It felt as though everything had a purpose—it wasn’t just pretty to look at, but it was making a statement: why it needs to exist, why it should last, why you should feel awe. These paintings and structures were beautiful because they each contained a thesis, a devotion to an idea left behind by the artist.

Take cathedrals: at their best, a pure-hearted intention behind these was to build a house that might hint at the awesomeness of their god.2 The tall ceilings draw your gaze toward heaven, the light filters through the stories in the stained glass windows, and the intended silence implies a reverence. And if you look closely, there are infinite details; each church is not quite like the next.

While seeing the French cathedrals, I felt a similar emotion to when I saw La Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s famous unfinished basilica in Barcelona. 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of his death, and the basilica is still not finished. What could possess someone to devote their entire life to building something they would never get to see complete? I know his famous line is “My client is not in a hurry,” but still—to build something with such devotion and conviction requires a sacrifice I can’t fathom.

I really hate this quote from Jeremy Tate, because I think it’s true:

Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamored with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.

In order to make something truly beautiful, it has to cost something. It can’t be so easy. Religion was a big motivator in Old World Europe, and so was status-signaling, the desire to control your enemies, and narcissistic tendencies (cough, Versailles). These intentions varied across the moral spectrum, but they left behind lasting monuments that we still cherish to this day, because they made a statement about something.

America, too, had a period where we expressed our belief in the future and the power of trade and capitalism, or our belief in democracy through our architecture—the Empire State Building and monuments in Washington, D.C. are famous examples, built around a century ago.

When I see newer structures, however, I don’t get the same sense of awe or inspiration—instead, they leave me feeling hollow. I walk past our megalomaniacs’ delusions of grandeur, knowing many of these serve commercial purposes, meant to optimize a city’s profits. I even live in a cookie-cutter glass-paneled building constructed with the cheapest materials and fewest customizations (in the “name” of modernism, eyeroll). If anything, we are signaling our lack of thought, as landlords guiltlessly sell us 15-foot-long hallways, triangular closets, or other odd dead spaces that honestly belong in purgatory.3

I think these exist not only in America but in every country where hypergrowth has prioritized scale and cost-efficiency over intentionality.

We visited Beijing earlier this month, to see James’s grandfather, a former architect. His critique of Beijing’s many government buildings from his era was that they might look big from the outside, but inside everything is dim and the ceilings are short. They were built for efficiency and conformity, and all the interiors have the same dull vibe no matter the building’s purpose. He preferred the buildings of Europe, and even Shanghai, that were tall and let in light and gave you something to aspire toward.

In contrast, I thought of the ambition of the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube, designed from scratch to teach the world of China’s modernity as they hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008. Or the Forbidden City and the many temples throughout Beijing, still preserved and maintained from the Ming and Qing dynasties, to give the people a sense of their history half a millennium later.

Beauty we make has a thesis, and a real work of beauty keeps reminding you it exists.

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There’s a present discourse I like about how people are pursuing more analog hobbies in 2026, to “protect more human-made things.” These stand out to me as hobbies that require investment through persistence to see a result—many of these require practice before we make anything we feel proud of. Practices like:

• Reading/writing longform content: Longform forces depth of thought and analysis, and fails otherwise. There’s a clear thesis, often supported by research, and a necessary organization and building-up of thoughts and stakes in order to deliver a point that matters.

• Film photography: Film often captures a precise and often imperfect moment—maybe we didn’t adjust the exposure right, there was a light leak, someone forgot to smile—and costs money to take a photo and develop it. But what we get back feels more precious, perhaps because it reflects the beauty of being in the moment and rejects artificial perfection.

• Tactile hobbies: ceramics, leatherwork, painting, knitting, furniture making—there is something that feels real about beating the shit out of clay, watching colors mix on a palette, or feeling the meditative and rhythmic beats as you get the hang of knitting. Moving your body doesn’t have to just be through exercise; crafting can also allow us to feel more grounded.

While on the surface, folks claim this is about “fighting against AI,” I actually believe this is about using our actions to define and defend what we believe is truly beautiful.

