finish, so i put it down and picked up another one instead (which, turns out i couldn’t finish that one, either, so maybe i didn’t have to abandon the obama book). anyway, i made it through the intro before deciding to put it down, and one point he shared really stuck with me which i have been reflecting on since: president obama says he prefers to draft his writing by hand, on paper, not by typing on a computer or word processor, because it gives a false sense of completeness or polish. (i’m paraphrasing.)

i’ve also read, from proponents of journaling by hand, that there is a material difference between writing by hand and typing, in that the former necessarily takes longer to do and therefore your thoughts slow down (or maybe it’s that the writing speed better matches the speed of your thoughts) which is why journaling is therapeutic. i don’t know about the science supporting that statement, but anecdotally i do find journaling (by hand) helps me better articulate my feelings and in some cases DECIDE how i feel about something, by dissecting my thoughts on paper in great detail with no regard for readability or clear communication.

i’ve noticed this phenomenon (is it a phenomenon? maybe just an observation) in other types of writing, too. in business writing, because everything is pretty much typed out in an email or a document nowadays, it’s sometimes hard to tell just from glancing at the writing itself if something is a draft of someone’s unedited thought process (akin to taking scratch notes on a piece of paper) versus a more formal perspective on something. despite how one may feel about google as a Big Tech and as a giant corporation, google docs is an incredible piece of software that enables collaboration to degrees we may have never imagined when first encountering the humble typewriter (or even the first iterations of word processing software).

it is also, in my opinion, a little TOO frictionless to create documents. and in my experience, google docs documents are very rarely if ever deleted. every organization i’ve ever done work for that uses google workspace¹ has a problem with document bloat where google drive is just a mess of disorganized files, and document management is a job in itself. (in google drive’s defense, i don’t think it was designed to replicate the file and file folder model; documents were meant to be as googlable as the internet itself.)

i think the observation applies to personal websites as well. while i love the concept of a “digital garden” in theory, one reason i’m not convinced it would be the best way to architect my own website is that from my understanding, the idea is that writing is published, but more like planting seeds or seedlings, “half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time”, as maggie appleton eloquently puts it. and i LOVE that idea; however, i want the challenge of committing to publishing something, putting it out there, and leaving it be. that’s not to say things should NEVER be edited, and certainly not that our thinking shouldn’t change over time. on the contrary, i want to always be able to change my mind about things. i recently found out that the person who coined the phrase “dark pattern” literally changed the domain name of his site and corrected all references from “dark pattern” to “deceptive pattern” because that terminology is both (1) more clear and (2) more inclusive (the implication being that the use of “dark” at best confers coded negative bias and at worst perpetuates racism and colorism). honestly, huge claps for that guy. that’s a perfect example of acknowledging that your thinking has changed on something, and not just saying “i guess my thinking has changed, but too bad because we’ve already as an industry decided we’re going to use this term forever and there’s no way we could ever change it!!” but instead doing the hard thing of correcting and communicating and evolving the term and the thinking in a really elegant way.

i digress—that point was not specific to personal websites. what i meant to say is that something about replacing words and thoughts or basically perpetually publicly editing personal thoughts and feelings doesn’t feel like what i want this space to be. (and that is the beauty of personal websites: your website is yours and my website is mine and if you want your site to be a digital garden written in pencil because it’s right for you and i want mine to be a messy collection of notes written in sharpie, there is a place for all of us and the existence of all of our quirks and strong opinions makes the overall ecosystem better!)

i could also be totally wrong, and maybe the idea isn’t that things are deleted and replaced as if they never existed, but that conceptually there is some evolution of content and the interpretation and execution of that is up to the individual owner.

weird analogy incoming: in clinical medicine, the major underlying principle of the medical record (whether the electronic patient chart or the paper chart) is that documentation is truth. if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen (and vice versa). one manifestation of that principle is that NOTHING can EVER be deleted from the medical record. when we used to write clinical notes on paper, that would look like crossing out what was written, writing “error” and marking my initials by it; in the electronic version, clinical notes are essentially a database where write permissions do not include the ability to delete, only to add a new correct note, or mark something in error. perhaps subconsciously i have carried over those principles here. there’s a difference between noting that a week ago the patient had a fever but today they are afebrile (or apyrectic in the queen’s medical english), versus pretending the fever never happened because there is no fever today. likewise something just doesn’t sit right with me about constantly editing my own published writing.

(again, there is a lot of nuance that i am conveniently ignoring here to make my point, including the fact that “editing” can include all manner of things including correcting a simple typo to removing harmful or hurtful language to just not wanting to keep something up in perpetuity because your own writing makes you cringe, and the same rules should probably not apply to both, and others.)

relatedly, it’s an interesting thought exercise to consider how we might indicate that something is more of a draft or more unpolished when writing on the internet. (terrible idea: publish everything that’s not been heavily edited in an ornate cursive typeface to indicate handwriting, and include a lot of misspellings and strikethroughs. haha. let’s not do that.)

one way i’ve tried to accomplish that here is by calling these posts “notes” versus something like “posts” or “essays” which to me feel more serious. i wouldn’t say there is zero editing that happens in a “note,” but more that it’s very light editing for basic readability, and the goal is not always to have the cleanest and most concise copy but moreso to be able to share and communicate something i’m thinking or feeling, even if it’s messy.

all told, i don’t mean to say that it’s a big problem that the typewritten word appears more polished than the thoughts behind it sometimes are. i think it’s wonderful that it has become relatively easy to publish one’s lightly edited thoughts. (and a huge unlock for accessibility with screen readers being able to take the written word and transform it into the spoken word, which if you think about it, is pretty amazing regardless if you have a disability related to reading the written word or not.) for what it’s worth, i wrote this as a draft (in google docs—old habits die hard 🥴) with the paragraphs as bulleted list items and in all lowercase, halfway through realized i was writing it more as prose instead of a bulleted list, kept going anyway, ¾ of the way through realized i would have to go back and change everything to sentence case, thought “lol i’m not doing all that,” moved this into sublime text as a markdown file, and then pushed it up to the internet, so there you go.

addendum, 10:48 AM EDT, i.e., 12 mins after initial deployment: after all that ranting about how i NEVER want to EVER edit a post on this website, i published this—and immediately found something i wanted to add to this, which is that i saw manu posted a very adjacent thought, much more concisely, the philosophy that a personal blog should involve chronologically listed content, which is maybe another point i was trying to make buried in all of that waxing philosophical.

i strongly disliked the name “g suite” because i guess it was supposed to be a play on “google” + “c suite” but instead my brain would always tell me it was a portmanteau of “g spot” + “c suite” which is so silly and makes zero sense but that is how my brain works and therein lies the problem with enterprise software names that try to be too clever. i am ecstatic it was changed to “google workspace” which is so much clearer and more boring—which is exactly what i want out of enterprise software. ↩︎

Liminal

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 21:14:39 -0400

Sometimes I walk around and do other things while brushing my teeth (which I know I’m probably not supposed to do but I do it anyway, like using Q-tips to clean my ears) and the other night I was winding down for the evening, brushing my teeth and zoning out while walking around the apartment and I noticed someone¹ had left the light on in my home office and it kinda looked like a liminal space:

Feels like someone should be here.

Neat.

Me. It was me. ↩︎

Chili oil

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 08:25:29 -0500

During the darkest parts of pandemic lockdown there was not a lot to do or look forward to so I put a lot of time and energy into making elaborate meals entirely from scratch. (It’s on my neverending to-do list for this website to make some sort of photo gallery of all those meals for posterity, but for now here we are.) Now that I have settled into a new(ish) normal(ish), where thankfully there are other things with which to occupy my time than food prep, I have become a bit more of a utilitarian eater, in that I am less concerned with ✨ thoughtful complex flavorful meals that are time-consuming to prepare ✨ and instead more concerned with 🤜 getting sustenance into my gastrointestinal system 🤛.

I do still want flavor, though (I get so much joy out of good food, and not to be morbid¹, but having seen a lot of people at the end of life, I think for me if I can’t enjoy food then it will be time for me to leave this world). I started making my own chili oil in 2020. It’s a great way to spend an hour on a Sunday afternoon, because then on busy weekdays I can grab whatever food is around and dump some chili oil on it and it’s automatically better. It’s great on rice with an egg, great with veggies, great in soups, great with a piece of bread, great on pizza, great with noodles, great at sports, great with your grandkids, great in a crisis…

Anyway, I generally use a variation of a recipe from the Woks of Life with sliced garlic, coriander instead of cardamom, and gochugaru in addition to Sichuan peppercorns, and usually I use an extra light olive oil even though it’s not neutral because we always have olive oil around. On a scale of 1 to 10, I like a spice level around 7-8 (I want to feel it, but I don’t want to die).

It really goes with everything

The funnest part is pouring the hot infused oil over the peppercorns. It’s very dramatic.

Alternatively to just drizzling it on things, I can also make a quick dipping sauce for dumplings or noodles or anything else that’s dippable/dunkable by taking a couple spoonfuls of the stuff and mixing it with soy sauce, white or black vinegar, black pepper, etc. Sometimes I go really wild and even add sesame oil for a double-oil situation.

I love going to restaurants and seeing that they have a house made chili oil on the table. It would be fun (albeit logistically challenging) to do a blind taste test of chili oils from different spots!

Well, I think that’s about all I have to say about chili oil right now.

…she says right before saying something kinda morbid ↩︎

2022 in review, part 2

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 09:40:41 -0500

As promised, here’s the second part of my year in review.

To recap: I audited where I spent my time (loosely) and where I spent my money (incredibly precisely) this past year, in an effort to understand what I really value and to be more mindful and aware of where I’m spending these limited resources.

First, the nondiscretionary chunks of my income go towards taxes, student loan payments, and rent (in descending order of relative amounts). C’est la vie, insert grumbling here, etc etc. It is what it is. As an unmarried and child-free person, the rest I am more or less free to do with what I like, which is a lucky position to be in. Here is the breakdown of that discretionary spending in 2022¹.

Money

Where my money went in 2022

(Side note: personal finance tech is amazing—I can literally track every penny in and out. Someone recently asked me where I saw digital health going in the next 10 years, and I think success would look something like every single person having a level of health literacy AND individuals being able to track and understand their health to the same degree that they can understand their finances today.)

Investments (44%)

This includes my personal contributions to my retirement and brokerage accounts. It doesn’t include any employer contributions. I suppose the fact that I put close to half of my discretionary income away for the future suggests that I value planning for the future, having safety and security, and preparing for the unknown. Interestingly, I have a tendency to beat myself up for not saving enough (probably a result of what was instilled in me by my immigrant parents), but looking at this percentage makes me feel less anxious about that.

Food and drink (24%)

Seeing how much I spend on food and drink was probably the most shocking finding to me from this whole exercise. The dollar amount was staggering, and borderline embarrassing. I’m not trying to shame myself or anything, but that is honestly how I felt. This figure includes spending at restaurants, bars, and on groceries. On a monthly basis, I spent 3-4x more on restaurants/bars than I did on groceries. My initial reaction was that I’ve been lazy and don’t cook at home as much as I should. If I were to be kinder to myself and pretend like I was talking to a friend who disclosed this to me sbout themselves, I’d say there were more factors at play that influenced this level of spending, not all of which are “bad” or within my control:

In part this is a holdover from lockdown when truly one of the only joys was food (I spent a LOT of time, money, and energy on food in 2020 and 2021).
Now that I work from home the vast majority of the time, sometimes going out to grab food is the only chance I get to leave the house all day. 💡 This feels like an opportunity
I DO genuinely get a lot of joy out of food, whether it’s making my own or getting takeout or going out to a restaurant. I like trying new restaurants occasionally, and I like going to my favorite spots even more.
Living in New York makes it VERY convenient to have endless amazing food options, and that convenience comes at a price.
Relevant to dining in at restaurants, it’s easy to rack up the bill on all the extra things (appetizer, dessert, cocktail, etc) that in retrospect, I often feel did not add that much to the experience. 💡 This also feels like an opportunity
Inflation.

Although I’m not a resolution-making person (it always feels like a setup for failure and disappointment), if I had to set an intention related to food and beverage spending in 2023 that didn’t feel like a punishment, I would start with the two opportunity areas above. For example, instead of using “going out to get food” as a reason to leave the house, I could eat at home and then go out for a walk more (or go out for a walk and then eat at home). And instead of getting a bunch of things on the menu that I can’t even finish or only enjoy marginally more with each additional purchase, I could start with the thing I want the most and if I really want the other stuff, add those on.

Shopping, edutainment (11%)

This (and a few of the other categories) are more granularly broken down in my personal records, and includes things like clothes, knick-knacks, purchases related to hobbies like my mechanical keyboard materials and such, tickets to events, streaming and other subscriptions, books, courses, costs related to this website, and others. Essentially, it’s the truly “fun stuff”. (“Edutainment” is a portmanteau I made up comprised of “education and entertainment” so that the spreadsheet I use for tracking would not have a category with a long name like “education and entertainment”.)

Travel and transportation (11%)

These are also separated more granularly in my personal records but Travel includes plane tickets, rental cars, hotels and Airbnbs, and other travel expenses (food and drink consumed while traveling is not included here and is part of the “Food and drink” category above). Transportation includes subway fare, Lyft rides, and Citi Bike rides. This seems like a reasonable amount to me. If I were to successfully spend less on food and drink, I think I’d put the extra funds towards travel.

Home (6%)

This includes essentials like toilet paper, cleaning supplies, garbage bags, etc, as well as furniture, picture frames, clocks, and other home accessories. The bigger purchases I remember from this year that felt special were an armchair and ottoman which I used to make a cozy reading corner in the bedroom, which has brought me a lot of joy.

Charity and gifts (3%)

This section includes donations to nonprofits and gifts for family and friends.

Healthcare, fitness (1%)

Like half of all Americans, my employer covers the majority of my healthcare, so the “healthcare” part of this figure represents my portion of the premium, copays, and other relatively minor out-of-pocket expenses. Fitness includes things like expenses for my bicycle, running shoes, etc. I could dedicate a whole blog (not blog post, a whole ass BLOG) to healthcare spending and value but for now I will just say that I am grateful to be healthy. (I think this is also where my dictum that the things I spend most of my time and money on dictate what I value most, because I don’t actually spend that much time and money on my health, yet I value it very highly. I think especially in this country, baseline health and its relationship to one’s quality of life is really a matter of luck, which is a little sad and terrifying.)

After having completed this exercise and reflecting on it, I think I’m pleasantly surprised with how I spent my year, and I have some thoughts about where to tweak in 2023, which I guess was the goal.

A note on my methods here: I track my finances by exporting .csv files from my various accounts into a spreadsheet which I then need to do some basic tweaking on (some accounts use negative numbers to denote debits while others use negatives to denote credits; Venmo is the most painful to reconcile given that the memos are often in emoji or GIF form that made sense at the time but when auditing, it’s impossible to remember what “fish emoji sparkle emoji red circle emoji” was referring to), and then manually assigning categories. While many personal finance apps do this automatically, I find it’s not always accurate, but more importantly to me, the routine of going through each charge in retrospect helps increase my awareness and accountability for not mindlessly spending in the future. I don’t know if that’s a good use of my time or not. Anyway, I then used the spreadsheet to automatically generate a doughnut chart, which I exported as a PDF and styled in Adobe Illustrator. I think a fun 2023 hobby would be to learn more data visualization skills. Well, this footnote is getting so long, it’s turning into a… feetnote! ↩︎

2022 in review

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 14:55:39 -0500

Note: if you have published a similar 2022 in review on your site, I would love to see it! You can email me a link at kwon(at)fastmail(dot)com.

How did 2022 go? All things told, it was… a year. In reflecting on how to reflect on this past year (I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I am an overthinker, particularly when it comes to writing things here), I had trouble relying on recall for notable events and accomplishments. As part of a separate personal exercise to work towards defining what my (aspirational) principles are, I realized that no matter what I claim I value, the cold hard truth lies in where and how I spend my resources: time, money, and energy.

Energy is hard to quantify and track, but time and money are more easily auditable, so I set out to review my calendars, photos, tracking apps, and bank accounts, and comb the data to understand where I was spending my time and money and how I felt about it. It was interesting to see how much I’d actually forgotten and put myself back in the place when I was deciding to go to that event or buy that thing or read that book.

I suppose there are two ways to look at that, which is that ultimately these decisions don’t matter much so I shouldn’t perseverate too much on whether to do a thing or not, or, some decisions DO really matter in the sense that they may become repeated and habitual and therefore over time the positive or negative effect compounds (like choosing to exercise).

Here’s where I spent my time in 2022.

Time

These are arbitrary buckets that are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive, but here’s how I segmented this section (other than #3, I excluded time spent working, mostly for simplicity and also because I think that’s a totally separate exercise):

Travel/vacation
Shows and events
Networking, mentorship, career exploration (outside of work)
Hobbies attempted
Parties and gatherings
Screen time
Fitness
Media consumed
Other

Travel/vacation

I took 22 days of vacation this year and traveled to 6 different places, all within the US. Most memorable:

Swimming with manta rays at nighttime in Hawaii
Eating my way through New Orleans (somewhat unexpectedly, one of the best meals was fried chicken from a gas station in the Tremé).

Shows and events

I attended 17 events (concerts, comedy shows, book talks, etc), which honestly was more than I thought at a rate of more than once a month on average. In pre-pandemic times, I would go to 2-3 events a week. Most memorable:

Eddy Kwon in the catacombs in Green-Wood cemetery. This was a solo performance art piece held in the catacombs of the cemetery, which was about as weird and surreal as it sounds.
Disability and Joy round table discussion with Judith Heumann, Chella Man and Jezz Chung at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. I had first heard about Judy Heumann’s story and her advocacy for disability rights from a Netflix documentary a few years ago, and the Instagram algorithm knows I’m queer and Asian and has served me Chella Man’s and Jezz Chung’s content many times. One part towards the end of the discussion has been particularly sticky and persistent in my brain since then, which was the idea that people may believe they are bonding with other people over their shared identities (queer, Asian, disabled, New Yorker, artist, etc) but maybe it’s actually bonding over shared values and while you may be more likely to share values with people whose identities are similar to yours, it is not a necessary condition. It resonated with me because I have been disappointed (and have been the disappointer, I’m sure) by people of whom I had high expectations just because they were ALSO Korean or ALSO a woman or ALSO a jigsaw puzzle enthusiast or what have you.

Networking, mentorship, career exploration

I didn’t spend too much time or energy on these this year, but in general I think this is a great use of time that tends to be extremely high yield. I’ve never regretted spending 30 minutes talking with people new to me in my industry (digital health, tech, healthcare), finding out more about what they’re working on, and bookmarking them in my mind. I’m not sure the best way to quantify this, but I found in my calendar that I had coffee meetings, phone calls, or virtual meetings with 6 new people this year (this excludes all the new people I met through work, which is also a great way to meet new people in the industry while getting paid to do it). Two were people I’d consider in my peer group, two were people I’d consider myself a mentor to, and two were company founders.

Hobbies attempted

I am a perpetual hobbyist and tried getting into the following this year:

Woodworking (built a lil wooden stool)
Ceramics (made a thicc lil bowl that I store my eyeglasses chamois and other desk ephemera in)
Film photography (tried to surgically restore an old Canon AE-1 that my parents used to take pictures of our family growing up; failed miserably and probably damaged it irreparably, but also found my old Lomo ActionSampler and started playing around with it, though have yet to get through a whole roll of film because I keep forgetting to bring it with me when I go outside in good lighting)
Mechanical keyboards (built a cute 65% keyboard and a cute numpad)
Jigsaw puzzles and Lego (sometimes I just get in a Mood, bust out my puzzle table and bang out a 500-piece puzzle)

Parties and gatherings

I attended or hosted 13 parties and gatherings that had some kind of invitation (i.e., excluding 1:1 lunches/dinners/drinks or impromptu “hey I’m in your neighborhood, wanna grab a coffee” meetups). I really enjoy hosting and plan to do more of it in 2023.