I don’t actually believe AI is inherently evil (though it is a shame it has been trained on so much plagiarized work), but what feels wrong is how so much generative “art” is inundating our fields of attention with nothing.4 It feels as though social media is now full of AI content to keep people scrolling, numbed and entertained, by pretty colors and images that don’t exist in reality—when these platforms started out trying to foster human connection.

What are you trying to say about the world?

What are you trying to teach me about myself?

Are you trying to say anything at all?

Anyone can feel empty living with so much noise and no message. No wonder we want to unplug and find real beauty, something indisputably real, knowing that it cost something to have brought it into the world—be it an opinion you need to defend, a story that risks embarrassment, effort and time with no promise of payback. To create is to tell the world that this idea deserves to be born, this idea matters, that this is your idea of beauty.

With each coming day, it’s harder to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not online. But I think when we choose to train our attention on what’s truly beautiful to us, we find what inspires us and not just what’s “pleasant to the eye” or “perfect.” In doing so, we find more meaning and happiness, despite the circumstances of our modern world.

Here’s to a 2026 filled with more of what’s really beautiful.

A few recent life events—my wedding and a recent diagnosis—have made me more aware of these shifts, though not in any profound way. For my body’s sake, I’ve needed to accept that now I have to become more prudent with how I spend my energy.1

It’s something I’ve mostly accepted and stopped trying to force. My closest friends live pretty far away from me, and while I’m happy whenever we manage to see each other, I still miss the days of closeness—the kind of safety that triggers the opposite of peace: total gremlin behavior. Hyena laughter, bizarre accents, bits no one else would understand—all the hypomanic tendencies of a teenage sleepover, distilled into the interactions in a relationship.

James and I like to call this “matching each other’s freak.”2 Others (maybe those who don’t listen to Tinashe) might call it “vibing” or “being on the same wavelength”—but that feels a bit too sanitized. You need a little unhinged chaos to be fully yourself. This love language is incredibly underrated, and it’s necessary for any relationship to feel life-giving.

Which is why I don’t buy the idea that the answer is just to limit where you spend your energy. I wouldn’t recommend the idea of thriving only by cutting costs to a business (literally my job), so why would I recommend it to myself? The more I pay attention, the more I suspect the real question isn’t how little energy can I spend? but rather, Why do some people give my energy back?

Maybe what we call “friend chemistry” is just a match of social energies: how we think, how we interpret, and how we attune to each other. Once I started seeing friendship through this lens of energy—not personality or life stages—I started to see some patterns.

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I recently went to a party with an excellent hostess. Naturally, we remarked on the decor, food, bar, snacks—all the elements of a great experience, the kind you might see featured on TikTok. Several of the girls I chatted with expressed envy of said TikTok trends like Cookbook Club, Cake Picnic, or Home Cafe. The sentiment was basically: “Where are these people? How do I find friends like this?” It struck me that we were all quietly waiting for someone else to be that friend.

The last time I felt that kind of shared energy at a party (aside from my wedding, I guess) was a campy murder mystery dinner I threw with my best friend somewhere in my mid-twenties. I wrote the clues and planned the menu, while Kristine designed the assets and curated the guest list. We had so many late nights sitting in her apartment giggling over the stupid details we created (Lambchop, the family name, was pronounced “lahm-show”). When the guests arrived, they fully lived out their characters—the friend playing the self-obsessed son character brought a cake with his name on it, others came in fully decked out in period-piece costume, some pulled out accents with the energy of a theater troupe…

Lately, I keep thinking about that party and what made it so special. It was thoughtful and high effort, but it would have flopped if the guests hadn’t fully committed. We chose the right people for the roles without realizing exactly why—we just identified people whose social energy we suspected would fit with ours.

I once went on a triple friend blind date and, as suspected, it was terribly awkward and we never talked to each other again. However, someone there referenced a professor (allegedly; someone can fact check me later) who said that the three components of friendship were positivity, vulnerability, and consistency. That all makes sense in a textbook way, but doesn’t quite address the friend “chemistry” question I keep circling around.

I am no social scientist or psychologist, but my fondness for personality inventories and the old era of BuzzFeed quizzes makes me wonder—what if we could actually index social energies? So that we could tell when we met someone new, how quickly or with how much effort it might take to click?

So, for fun, I decided to sketch my own tiny “social chemistry framework”—nothing scientific, just a novelist’s attempt to understand why some people feel instantly easy and others feel like heavy lifting. The names are kind of WIP, but the two axes that keep resurfacing so far are “meaning orientation” and “inference style.”

Meaning Orientation

At what altitude do you naturally process conversation? I think there are three variants:

• Surface: They like to track facts, logistics, observable details, for smooth conversations and clarity of thought, even if they sometimes miss emotional layers.

• Story: They like to organize experiences into narratives, or draw connections—even when there might not be any—but can bring a lot of color, flow, coherence into a conversation.

• Subtext: They like to thread the needle between unspoken motives, patterns, and emotional currents. Sometimes they can provide a lot of insight and naturally deep conversations… and other times can make folks feel like they are being psychoanalyzed.

I think most of us end up somewhere in the middle in practice, but where does your proclivity lie?

I see this play out at the lunch table at work a lot, where the conversation is encouraged to stay surface/story-level for sake of professionalism: vacation plans, the weather, favorite restaurants, weekend plans, movies/shows we’ve seen lately. It’s good fun and helps you learn about each other: so-and-so is a cinephile, this person is a foodie, someone is quite the wild adventurer…

Occasionally, someone will throw a curveball into the ring: Would you rather win the genetic lottery, or the actual lottery? And why? Everyone took a turn to answer, but those who prefer subtext spun it out of control into an hour-long discussion with lots of personal stories about capitalistic structures, privilege, and what truly makes for a meaningful life (everyone else left—also because we should have been working). I became a lot more interested in folks after hearing their stances here—even if I disagreed with them, I felt more connected.

I think those of a similar orientation are more likely to instantly click. Not saying opposites can’t get along, but there’s a risk that subtext folks feel starved for deeper connection and surface folks feel that the mood got heavy out of nowhere when there’s too big of a mismatch. I think the chemistry happens more easily when people process meaning similarly.

Inference Style

How do you expect needs and boundaries to be communicated? Do you believe that people should say what they need, or that people should read the room and anticipate needs? Neither style is “better”—they just create friction when the expectations don’t match. Explicit communicators assume clarity is respectful; implicit communicators assume consideration is respectful—which is why they end up inferring intent so differently.

For example, imagine you’re in a group and one person is dominating the conversation:

• An explicit communicator might think, “If someone else had something more interesting to say, they’d speak up—at least, that’s what I’d do” and trust others to speak for themselves.

• An implicit communicator might think, “Does that person realize they’re dominating the entire conversation? Should I change the subject so someone else can have a turn?”

I suspect:

• Explicit + explicit get along in general—they are direct and efficient, and even if they butt heads, they can establish respect if nothing further than that

• Implicit + implicit get along—they intuit each other well, especially in group settings where their attunement can shine

• Explicit + implicit do not get along unless they adjust—though the roles aren’t always super evident if you first meet in a 1:1 setting.

  • In friendships and especially romantic relationships it’s easy for things to become one-sided—left unchecked the implicit’s needs go unmet and resentment builds up over time.

  • The key to overcoming this is meeting somewhere in the middle—so it’s not necessarily a friendship doomer but just that this type of relationship requires more investment (though operating outside your natural inclination) for sustained connection

Two other variables I can’t quite ignore, but chose to exclude from my “social chemistry framework” are proximity and EQ. Proximity—both physical proximity and common interests—creates the spaces in which the chemistry can grow. (It doesn’t matter how well you hit it off with someone if you never see each other again!) And sure, EQ is important, since without self-awareness we’re all insufferable long term. However, I feel like it’s not actually a big dealbreaker for true connection—if anything, it might help smooth over a blunder or two but doesn’t pave the road itself. These aren’t the seeds that sow connection, just the soil it grows in.