Screen time

According to my Screen Time app, I spent ~37 hours per week (4–7 hours a day over the past 4 weeks) on my phone, which seems absolutely insane. I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but I think this is definitely a big opportunity area for an intention to set in 2023. I frequently vacillate between “smartphones are evil capitalist sleeper agents sent to our pockets to make us spend money on commerce” and “smartphones are marvels of modern technology that enable us to do things that transcend our parents’ and grandparents’ generations’ wildest dreams”. Honestly, maybe both of those things can be true. Regardless, having this data is very helpful.

Fitness

According to my Health app, I spent an average of 8 hours and 15 minutes in bed. I am extremely conscious of my sleep hygiene these days (having spent the better part of my 20s and early 30s with the worst sleep hygiene ever, staying up for 24+ hours at a time, napping in a chair in the ICU with two pagers on my chest ready to go off at any moment, etc), so I’m pretty pleased with that.

My average daily step count was 10,872 steps per day in 2022, which is an improvement over 8,864 steps/day in 2021 and 7,813 in 2020, and better than my pre-pandemic average of 10,114 in 2019.

I got an indoor exercise bike about a month ago and am working on building the habit of using it 5–7 days a week.

Media consumed

I watched 44 films this year. My favorites, in no particular order:

Everything Everywhere All At Once
Barbarian
Glass Onion
The Menu
Do Revenge
Do the Right Thing
Nope

I watched 12 short films. My favorite was one called Tank Fairy, about a queer kid growing up in Taiwan.

I at least started a whopping 37 television series, limited series, or comedy specials (I abandoned 10 for various reasons including “oh I forgot I was watching that” to “They got me with the first few episodes but now it’s falling flat”). Favorites:

The Bear
Yellowjackets
Somebody Somewhere
The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers¹
Angel²
Abbott Elementary
Moses Storm: Trash White
Mo

I finished reading 12 books (and started and then abandoned probably 3x that many). Favorites:

Solitary by Albert Woodfox
The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang

Other

Some other notable or memorable things in my life from this year:

Joined and quit the local food coop
Fostered a sweet dog for 5 days
Celebrated 2 years with my partner
Ate the spiciest food I’ve ever eaten in my life at a Thai restaurant called Zaab Zaab, and then the next day ate the 2nd spiciest food I’ve ever eaten in my life at an Indian restaurant called Masalawala and Sons
Hosted a virtual fireside chat with Michelle MiJung Kim, an author and activist who I really respect and admire
Tried and abandoned therapy (I have reasons for both!! Story for another time)
Co-hosted my favorite niece’s 4th birthday party
Found out that horses remember if you smiled or frowned the last time they saw you (AND modify their behavior accordingly) and honestly I’m still not over it

Okay, this year in review is getting to be QUITE long (I’m told the “year in review” should not actually take the full year to write/read) not to mention I have wandered into equine memory territory, so I will put a 📌 in this for now and conclude the “where did my time go in 2022” audit and pick back up tomorrow with results and insights from my “where did my money go in 2022” audit. It may or may not include a doughnut chart!

Edited to add: Here’s the second part. 🍩

Mostly from nostalgia for the original movies ↩︎
I was always a huge Buffy fan but never got into Angel when it was on when I was a teenager, but now I feel like I appreciate the darker tone ↩︎

Re: re-reading

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:21:08 -0500

Lately I feel that more often I’d rather re-read a book I’ve already read before (and enjoyed) than pick up a new one. Maybe it’s a form of risk aversion (I don’t know if I’m going to like a new book, so I’d rather read an old one). Maybe it’s something that comes with aging. I’ve always loved reading books, since I was a kid and my parents would take me to the library and every single time I would check out the maximum number of books (thirty)¹, read them all, return them within the two-week checkout period, and check out another 30.

At some point, maybe in college, I started re-reading books I’d already read, although only rarely, and most of the books I read were in fact “new” ones I’d never read. This is still the case, but increasingly I find myself going back to older books more frequently, and I believe this is a trend that will continue, although I hope I never get to a point where I refuse to read anything new.

Same thing I just said in graph form

In addition to reading a lot, I used to track all the books I read and publish very short reviews with ratings of said books on my website, which I then exported to Goodreads at some point, but then I kind of realized that not everything has to be social media-ified and seeing other people’s negative reviews of books kind of took some of the joy out of the things I enjoyed that weren’t well-reviewed. (I was also skeptical about staying on the platform after it was acquired by Amazon for reasons I won’t get into here today, but you can probably guess.)

It also started to feel performative for me to publicly track what I was reading, and it became a bit Hawthorne effect-y² (not so severe that I ONLY read books because I knew people were watching, but, because I knew I was being observed to some degree, I can’t be sure that I DIDN’T change my behavior because of it) and there are a lot of books I technically have read but honestly can’t remember much of other than my gut reaction, and I certainly couldn’t hold a conversation about those books today. Even reading my OWN reviews (that came from my OWN brain and were typed by my OWN hands³) is not helpful to jog my memory in some cases (oy). Also, some of them go back almost 20 years, and I was definitely a different person with different opinions and a more limited perspective back then.

Anyway, one of the benefits of re-reading some books I’ve already read is that it helps reinforce the memory of what I read the first time, or give me a new perspective. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction which is very amenable to this approach. I also have a much lower threshold to abandon a book partway if I’m not really connecting with it, after reframing it in my mind not as abandonment but just a pause for now (whereas in the past I would have just tried to barrel through to say I’ve read it).

I did recently migrate my Goodreads data to Literal because I do love tracking and documenting things. I also tried The Storygraph which I thought was pretty good but I really wanted a service where I could play around with the API, and unfortunately the founder isn’t prioritizing that right now, which is totally fair (sounds like it was one-person show for a long time). I really appreciated that they shared that context when they certainly didn’t have to.

Currently I’m re-reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi⁴, which apparently I rated 3 stars in 2019, but am giving another chance for the aforementioned reasons and also I want to jumpstart myself into finding flow states in my own life again, so I have very high expectations of this book this time around to solve all my problems 😄.

Obviously I wasn’t reading 30 epic novels or anything, more like 30 Baby-Sitters Club books with some Roald Dahl sprinkled in. But it was still a lot of books. ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect ↩︎
Now I’ve said OWN too many times that all I can see is “Oprah Winfrey Network”. ↩︎
…which is a really great name because his first name is embedded in his last name (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). That would be like if my name were Rachel Kwonracheli. ↩︎

Outdoors

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 22:31:46 -0500

I spent some time in the Bay Area this past week and did a vigorous hike (among other things). I was made to believe it would be more of a “nature walk” but this one, Mission Peak, had a steep grade and full exposure to the elements, and ended up being about 3.5 hours and close to 30,000 steps. I haven’t challenged myself physically like that in a long time so I was pleasantly surprised that I survived.

I did feel like a real city mouse because my inner (and sometimes outer) monologue included lots of declarations of “wow… it’s just so… NATURE!” alternating with “dear god it’s taking three business days to get to the top of this mountain.”

View from the descent

I remember being at gatherings of my peers years ago and hearing them talk about hiking like it was a competitive endeavor, and immediately feeling inadequate:

Have you done XYZ hike? (Because that’s the only one that matters)
How often do you go hiking? (Because you have to go every weekend otherwise you can’t call yourself a hiker)
Do you wear fancy expensive hiking boots? (Because if not, you’re not REALLY hiking)
Do you have a car? (Because that’s the only way to have access to ACTUAL hikes)

I think we were competitive about it because we were mostly just insecure and peacocking for each other. I definitely care much less about all of that now. It was nice to be on this particular hike and think whatever thoughts came into my head, including remembering those times and realizing I don’t think like that anymore. Growth, I s’pose. (I do sometimes feel the same way when I hear people talk about travel, specifically international travel for leisure, like it’s a competitive sport.)

People like to stand on this pole at the top (it’s me. I’m people)

This episode of NPR’s Life Kit podcast articulates a lot of how I feel about nature these days—getting outdoors doesn’t have to be this Big Thing, and also, I never considered the belief that it DOES have to be a Big Thing could be rooted in settler colonialism.

I feel lucky to live close to Prospect Park which I can almost get lost in and pretend that I am in an actual forest (until I hear horns honking or the planes overhead or other sounds of Brooklyn), and that there are lots of trees in the neighborhood.

Covid: the Sequel

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 12:21:13 -0400

Well, Covid got me again. I’m recovering from a second bout after having had it in April 2020. That feels like a different era of fear and confusion—testing was nonexistent, we were running out of toilet paper and Tylenol, and the general guidance was to isolate but go to the emergency room if you were really sick but to call ahead and wear a mask and also if you were sick but not sick sick you should call your doctor (and you better know the difference between sick sick and sick and you better have a pulse oximeter at home, what do you mean you don’t have a pulse oximeter at home?), and we were banging on pots and pans at 7 pm every night to thank healthcare workers instead of giving them basic personal protective equipment or hazard pay.

Anyway, this time the symptoms were less severe and felt more like a mild to moderate flu (which was still pretty intense and knocked me out for a full week). I did lose most of my sense of taste and smell and consequently had very little appetite. On the plus side, I was able to eat vindaloo takeout, which ordinarily would probably be too spicy. That was the most delicious thing I ate while I was sick.