I wonder if understanding where we fall and what we seek in these spectrums can help us notice friendship at an earlier point—especially ones that can bring out the gremlin freaks inside of us all. Maybe adulthood isn’t about losing the closeness we once had, but learning how to recognize it in the forms that actually sustain us rather than drain us… so the question isn’t whether we have enough energy, but how precisely we choose to spend it.

Going to Japan this time, I’d never been more disorganized with restaurant recs scattered across Instagram/TikTok pins, Google Maps pins, links and docs sent by friends, random iPhone notes (even though I use Notion?)... in this world of infinite content, I wish I had a simpler list to go off.

Looking back, I ended up not caring about how many Michelin stars a restaurant had, or how highly rated or hyped or new it was either. I really just had 3 sentiments—vibes, if you will—when it came to the places I ate at:

1. I can’t stop thinking about this and how good it was

2. I’d be down to go again

3. Left little impression (or as the kids say, was mid)

I obviously am not going to tell you about disappointing places, but instead will offer you a list of bookmarked places I wish I’d visited but didn’t get around to—so you can let me know if it was worth it or not.

Without further ado, here’s my humble list of Japanese food recs, sorted by the categories listed above. As always, each rec comes with a Google Maps link for easy bookmarking.

“I can’t stop thinking about this and how good it was”

Tsukemen Enji (Kichijoji, Tokyo - $)

I don’t think I’ve ever thought about tsukemen (dipping noodles) before I had it here, but now I can’t stop thinking about it. Everything from the texture to the flavorful sauce was just *chef’s kiss*—This was one of our most affordable, yet delicious meals we enjoyed.

Kobe Beef & Matsuzaka Beef Shabu Shabu (Ginza, Tokyo - $$$-$$$$)

Delicious sukiyaki and shabu shabu with very premium beef options. It’s a set menu but comes with more than enough food, though prices vary depending on which set you choose. Gives a great assortment of veggies (including rare mushrooms, which were my favorites)—we ended up coming here again with a larger friend group on our last night.

Ito-King Tenjin (Fukuoka - $)

Specialty dessert shop featuring the famous Amaou strawberry, and was probably my favorite dessert I had all trip. Everything is amazing here, though they are famous for their sugar-glazed strawberry skewer and dorayaki that comes in different cream fillings with an whole fresh strawberry inside. I was in heaven and spent ~$60 trying the entire menu and buying all the gift boxes here.

Godaime Hanayama Udon (Tokyo - $$)

I don’t generally like udon, but I loved this place—maybe because they have super wide, flat, chewy udon noodles that are really unique. They have ones in soup, or ones that you dip (what I ordered). There’s usually a long line but they have multiple branches—we went to the one in Nihonbashi which was larger and less crowded.

Nihonbashi Kaisen Donburi Tsujihan (Tokyo - $$)

Michelin-starred and worth it—these seafood bowls were so delightful and delicious. You can pay extra to have more toppings (ikura, uni, crab) added on—but the original already has 10 types of fish. When you’re about 2/3 done with your meal, give your bowl back to the chefs and they’ll pour a delicious sea bream broth into your bowl for an entirely new experience. The lines are long but there are many branches—the less central ones have a shorter wait.

“I’d be down to go again”

Glitch Coffee Roasters (Tokyo and Osaka - $-$$)

Really fancy award winning coffee that one should really only drink black (lattes in Japan are really watery, anyway…). It was delicious and I’m glad I tried it, but I also realized some people love coffee on a whole different level: James actually ran into the exact same person in the Tokyo shop as he did in Osaka. Talk about a glitch in the Matrix.

i’m donut? (Tokyo and Fukuoka - $)

Would recommend if you love donuts and/or stores with fun names. It’s fluffy and light with a good (non-mochi) chew and not-too-sweet pastry cream. But it’s a LONG line. We went around closing time to the one in Harajuku—most flavors were sold out but we got to try the bestseller, pistachio cream, which James said was the best donut he’s had in his life.