Also, when I was able to go outside after isolation, I started a new routine of taking daily walks along parts of the Gowanus canal, which to anyone with full scent-detecting abilities has a, shall we say, UNIQUE odor (it is our friendly neighborhood EPA Superfund site and significant efforts to dredge and clean it have been underway for years but it’s not the kind of thing that happens overnight). It is surprisingly pretty along some parts of it, when you are blessed with impaired olfaction.

Another silver lining during my acute illness was that it’s difficult to think about anything else other than being sick when you’re sick, so a lot of the chatter in my brain that usually hums in the background was oddly quiet. Actually, it was not unlike being hung over, which is a horrible feeling and because I’m a wimp I always feel like I’m going to die even though rationally I know I’m going to be fine, because for better or worse, I just can’t think about anything else. Of course it was miserable being sick; I just didn’t hate the part of being sick that meant I wasn’t obligated to think or worry about anything else other than resting and getting better.

When I was in the phase of recovery where I was still symptomatic but on the up and up, I was in a constant haze of napping and watching television and reading books and doing jigsaw puzzles. (My partner was also sick and tested positive before I did, so for 3 days we isolated from each other and watched movies together apart on our separate devices, which was cute and sad.) I watched old episodes of ER and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both of which were popular in the late 90s/early 00s when I was a teenager, which made me feel nostalgic).

Isolating felt harder this time around because in 2020, everyone was isolating, but this time, most people were just living the normal version of their lives. When I was sick in 2020, I think my family and friends thought I was going to die. This time, I got a lot of “That sucks! Hope you feel better soon” types of messages. I guess it’s a positive turn that in general things feel less dire (to say nothing of the systems that were tenuous to begin with and have been depleted and are running on fumes and for the segments of our society that are and have been the most vulnerable to these problems).

Digital noise

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 09:30:41 -0400

I’m getting worn down by all the digital noise. By digital noise I mean the constant barrage of alerts, notifications, pings, email subscriptions I didn’t sign up for, email subscriptions I DID sign up for but regret doing so, all the inputs that come through my connected devices.

Sometimes I secretly wish I could be one of those people who moves off the grid, abandons the smartphone, deletes all social media, and lives a quiet minimalist life in the woods. I think that’s too extreme for me, though.

The problem with digital noise is that within it is signal. Some emails I care about, some internet content is informative or entertaining, some aspects of digital connectedness do translate to real connectedness.

A few years back, I turned off all alerts on my phone except for text messages and phone calls. That was a big help. I don’t get many text messages or calls these days anyway (I think your social circle naturally shrinks a bit as you get older, but the interactions are more meaningful, as opposed to the random acquaintance hitting you up wanting to go out that night or whatever (no shade, truly—in my 20s and early 30s, I was usually the random acquaintance)).

More recently, I created a mail filter for emails containing the word “unsubscribe” to bypass my inbox and go into a folder called Subscriptions. I check it once every other day or so. This has also helped, although every once in awhile I miss an email that should probably have been addressed earlier because it doesn’t go to my inbox. I think that is a reasonable price to pay for a little more peace.

Still, there is too much noise. Advertising on social media and marketing emails are the worst offenders. Well, it would be reductive to say that it’s all bad and that technology is evil and things were better in the before times. The most vocal critics rail against specific wonders of technology such as the infinite scroll and “the algorithm.” I used to be one of them, but I’ve been reading this book (slowly, because ironically or not ironically I keep getting sidetracked by digital noise) called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in which the central thesis, if I can flatten a book of several hundred pages to a punchy phrase with little nuance, is that it’s not technology that’s the problem, it’s capitalism. I need to actually finish reading the book and chew on it a bit, but it’s an interesting take that kind of makes sense on first blush. (Not that I’m going to abandon capitalism, if such a thing were even possible; I happen to have a skillset and background that works with capitalism, to a certain degree, such that what I produce as a laborer enables me to provide for myself.)

Language

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 08:30:29 -0400

Several years ago, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City made a major change that affected every subway and bus ride overnight, but not many people noticed.

What happened? Announcers were trained to avoid using gendered language, such as “Ladies and gentlemen,” and instead use greetings like “Attention passengers” or “Good morning everyone” prior to making an announcement.

Okay, so it wasn’t earth-shattering. But I thought it was a great example of a small, easy, tangible way to be more inclusive, without being overly fussy or political about it. I didn’t even really notice it until I read an article about it in 2017.

It’s a wonderfully elegant solution. It is not even a direct translation. Saying “ladies and gentlemen” to get people’s attention is kind of clunky anyway.

Sidebar: I’ve never had a crisis of gender identity. I have been misgendered exactly twice in my life, and coincidentally, both times were at a Potbelly sandwich shop. Go figure. The first was when I was 19 and in a butch phase of sorts, with short spiky hair and an outfit that almost invariably consisted of a long-sleeved collared shirt over a short-sleeved t-shirt (you read that correctly: the t-shirt was worn OVER the collared shirt), and I thought I was REALLY cool. Forgive me, I was 19. Anywho, I was at a downtown Chicago location of the shop and was next in line and the sandwich artist yelled, “Sir? Sir!” I was mortified. The second was a decade and a half later, when I was 35, in the middle of my workday near Union Square in Manhattan, and I was wearing a hoodie with the hood up and probably looked grumpy. The sandwich artist (a different one… I’m PRETTY sure…) yelled “SIR!” I was more confused than mortified this time but it unlocked the previous memory which I had since forgotten, and prompted me to record this which I am currently ~~writing into a Google doc~~ pasting into a Markdown file. Anyway, getting sir’d by sandwich artists at a Potbelly is not exactly a hate crime, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. Especially in 2003 when I (and much of the world) had a flat, less nuanced understanding of gender. It bothered me not because of anything inherently wrong with being a man, of course, but because it wasn’t accurate. But this has happened to me TWICE in my WHOLE LIFE. I can only imagine how it must feel for trans and gender nonconforming people to be misgendered on a daily basis, at best out of ignorance, at worst out of hate and an active intent to harm.

This is a flawed comparison, but… the closest thing I can imagine it might feel like is all the times during my residency I was mistaken for a nurse. This is very common for doctors who are women, and happened to me at least a couple times a week. It’s almost like reverse misgendering—correctly identifying someone’s gender, but incorrectly assigning it to the gendered role (doctor = man, nurse = woman, and those are the rules, and there are no exceptions, of course).

The first time it happened, it wasn’t a big deal. “I’m your doctor, actually; [name] is your nurse, but no worries.” Then it started to get annoying. Again, not because there’s anything wrong with being a nurse or that they’re somehow lower in the hierarchy of medicine. It is just inaccurate, and those assumptions over time build up and really make you realize it’s truly baked into our collective psychology.

Others have written about this more eloquently than I, so I won’t go too far on this tangent (though I’m already quite far, aren’t I… wasn’t I talking about the subway?), but my point is that the general feeling was similar to being sir’d at Potbelly.

It’s also not dissimilar to feelings I had when growing up in suburban Illinois, and white American people (who were strangers) would come up to me and say things like “welcome to this country!” or “your English is so good!” Again—absolutely nothing inherently wrong with being an immigrant, but assuming that anyone other than a white American person is a foreigner is problematic and these days can be life-threatening.

(When I originally drafted this—on December 17, 2019, according to the version history of the Google doc—I had a sentence in here about how I like New York because I’ve never felt like a foreigner here. Unfortunately I can no longer make that claim.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right—the subway announcers. I wonder how that planning meeting went. Did someone suggest a 1:1 translation of “ladies and gentlemen”? Like, “boys and girls and everything in between”? That’s still kind of marginalizing. And anyway, the point of the announcement is not to put people in gendered buckets; it’s to get people’s attention for a transportation-related announcement. Just like the sandwich artist’s goal wasn’t to say, “hey there, you are a male person,” it was just to ask me what fixins I wanted on my Italian sub (lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, hot peppers, and Italian seasoning, of course). Saying “hi” or “next” or “hey, you’re up!” instead of “SIR?” would have worked, I think.

I especially like that the new and improved announcement intros also have a nice syllabic congruence with the cadence of the outdated version:

LA-dies and GEN-tle-men!

at-TEN-tion PASS-eng-ers!

good MORN-ing every-ONE!

Grey matters

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 07:55:22 -0400

I read that Noah Grey, the creator of the blogging software Greymatter, recently resurfaced on the internet because he was losing his home to foreclosure and had set up a GoFundMe.

I went into a little bit of a rabbit hole reading about Noah and what he had been up to, and it made me quite nostalgic. My first blog, circa 2001, was built with Greymatter. The internet was different back then (she says, rocking gently in her rocking chair on the porch, occasionally pausing to yell at children to get off her lawn). Blogs were very pure and people-centric. They were organic, artisanal, handmade. Nobody was trying to make money off of them. (Dooce.com was the first personal blog I was aware of that got big enough to monetize.)

You had to be able to design and build a basic website more or less from scratch, but anyone could learn how to do that if they had an internet connection and were willing to roll up their sleeves and try. The people who did, myself included, tended to be… well… indoor kids. Most of us had a guestbook that visitors could sign. It was so exciting whenever a new person signed your guestbook or left a comment on your blog. We joined webrings to find each other, or put links to our “friends” on our sites. Many of our blogs were designed for Internet Explorer at 800x600.

So many of the graphics we created in pirated copies of Photoshop obtained through Kazaa, or, later, BitTorrent, used the Silkscreen font. There was very little awareness of accessibility (or at least in my abled mind back then). In general, the fonts we used were too small.

According to Noah Grey’s current website, he is “In order of discovery: autodidact, geek, gay, bipolar, autistic, asexual, humanist, homoromantic, nonbinary.” It sounds like he is also living with past trauma and some serious psychiatric disorders. I never knew any of this when I was a teenager discovering the web; I just knew he was kind of an internet celebrity because he wrote the software that enabled me and so many other new internet denizens to find our place online.

Now, reflecting on all of that, I see Noah as way more of an internet pioneer than the Mark Zuckerbergs or Jack Dorseys of the world, who I’m not sure have made it a better place and have been irresponsible with their power in many ways, and it makes me sad that he seems to be struggling. Objectively I don’t think as many people know about Noah Grey but in my mind he’s a true internet hero.

Intelligent art

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 10:33:34 -0400

I signed up as a beta user for an AI art generator that uses keywords (text) to create images. The first image I asked it to make was one using the keywords korean queer mermaid liminal space and these are the four options it generated:

Four queer Korean mermaids, drawn by a machine (generated by Midjourney)

It’s pretty amazing that a computer made these images, and that is obviously a marvel and an incredible feat of technology, although if you look closely you can see where it still needs a little bit of work (for example, in the bottom right panel the face is fairly well done, but I’m not sure what’s happening with the body or why the tail is detached, and the bottom left very much seems like the generator phoned it in).

At this point I’ve tried multiple sets of keywords with varying results and am still playing around with it (there are many many weird and kind of unintentionally creepy ones where the computer misunderstood what I was trying to convey that I won’t share here). Like with any new technology, I am curious what implications this has for humanity… it seems fairly innocent and cool to be able to generate art and images in this way, and that could be used in really cool ways (e.g. to increase visiblity and awareness of queer Korean mermaids), but unchecked, it could also be used for nefarious purposes (the discourse is probably similar to that around deepfake technology). My mind often goes immediately to the worst case scenario in general, which is something I am trying to manage.

In the meantime, here is one of my favorite and hopefully not evil sets so far, using keywords cassette tape moon 80s landscape colorful --w 3840 --h 2160 (I guess it got confused by “cassette tape,” but otherwise I think it did a good job of capturing the vibe I was going for):

Dreamy 80s landscape, Option 1 (generated by Midjourney)

Dreamy 80s landscape, Option 2 (generated by Midjourney)

Dreamy 80s landscape, Option 3 (generated by Midjourney)

Dreamy 80s landscape, Option 4 (generated by Midjourney)

I liked this option a lot, so I asked the generator to riff off of it and make some variations, and this is what it came up with:

Dreamy 80s landscape, Option 4 modifications (generated by Midjourney)

Am I an artist now??

Cooperate

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 09:19:00 -0400

We joined the food co-op. I worked my first shift the other night (after work work). You choose from available shifts and sign up for the kind of work you might want to do. I chose cleaning. I had been somewhat apprehensive about working the shift, not because it was work, or even that it was work I wasn’t willing to do or anything, but moreso that it was a New Thing to do and it had been a while since I had done a New Thing.

When I showed up for my shift at 8:30 pm, it was after shopping hours were already over, so luckily all the shoppers were gone and it was just workers in the store. I would have been especially apprehensive if I had to work around shoppers because I wouldn’t want to get in their way. (However, when I am the shopper and there are workers, I am also apprehensive that I am getting in their way, so riddle me that.)

I started the shift by reporting to my shift manager, a friendly man with a ponytail who showed me around and assigned me to mop floors and clean surfaces in the kitchen. It was pretty quiet since it was after hours, and I was reminded of my first job in high school which was also in a kitchen and also involved mopping floors and cleaning surfaces.

Being a knowledge worker by day is the best way for me to leverage my current skillset in order to make a living and provide for myself (which is necessary because capitalism), but also that means that moments of instant (or near instant) gratification, like the kind you get after you mop a previously dirty floor and then it’s clean, are fairly few and far between. So I found it very refreshing to be able to have a task that was predictable, finite, and led to a sense of accomplishment.

(I realize in typing this all out that at best I have incredible privilege to be able to marvel at the feeling of satisfaction associated with voluntarily mopping the floors of a grocery store, and at worst I am totally out of touch with what it means to have to do manual labor for a living. Both truths may coexist.)

I don’t miss many things about general surgery but one is that it was nice to be able to have a job that incorporated both intellectual and physical labor. Maybe “nice” isn’t the right word—I just noticed when I didn’t have it anymore.

During my co-op shift I also got to use a hand-held vacuum to clean the registers, and to wipe them down with cleaning solution (vegan and eco-friendly, of course). When I went to the co-op today to pick up a sandwich and some other groceries (I’m planning on doing tacos because the cilantro and limes looked especially fresh today), it was a good feeling to look at the shop floor and registers and think, hey, I cleaned those!

At the end of my shift, I made small talk with my shift manager (the man with the ponytail) and found out that he was a graphic designer, and that two of the other people on shift with me were architects, which was pretty neat.

Coffee

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:20:35 -0400

Coffee is so good.

In addition to being physiologically and emotionally dependent on caffeine, I genuinely enjoy coffee. I have accumulated too many coffeemaking implements over the years, including but not limited to a French press, burr grinder, espresso machine, pourover cone, cold brew system, and probably others I’m forgetting that I use less frequently and are collecting dust in a cabinet. I started drinking coffee in college, mainly out of curiosity—I had a friend who said they couldn’t function without coffee, though I perceived them as a very functional person, and I thought, “hey, college is the time when you experiment with drugs, right? Let’s give this a whirl.” I really knew how to party back then. (My idea of a good weekend when I was in college was waking up at 7 am and spending the morning in the main library, then spicing it up in the afternoon to go to a different library, then going back to my dorm to watch Netflix DVDs and explore the internet for hours.)

Anyway, coffee. I started drinking huge cups of black coffee off the bat, but I wasn’t really a regular coffee drinker until medical school. I don’t particularly remember having a coffee routine per se, but I do remember going to a lot of different coffee shops and settling on my regular favorites. I also remember afternoon coffee naps, where I would chug an iced coffee then quickly fall asleep on the couch until the caffeine hit and woke me up so I could study. (I know. Party animal.)

Residency was my time of peak coffee consumption, and the time when my dependency was locked in. I would wake up around 5:20 am to a blaring alarm, make an espresso, down it, throw on some scrubs and ride my bike to the hospital in time for rounds at 6 am. Then by the time OR cases started at 7:30 am, I would be ready for another cup. If I was on overnight call, it wouldn’t be unusual for me to consume up to 6 cups of coffee over the course of 24 hours. Yikes.

Post-residency, when I really started prioritizing my health, there was a period of time where I decided I wanted to kick the caffeine dependency, mainly to see if I could actually do it. Over the course of about 6-8 weeks, I gradually and methodically cut down my coffee consumption to zero, replaced it with black tea during the tapering period, and eventually got to a point where I would wake up without a caffeine withdrawal headache and just drink water.

That felt like an accomplishment and I’m glad I proved I could do it, but… coffee is just so good. And fun to make. And makes my brain feel nice. So I restarted my daily habit and haven’t looked back since. These days, I enjoy the equivalent of one caffeinated cup of coffee every morning, usually an espresso but sometimes a pourover on weekends, or a cold brew if I’m on my morning walk in the park (some genius put a coffee stand IN the middle of the park, which is dangerous because usually I’ll have already had my coffee at home).

My new thing lately is decaf cold brew concentrate. It’s hard to find good quality whole decaffeinated beans, but they’re around. Irving Farm has a particularly good bag called Decaf Blackstrap, which also makes a nice decaf espresso. I’ll treat myself to a decaf iced cold brew in the afternoon, when I have the post-lunch sleepies. (Obviously I still know how to party hard, like in my college days.)

Coffee is so good!

Summer ride

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:51:55 -0400

It’s the good part of summer right now, the part where it’s warm and sunny and the days are long but it hasn’t gotten too humid out. I went on a nice bike ride yesterday morning along a route I used to take years ago when I first moved to Brooklyn that I haven’t done since. Truthfully I have not been riding my bike as much as I used to (and I used to ride it EVERYWHERE). I am constantly amazed by how quickly this city evolves. The thing that was once another thing is now a new thing. I also forget how different it is on foot versus cycling versus in a car versus a bus versus the subway.

On this particular ride, I went from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Domino Park, neither of which existed when I first moved here. My first destination was Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was a quiet morning and the only other people out were the runners, and parents with young kids. The park is nice, if a bit sterile since it’s so new. There’s a bike lane that runs through it, but like many bike lanes in New York, it’s more of a suggestion (that is usually rejected) than a dedicated space for cyclists, since most of it isn’t physically divided from pedestrian areas. It’s still a decent ride between trees and water if you go slowly enough, though, with great views of downtown Manhattan.

View of lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6

My next destination was Domino Park in Williamsburg. The ride along Kent Avenue past the Navy Yard is one I used to do several times a week. There’s now a protected two-way bike lane along most of it, which makes it feel somewhat safer. (I remember riding home at 4 am from Williamsburg during my years of maximum poor judgment and it is definitely safer than that.) There is also a giant Wegman’s, which I remember hearing that people were very excited about (I did not go inside but it looked more like a compound than a grocery store from the outside).

Even with a fancy bike lane, that part of the ride still felt somewhat industrial, although the Navy Yard seems a lot more buttoned up these days. Even the shipping containers were kinda cute.

Cute shipping containers on Kent (my favorite is the mint green in cell C2)

I stopped at Domino Park, which is even newer than Brooklyn Bridge Park, and sat on a bench in the shade overlooking the East River. I’ve only been there twice and both times I didn’t feel I was meant to stay there long. Maybe because it’s a long, narrow park. Or because I’ve never really felt totally welcomed in Williamsburg (why else was I booking it out of there at 4 am?).

Anyway, it was a nice way to spend the morning, and got me excited about riding my bike around the city this summer!

My route map (partial), from Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6 to Domino Park

Early bird

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 07:01:53 -0400

I have been doing a Thing™ lately where I let the morning light wake me up instead of an alarm. Currently I am on an approximately two week streak of waking up at sunrise, and because the bedroom faces east, this means I have been waking up around 5:30 am. (Voluntarily!)