Ginza Kagari (Ginza, Tokyo - $)

This is that 1-star Michelin ramen restaurant in everyone’s list. It’s great for toripaitan ramen, and the price point makes it even greater. However, it’s a long wait—there’s a separate line to order than to eat—and while it was delicious I feel like I’d rather wait in a shorter line here for Mensho instead.

Anakuma Cafe (Harajuku, Tokyo - $)

A fun literal hole in the wall, where you order coffee on an iPad and a bear(?) mascot hands it to you through said hole. They interact with you as well through props, gachapons, and whiteboard messages. It’s a fun experience for some tasty coffee and tea—also feels very “Harajuku.”

鰻のエイト (Fukuoka - $$)

Unagi restaurant that serves 2 dishes—unagi in stone pot with beef (kind of like bimimbap) or unagi with egg in a bamboo box. It’s clearly a fusion restaurant but the dishes were delicious—and even came with a cute little pudding dessert at the end.

Kobe Beef Steak Mouriya Gion (Gion, Kyoto - $$$$)

James thinks there’s only 2 ways to enjoy really fancy marbled beef: hot pot or grilled. We already tried shabu, so we came here to try teppanyaki beef. This place was super good—not only the beef, but also the veggies that balanced the meal. The salad was also so interesting—we still don’t know what veggies we ate but it was great.

a note on fine dining

I generally don’t like to recommend these because they are usually super expensive and your mileage may vary when it comes to whether you’d think they are worth it. If you do like fine dining, I highly recommend Tableall for booking sushi/fancy/Michelin-starred places—their team of concierges will call in and make reservations for you, and even suggest alternatives if you can’t get the reservation you want. Here were my favorite fine dining meals:

• Noguchi Tsunagu (Kyoto - $$$$) - 2-Michelin coursed meal featuring “the best ingredients one can buy,” including A5 wagyu, mackerel, barracuda, izu lobster, and bear (yes, you read that right).

• Sushi Arai (Ginza, Tokyo - $$$$) - 1-Michelin sushi, with some of the best fish I’ve tasted in my life. There’s 2 floors—one where the “master” serves guests and another where the “apprentice” serves guests. We could only afford the apprentice but it was still some of the best sushi I’ve had.

“Places I wish I visited”

• Shirohige’s Cream-Puff Factory (Tokyo, $) - home of the Totoro cream puff—but they were doing a pop-up elsewhere when I visited. I’ve heard it’s mid but I still wanted to try it for the cuteness!

• Tsukiji Unitora Nakadori (Tokyo, $$) - I love uni but the lines were too long (it’s also in Tsukiji Market) even if you got up super early for it. I’ve heard this place is all hype, but I’m still sad I didn’t get to decide for myself.

• Itoh Kyuemon (Kyoto, $) - they sell these very Instagrammable matcha parfait bars that I wanted to try… except I was sick and it was freezing cold outside and I couldn’t justify eating ice cream under those conditions.

• Izakaya Toyo (Osaka, $$) - I saw this in Netflix’s Street Food: Asia and really wanted to go—except I was sick on for our day trip to Osaka. James went with his friends to a different restaurant instead…

Final Notes

Food in Japan is awesome, especially since Japanese food is my favorite cuisine! I think there are things they do especially well that are super worth trying in Japan, such as:

• convenience store food—looking at the Lawson’s tamago sando in particular

• noodles—they are just of a different quality, especially in handmade noodle shops

• seafood / fresh fish

• fancy beef

• fruits—super expensive but SO delicious and sweet

• sweets—there is a delicate, milky flavor to a lot of the desserts and they don’t tend to be too sweet

• markets—I will happily eat street food here since I really trust Japanese food safety standards

I hope you enjoy this list and get to try some of these places one day!