I wish I were one of those people who could function on 5 or 6 hours of sleep, but alas, somewhat embarrassingly I need a full 8 to 9 in order to really feel rested. After having horrible sleep hygiene during my surgery training and to some degree during medical school, I have since prioritized sleep hygiene pretty highly and I guess this is the natural evolution to my final form: a 38 year old woman who starts winding down for the night at 8:30 pm.

The CDC website has a section on sleep and sleep disorders with a list of good sleep habits (this particular page has not been updated recently but I guess the Center has been busy Controlling other Diseases lately 🤷):

Be consistent. Go to bed at the same time each night and get up at the same time each morning, including on the weekends

Make sure your bedroom is quiet, dark, relaxing, and at a comfortable temperature

Remove electronic devices, such as TVs, computers, and smart phones, from the bedroom

Avoid large meals, caffeine, and alcohol before bedtime

Get some exercise. Being physically active during the day can help you fall asleep more easily at night.

(Sleep during surgical training is essentially the opposite of this list and would include things like “Make sure you sleep on a chair in the ICU for 15 minutes at 3 am with your pager on your chest” and “Set your sleep times and durations to be as inconsistent and erratic as possible—the more random, the better.”) Other than smart phones in the bedroom, I am mostly adherent to this list these days. And it’s the darnedest¹ thing but it actually works. I can’t emphasize how enthusiastically I do these things after having not been able to for so many years. I think if my younger self were to read this, she would be annoyed and roll her eyes (Great!! You can feign death for a full 9 hours every night and come back to life rejuvenated!!! How nice for you!!!!!).

Most of what I do in the morning is enjoy coffee slowly, take long walks in the park, make breakfast or prep food for later slowly, read, avoid screens (except for this morning as I write this), pick up clutter around the house, etc—i.e., nothing particularly earth-shattering, but it does set me up for the rest of the day which may be less predictable. If I get to see a tree, I’m happy.

I wouldn’t say I am necessarily more productive because I wake up early and get a ton of sleep consistently (and am also trying to rewire my brain to not hang its hat² on PRODUCTIVITY as the sole metric for SUCCESS), but I do think I am generally more EFFECTIVE, which is maybe more important.

(I also want to point out that I am talking about two distinct but related things here: one is GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP, where “enough” is different from person to person, and the other is WAKING UP EARLY because waking up early seems to be what my body likes. I’m not advocating for sleeping from 9:30-5:30 for everybody every night; moreso just sharing that this particular sleep schedule is what happens to make me feel closer to my best self these days. (Should I have one of those disclaimers somewhere on this website that nothing I say here constitutes medical advice? I’ll think about it. In the meantime, I need to work on repairing this fourth wall that I just broke.))

I don’t know about you but I just stared at this word for a full five minutes and my brain cycled through reading it as “dar-nedest”, “darne-dest”, “dame-dest”, and would not land on “darned-est”, so maybe I haven’t gotten as much sleep as I thought. ↩︎
Would a brain’s hat just be the skull? 🤔 ↩︎

Brussels sprouts

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:09:03 -0400

As an adult I still sometimes have to trick myself into eating my vegetables. I made these roasted 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts yesterday that really did do the trick:

고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts

Here’s my incredibly imprecise recipe.

고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts

Brussels sprouts (you could probably do this with carrots also or any vegetable that is good for roasting)
Honey (or any kind of sweet nectar—I used maple syrup this time)
Lemon (or any kind of citrus/acid)
Garlic powder
Gochujang

Wash your sprouts, cut off the stems, and slice in half the long way (if the bulbous part is a head and the stem is a neck, cut it in a coronal or midline sagittal plane). Check for aphids. If you have them, sorry.
Dry your sprouts. You don’t have to go wild but the drier they are, the crispier they will turn out. I just blotted them with a paper towel and let them sit in the colander for about 5 minutes.
Get a big bowl and dump the prepared sprouts in with enough olive oil to lightly coat them, plus a punch of salt and pepper. Some people say you shouldn’t salt before roasting because salt pulls out the moisture, like how osmotic pressure pulls water out of cells when there’s too much sodium in extracellular fluid in a human person, but I don’t think it makes a terribly big difference. The consequence of slightly dry vegetables is also less than that of massive intracellular fluid shifts in a human person.
Roast the sprouts until they’re browned and crispy. In my convection oven at 425ºF, this ended up being about 30 minutes.
While the sprouts are roasting, mix together the 고추장 (gochujang), honey (or maple syrup), lemon juice, and garlic powder in a small bowl until the consistency is similar to that of the honey. For a bag of about 15ish sprouts, I used a heaping spoonful of 고추장, a similar amount of maple syrup, three shakes of garlic powder, and enough lemon juice to thin it out so that it was stirrable (I think it was half a lemon). I then added more garlic powder to taste because you can’t go wrong with garlic powder, unless you are serving vampires or strict Buddhists.
When the sprouts are done, dump them back into the big bowl you used to toss them with the olive oil (ugh, I washed it already, this is what I get for trying to clean as I go), drizzle the 고추장 honey mixture over, and toss like a bingo machine tossing bingo balls.
Serve, enjoy, and go on with your day.

Flashback

Wed, 18 May 2022 06:51:54 -0400

This past weekend I met up with a few of my former colleagues from residency for dinner and drinks. It felt a little bit like a meetup with high school friends might feel, if you spent high school removing gallbladders and incising and draining abscesses. (Maybe you did. I don’t know your life.)

Having a chance to confront and reflect on my former self in a controlled environment—in this case, a contemporary Mexican restaurant—was not a bad exercise. Part of me was hesitant, as my general feeling towards that time in my life is “thank you, universe, for the opportunity to learn about the world and myself, but also, don’t ever put me there again.”

It’s been long enough that specific memories and people are fading fast (or maybe I just gave my hippocampus permission to let go of those memories), so when hearing specific people’s names or other random things from that time that I used to think about every day, like pagers or atelectasis, I am more likely to have a gut feeling or reaction than remember any particular memory.

Being geographically close to where it all happened (I trained in Brooklyn and still live in Brooklyn), I occasionally see people from my past life unexpectedly. The other day I was walking in the park and heard somebody yell my name. You know that moment when you see somebody totally out of context, like when you’re a kid and you see your teacher at the grocery store, and it takes you a second for your brain to adjust, like, “what are YOU doing here?! Teachers buy groceries too?”? I had to place this person mentally, but in that split second before I rememered they were a colleague in emergency medicine with whom I’d done a trauma rotation, I just had this really warm feeling (which is somewhat unusual because surgeons and emergency medicine doctors aren’t always… um… nice to each other).

When my brain did catch up, I remembered them being a genuinely kind, hardworking person who cared about their patients and always treated other residents with respect, even when it was 3 am and everyone was physically and emotionally exhausted.

Later, I also remembered us dramatically wheeling a patient with an open abdomen to the operating room emergently together. But in that moment, the overwhelming memory was that warm feeling¹, and I gave them a big hug and we each went off in our separate directions without any further conversation.

I also realize that, to other people, I’m a blip in their lives with which the only lasting memory is a feeling, so I hope I am living my life in a way that it is a warm and positive feeling, because there are definitely people I’d see to whom my reaction would be more like 😒 or 😑. ↩︎

Tuesday

Wed, 11 May 2022 07:40:55 -0400

The cadence of life is a little different now that I live in Brooklyn and work from home. In my 12 years in New York City, I have:

lived in Brooklyn and worked in Brooklyn
lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan (the worst overall)
lived in Manhattan and worked in Manhattan
lived in Manhattan and worked from home
lived in Brooklyn and worked from home

and the one that feels most like not working at all is living in Brooklyn and working from home. The only thing is that, as always, the psychological barrier to completing inter-borough travel on a weekday evening feels insurmountable, even though it’s a subway ride that’s all of 15 minutes.

Yesterday, I logged off around 5 pm, and had a beer on the patio of the corner bar and read a book, decided I had a craving for dumplings, and made mental moves to make physical moves to the dumpling shop a few doors down, marveling at how lucky I am to have all these nice things within my radius of a few blocks. But then I was thinking about how the dumpling wrappers at this particular shop are thicker than I prefer¹, and that the train ride to some of the best dumplings I’ve ever had is too short to use it as an excuse, and how when I used to work at the hospital one of my co-residents who lived literally next door to the hospital explained it by saying “I’d rather commute to fun” and how that has stuck with me, and essentially ended up overthinking this decision to the point where I almost just decided to go home and eat leftovers.

Anyway, I did end up going to Manhattan, and the trip was a lot less dramatic than I made it out to be in my head, and enjoyed the best wonton soup, and then came back to Brooklyn at a reasonable hour and was in bed by 9:30. Success!

Division street, Manhattan Chinatown

I would say that for any carb-based-vehicle-with-a-filling type of food, whether it’s a sandwich, a dumpling, a taco, a samosa, etc, I prefer a moderately high ratio of filling to carb-based vehicle, with the exception of banh mi, whose baguette should ideally have a crusty outer layer and a soft, fluffy inner layer regardless of thickness (and thicker is okay by me, but for this use case only). ↩︎

Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson's husband's socks

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 08:58:02 -0400

I keep an eye on the news through peripheral vision mostly but I noticed something about the confirmation hearings of the honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson that required my focus:

Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s husband

No, not the husband. The SOCK:

Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s husband’s sock

I’m not quite sure what the design is (looks like some kind of illustration of a face), but what I do know is that it is a funky sock. Why is he wearing a funky sock?!

On further research (googling “Ketanji Brown Jackson husband”), I discover he is a surgeon.

Ahh, now it makes sense.

Why do surgeons wear funky socks? I used to wear a funky sock (two, even) in my OR days. It was because it was one of the few acceptable ways to show my personality in that setting. You’re wearing the same scrubs as everyone else, your hair and face are covered, and, once you’re scrubbed, your arms, hands, torso, lower body, basically everything is covered. Your socks are covered, too—but in your mind you know they are funky, and perhaps that is what gets you through the most stressful days.

Sidebar: I thought I remembered a website called surgsoxx.com or something like that from those days but it’s possible that it was just a Twitter hashtag or that I am conflating it with throx.com, a site I heard about from a vascular surgeon who wore the funkiest socks I’ve seen to this day, and told me he used throx.com because they would send you three socks instead of two in a set, to account for inevitably losing one in the laundry, which I thought was a great idea. The closest thing to “surgsoxx” I could find today was a veterinary product called Surgi-sox, which, while not quite what I was looking for, was a delightful detour:

This standard poodle looks suspiciously like a Park Slope athleisure mom and I am absolutely losing it.

I mean, look at this list of indications.

Imagine the dog park stigma if your dog friends knew you had to wear a Lululemon shirt because of your chronic obsessive licking of the torso :(

Anyway. Surgeon socks!

Distracted

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:30:24 -0400

RIP to my attention span.

The world seems to be opening back up now that we are no longer surging (or are just between surges?), but I wouldn’t say that I feel normal again.

Lack of focus has been one of the most pronounced negative effects. For example, I sat down with a cup of coffee and opened up a text editor to write this note about an hour ago and have since abandoned the window no fewer than seven times (see Appendix).

I am mostly unable to watch a full feature-length film without getting distracted or antsy (or falling asleep) halfway through. (Weirdly, I can watch an entire season of a show in one sitting, so riddle me that.) Reading books is possible, but it’s harder to read nonfiction these days, which I used to read exclusively. I can read a novel for about fifteen minutes at a time.

I know it’s probably just my prefrontal cortex taking a break in the presence of constant low-grade stress and anxiety that occasionally peaks to acute stress and anxiety, but just because my brain happens to know what it’s doing doesn’t mean I can trick it from not doing the thing. Brains are tricky that way.

I am immeasurably lucky that I am (and my loved ones are) mostly otherwise unscathed. People have died, acquired significant disabilities, lost out on so much (and so many people have lived with the kind of day-to-day stress and uncertainty that was previously unimaginable to me, for years or even generations); there is geopolitical fallout and massive economic instability; we don’t even know the full extent of the pandemic’s blast radius of second- and third-order effects—and my biggest complaint today is that I get distracted a lot.

The addictive nature of certain smartphone apps has not helped. The inventor of the infinite scroll has major regrets. (The inventor of the labradoodle seems to have similar regrets, but that is another story, although it does help prove my point since I just got distracted again looking at labradoodles on the internet.)

What has helped has been recognizing when I’m doomscrolling and acknowledging it (even if I don’t stop right away), walks in the park, talking to people face to face and not over video chat, cooking at home and other physical hobbies, reading print magazines, doing jigsaw puzzles, and essentially distracting myself from my own distractions with what I perceive are healthier distractions. Work has also been a great distraction, and I know I’m a weirdo for liking my job so much, but I’m also trying to maintain good work-life balance, which is healthy even if you do like your job.

Also, more tactically, springing for 16 GB memory on my personal computer was kind of a game changer and well worth it (the base model has 8 GB), because the reduced latency means I’m less likely to pick up my phone or degrade focus while waiting for something to load (in other words, I can only blame myself, not my computer).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to close my laptop and go outside.

Appendix

Things I was distracted by while writing this note:

Choosing which water receptacle to drink from (do I use the heavy 32 oz double-walled water bottle so I have to get up fewer times, or the more manageable but lower volume glass cup?)
Admiring my water bottle collection
This Google search for “labradoodle inventor regret”
Some “movement” after finishing my coffee (ahem)
Spotify
The sudden and blinding need to arrange all the shoes on the shoe rack
Frying an egg

Setup

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 09:07:52 -0500

One of the top priorities when moving to Brooklyn was to have more space, particularly to have dedicated workspace. In our previous apartment, my office was a corner of the bedroom, which I was grateful to have, but also over time resentful. I love my work and my job (probably a litle too much), but seeing my workspace as the first thing upon waking and the last before sleep made it hard for my brain to rest. (It wasn’t nearly as draining as sleeping on a twin bed in a call room in the corner of a patient ward with my pager on my chest, though, like I used to have to do during my surgery training, which is always helpful to recall for perspective.)

Anyway, one of my many pandemic hobbies, after getting over the initial shock of having my own office space, has been tweaking the office setup. This is what it currently looks like:

Current setup

It’s kind of like the dark mode version of my previous setup, which looked something like this:

Previous setup

Here’s a close-up of my custom mechanical keyboard, which was a sub-hobby of this hobby:

Keyboard

Bicycle storycle (bike story)

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 09:23:09 -0400

TL;DR I made a new page: kwon.nyc/bike

In January 2010 I was in my final year of medical school and had some rare free time for several weeks on a light rotation. My Local Bike Shop™ was offering classes on how to build a bike, so I enrolled and learned a lot about bike parts and bike maintenance. (Oddly enough, we didn’t actually build bikes.) Over the next few years I started building up a track bike, slowly amassing parts from my travels, getting the naked frame painted and framesaved, et cetera.

It was a meandering but fun process and a constant work in progress where I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d be done or what the thing would look like but I had a vague sense of the end goal. Kind of like this website and also my life. It felt like pulling on a thread without much intention, just waiting to see where it ended; the process of doing it was also the reason for doing it. I didn’t have much incentive to finish it quickly, because I already had my trusty bicycle¹ that I used for everyday riding.

Unfortunately (but also fortunately), said trusty bicycle was stolen from outside my flat in East London where I was living for a year while doing research between my second and third years of residency. I never saw it again.

Few things feel worse than finding a sawed-through U-lock in the spot where you locked up your bicycle. My flatmate Paul joked that it was probably resold at the Brick Lane Market. Be quiet, Paul.

Anywho, as soon as I got back to New York I finally finished the new bike. It looked something like this (and by “something like” I mean “exactly like,” because this is a photo of my bike):

My bicycle

There’s something about planning a thing, building it with your own two hands, and then being able to use it afterwards (or, just as good, seeing someone else use it) that is just the best feeling. Especially if you’ve had some frustration along the way in trying to figure something out (how the heck does this headset work?), and then that 💡 moment when you finally get it.

So for my next trick, I decided to try and draw my bicycle. This was my first attempt:

Illustration (analog), first attempt

I think this is actually not terrible for a freehand first attempt, but… if this illustration were a sound, it would probably be the Titanic recorder fail sound—you can tell what it’s supposed to be, but it’s just not very good. My second attempt was surprisingly much better:

Illustration (analog), second attempt

My third attempt was the best of the three, but weirdly, not significantly better than the second:

Illustration (analog), third attempt

I struggled with the wheels, because it’s very hard to draw a perfect circle or oval. So then I thought,

I’d have to be a computer to be able to draw a perfect circle or oval…

Wait, I have a computer…

But I don’t know how to use illustrator software.

Wait, I learned how to build a bike…

Could I learn how to use illustrator software?!…

So, just like trying to figure out how to install the headset on my bike IRL, I decided to roll up my sleeves and learn Adobe Illustrator.

My first attempt was about as rudimentary as my first analog attempt. (But on the plus side, check out how smooth those ovals are.)

Illustration (digital), 1st attempt

At some point, I figured it out. I got over the hump. It was definitely well over 20 hours of messing around in Illustrator, getting into flow states, often getting frustrated and giving up, staying up late, but finally I came up with a version I am more or less happy with:

Illustration (digital)

I also created an exploded view with the thought that I would label it with each of the parts to create a sort of spec (this part is still in progress).

Illustration (digital), exploded view with labels [draft]

Not bad, eh? My favorite part is the bottom bracket.

Bottom bracket

Also, this whole process took me so long that between the time I started this illustration and now, I also started using a-whole-nother design tool, Figma, and published some versions of these illustrations for downloading and remixing on my Figma Community profile, then embedded the file on kwon.nyc/bike.

Someday I’ll get around to adding the specs.

What if I was like “Hi, my name is Mike” and someone was like “short for Michael?” and I was like “No. Micycle” and then walked away. ↩︎

Power moves

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 11:28:34 -0400

Yesterday one of my colleagues in a (virtual) meeting reportedly picked up a canister of coarse sea salt, announced “I’m just snacking,” and proceeded to eat the salt, which confused and maybe frightened the other meeting attendees.

It reminded me of the time I was rounding with my interns and medical students in the recovery room after scrubbing out of a long case and I was hungry so I pulled an apple out of my white coat pocket, ate most of it, noticed that there weren’t any trash cans close by, and so I ate the core and seeds as well and then deposited the stem in the breast pocket of my white coat to discard later.

Years later, I found out that I scared the interns and students because they thought it was some kind of power move to assert dominance, because apparently I was making eye contact with them the whole time while ingesting the core and seeds.

Newyorkiversary

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 17:06:37 -0400

June 2021 marks my eleventh year in New York City. I wasn’t supposed to be here this long. The Plan™ was never to stay in New York for this long. The Plan™ was to come here for five years to learn how to be a surgeon, then go back to Chicago and be a surgeon and live happily ever after.

When I was younger, I didn’t think that carefully about my future, which is kind of terrifying to think about now, how I made decisions about my life without really thinking about them. I’m trying to be kinder to my younger self and recognize that she was doing the best she could with what she had, even if she didn’t make the decisions that my present self would make, with the benefit of hindsight.

According to knowyourmeme.com, “Expectation versus Reality” is a meme wherein parallel images illustrate “an obvious discrepancy,” usually implying that reality (the image on the right) falls short of the expectation (the image on the left). If I were to meme my life, it might look something like this:

Expectations for 2021, as projected in 2010

I’m a surgeon
I live in Chicago, near where I grew up
I am happy, whatever that means

Reality of 2021

I’m definitely not a surgeon
I live in Manhattan
I am happier than I ever thought possible

I’m lucky that, unlike the meme, my reality has surpassed any expectations. Similarly, while my own vision of my future ended up being totally off as far as the day-to-day, I think the underlying goals I was chasing were the same. Because they’re the same things everyone wants: being able to see the impact of my work, helping people, a feeling of belonging and connectedness.

When I was 25 years old and considering the arc of my life, I felt that feeling that I think a lot of people feel about New York — I was curious about it, drawn to it, and a little scared of it. Brooklyn seemed like a nice compromise because it was close enough to NEW YORK, the CITY, MANHATTAN, without being in the thick of it. I ranked Brooklyn first on my match list for residency and got my first choice. I found an apartment on Craigslist with two other people, a windowless room in Park Slope that was probably not legally a bedroom, for $900 a month.

Shortly after I moved to New York, I went back to Chicago for a wedding. The wedding photographer told me he’d flown in that morning, having photographed a Passion Pit show in Brooklyn the night before. I was simultaneously super impressed and also super proud that I could call myself a Brooklynite. (NOT a New Yorker though — I was afraid to claim that after just two months, in an outer borough, no less.)

People say the first year is the hardest. For me it was the first two years. I was working 80-100 hours a week which didn’t leave much time (or energy) for anything else, let alone exploring a big city. I mostly stayed in Brooklyn, rode my bike around, occasionally hung out with my roommates in the 30 minutes or so a day that we would actually all be in the apartment (usually if I was able to make it home from overnight call before 9:30 am when they left for work). I felt untethered.

Living here during a global pandemic absolutely did not make sense. Why pay Manhattan rent prices when you could work from somewhere else with twice as much space for half the cost? Hundreds of thousands of residents fled the city. People who claimed to be New Yorkers wrote long thinkpieces about how the city was over, overpriced, overrated, and would never recover.

And yet I never even considered leaving. I came to New York to work, and definitely didn’t think I’d be here for eleven years, but there I was, holed up in my Chelsea one-bedroom. It was a weird time¹. One day I busted out my violin and played Mendelssohn’s Meditation from Thaïs in my living room, the only piece I could recall from memory after years of not having really played. My next door neighbor, a woman in her 60s who I’d never seen face to face or spoken to, applauded on the other side of the wall and yelled, “That was beautiful!”

I was startled and shouted back “Thanks!”

We’ve never spoke again since.

If I had to sum up all of my random New York memories, most of them are similar to this one. Being in some stressful situation, forging an unexpected and usually fleeting connection with another person, and immediately forgetting about it until the next time it happens with some other situation and some other person.

I no longer try to project specifics of what my life will look like a decade later. If I say with certainty I’m still in this city, I might be wrong. It does feel like I’ll be here for the foreseeable future, and if I am, I’ll still be wondering why.

I say this as if it were decades ago. It was less than a year ago. 2020 doesn’t count, though. ↩︎

Goodbye and hello

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 22:02:56 -0400

As some of you have heard, I recently resigned from surgical residency, and am leaving clinical medicine.

Ten years ago, I decided to be a doctor. It was a decision that made perfect sense at the time: I wanted to help people who were suffering, and I was fortunate to have the ability and resources to gain entry into medical school. I wasn’t sure which specialty would be my calling, but shortly after starting my clinical rotations I fell in love with surgery. I loved seeing and evaluating patients who had a very clear and usually dramatic surgical problem that I knew could be solved by an operation, by putting hands on the patient and potentially curing them of whatever it was that was ailing them.

I remember being a medical student on general surgery, the drama of literally saving somebody’s life, the long days starting at 4 am and ending whenever the work was done, the admiration I had of these superhuman doctors who were also craftspeople that could diagnose and treat the sickest of the sick using both their minds and their hands. They were the coolest kids on the block, and I wanted to be one of them. And miraculously, I was inducted into their world; they wanted me too, even though I didn’t necessarily fit the mold. I moved to New York and embarked on what I thought would be a lifelong journey of being a surgeon.

The things that laypeople think are difficult about clinical medicine are not the things that got to me in the end. The work-life imbalance didn’t bother me, because I thought the work was good, and worthy of doing; the long hours didn’t bother me, because it was not as if I was working 80 hours a week at a desk job; the sleepless nights didn’t bother me, because my need for rest was always superseded by somebody sick who needed my help, which was the best reason I could think of for eschewing sleep. I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for this. I loved being able to take care of people who I knew I could help, and often did. I never lost; I either won or I learned something.

But gradually, I began to see flaws in the system. One night, as an inexperienced second year resident in the ICU, the only doctor in the hospital overnight who really knew the sickest patients, I saw something on a chest x-ray that I thought was incongruent with the physical findings of the patient, and brought it up with the on-call intensivist, who dismissed it. Maybe it was because I didn’t present the situation correctly. Maybe it was because I misinterpreted the x-ray. Maybe it was because I simply didn’t have the acumen or experience to see how sick the patient really was. Whatever it was that I had done wrong, that patient ended up taking a turn for the worse, and later that week I was called in to talk to the people in the offices about it. (Very rarely does anything good come of a meeting with a person in an office.) The harshest criticism I received was not that my mistake had caused the patient to suffer, but rather, that I had not documented my conversation with the intensivist. The patient suffered in agony, and I got a slap on the wrist for not writing a note.

That was my first glimpse at the ugly side of clinical medicine. It wasn’t the last.

Over the years, more hesitancies creeped their way in. I took time off after my second clinical year to do research in patient safety. It was an amazing opportunity that I couldn’t fully enjoy because I had seen firsthand just how unsafe and how unjust the system really is to patients. The conclusion that I made, personally, was that patient care was NOT safe, and making it so was an impossible task that usually just ended up in more paperwork and maybe a vague if questionable improvement in patient care. My cynical mind felt that when a patient had a good outcome, it was in spite of the system, not because of it. And the frustrations I felt as a training clinician delivering healthcare were infinitesimal compared to what patients receiving care must have felt. My days were largely spent navigating a system that was set up for me and other healthcare providers to fail. And the times that we do, inevitably, fail, whether manifest as a patient angry about having to wait in the office, one who develops a complication after an operation, or one who waits too long to get care because they are afraid that they can’t pay for it and end up with a bill ten times more than if they had been able to receive appropriate care in the first place… we as the front-line providers are the first ones to bear the brunt of the blame. The barriers to being able to spend time with and take care of patients are boundless, relentless, and unforgiving. I saw the frustrations in my attendings, too. And it wasn’t just at my home institution; I saw it when I rotated at other hospitals, other programs, other systems, other countries.

I have worked with so many caring, well-meaning individuals who do incredible things every day. I don’t blame any one person for these problems. It’s easy to call somebody lazy or stupid or incompetent out of exasperation, but nobody comes to work to do a bad job, and we are doing the best we can with what we have. But there are very real problems. We are in a healthcare crisis. Every once in awhile, things go right – a young, otherwise healthy patient who comes with terrible pain from appendicitis, has an operation as soon as the diagnosis is made and goes home later that day and never has that problem again. But that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. And that is the fundamental reason why I am leaving. I am not going to have the impact I thought I would as a physician on the front lines, and I am never going to be the kind of surgeon I wanted to be when I started. Not in this landscape. This was not an overnight decision; on the contrary, it was the most drawn out, difficult decision I have ever made in my life, but it is the right one. I never imagined that I would walk away from what was once my dream, but it is no longer my dream, because I am not being the best Kwon I can be by doing this.

So. Surgery and I are getting a divorce. I still have the utmost respect for surgery, but I’m not in love anymore, and it’s making me unhappy. The good days have become so few and far between that it feels shocking when they happen. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t all bad. In some ways, I wish it was. Because then I would have cut ties sooner, and it probably would have been easier to do so. Despite what the reasons are, we have drifted apart, and though we both fought for a long time to stay together, it’s time to end it.

I am forever indebted to the people I have met on this path who have helped me. I want to publicly thank my infallible mentor, Ron Kaleya, who has been my angel – my neurotic, fat, balding, Jewish angel (his words, not mine). He extended a life vest to me at a time when I was drowning and it felt like everybody else was just standing by and commenting on the quality of the water. My family, who have been with me since the beginning (like, Baby-Kwon-in-diapers beginning) and who I was terrified to tell but were ultimately supportive and made it clear that my happiness matters. My sister in particular, who is my hero in life and who supported me from day one – when I wonder what I should do, I just think about what Sarah Kwon would do, and if I don’t know what Sarah Kwon would do, I ask her, and she tells me. My co-residents, my partners in crime, my allies in this war: I commend you for sticking with it and fighting the good fight. You are battling an impossible enemy, and I have hope that you will be able to carry out the mission that I originally set out to accomplish. Same goes for the attendings who taught me: I learned something from every single one of you, and I am sure I will use the skills and lessons you have taught me in some form or another in my life. And, a very special thank you to the defectors, secret would-be defectors, and other career-changers who gave me the insight and confidence to redirect my path. You know who you are. There are more of you than I ever could have imagined, and I feel that we are bonded for life.

I am grateful to my program for the opportunity to be a surgeon, and for extending support to me even though I am no longer using that opportunity in the manner we both originally intended.

I have done and seen some incredible things as a surgical resident that I’ll never forget. I cracked the chest of a man shot in the heart. I made buttholes for babies born without buttholes (one butthole per baby). I once removed an appendix in nine minutes. I’ve seen people die in front of me. I’ve seen humans at their worst, and their best. I’ve done probably at least a thousand rectal exams (…most of them while at work). But most of all, I was given the privilege to operate on and take care of people in need, for however brief a time, in the grand scheme of things. And I am well aware that whatever struggles I had in doing so are still minor compared to the hell that patients go through, sometimes on a daily basis, for their entire lives, and unlike me, they do not have the freedom to walk away from it. They are the ones who truly suffer and my heart goes out to them sincerely.

Goodbye to surgery, and hello to whatever is next…

Love, Kwon

A happy Kwon on a bouncy castle installed outside the hospital, 2011