Since then, a lot of things have changed—but when I try to explain what happened in my life lately, I find myself listing events like:

• My employer got acquired in November, so I’ve been working really hard to keep my job amidst big leadership and governance changes. Especially since I needed to pay for the aforementioned travel plans. Even now, with layoffs around the corner, we’re all just chugging along with above-average stress in anticipation of what’s coming.

• James and I just got back from almost 3 months abroad:

  • 1 week in Jaipur, India - for a friend’s wedding

  • 1 week in Hua Hin, Thailand - for another friend’s wedding

  • 2 weeks in cities across five provinces in China: Chengdu, Chongqing, Xian, Hefei, Shanghai - with my family for the holidays

  • 3 weeks in Japan: Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto, Osaka, Fukuoka - testing out the work remote from abroad situation. (Highly do not recommend.)

  • 2 weeks in Canada: Toronto and Yellowknife - with James’s family for Lunar New Year (not pictured here because I actually posted it on IG lol)

And then, you consider the complication of intimacy: If I’m talking to my sister or Kristine—I feel comfortable sharing any random thought or meme or funny event I come across. If I’m catching up with an acquaintance or friend—I can probably list out what I’ve been up to and see if they’re interested in learning more. If it’s someone I’ve just met for the first time—do I even say any of this at all? Where do I even start? How much of yourself do you share with the other person, and how much of what you say actually captures who you are?

I scrub through my montage of memories, searching for highlights that could be relevant and interesting. If I let you inside my innermost thoughts, I’d tell you that six years ago I visited Hakone with my family and dreamt of when I’d return to the the dappled lighting among the trees, the halo of Fuji hovering over the lake, the chatter of the wind, water, and mountain life. However, this time we never left our hotel but instead dove into pillowy soft futons after a moonlit bath, surrounded by paper lanterns and the winter wind rattling off the shoji screens. I wasn’t unhappy—it all felt so blissful, it was like a dream—but it was different. I felt it sooner but I acknowledged it then: that you could never truly return to the same place twice. And yet, everything was beautiful because everything was ephemeral. That night, I drifted off to sleep torn between the sweet reminiscence of the past that would never be again, and the sweeter happiness of the present that would soon become yesterday.

But you don’t want to hear all that—at least, not at a party or in response to a simple How are you? My thoughts tend to dive deep and meander, which is hardly good etiquette when in company. Instead, I respond to the prompts: How was India? I tell stories of the cow-filled traffic, and the extravagance of the weddings. How was Thailand? I describe the delicious food and how thrilling the Muay Thai fights were.

But if I’m meeting someone brand new: do I start with my bio first? Chinese-American, Bay Area native but went to school in Los Angeles, tech worker, but not really since I’m not an engineer and instead work in strategy/bizops (whatever that means), but honestly would rather just own a cozy cafe where I’d sit and pen novels, people watch, and enjoy good music and vibes. I could also talk endlessly about stories I love, which recently have been mostly in video games and anime even though I do also keep a to-read bookshelf like any other person. I’m actually quite nerdy and analytical —all writers are, really—so I don’t hate my job either, especially since I work really hard and care a lot about solving problems and delivering value.

Nobody wants this anti-elevator pitch, this train wreck of an intro—so I default to just asking new people questions about themselves instead. Popular business books say people like to talk about themselves. I consider it a win-win for them and for my social anxiety.

But is it a win for me? Do I really only want to share a pared-down, greatest-hits version of my life, when who I am really comes from all the things I do in between? If I only get to see someone one a year, or once every few years, they’re essentially meeting a different person every encounter. If I care so deeply about relationships, then wouldn’t I want to do more to be seen and understood—and invite people to do the same?

Sometimes I feel lonely in my environment here in San Francisco—especially since I know what brings me meaning in life is not so concrete a goal as that of those around me. In this lovely and surreal city, I meet founders and high achievers everywhere, all chasing their dreams of having a billion dollar company or attaining a certain lifestyle. It’s like Hollywood, but more meritocratic since you actually see people succeed all around you. It’s easy to convince myself I share the same dream, especially when I have a pedigree and privilege that lets me blend in.

I used to think that if I presented a certain side of myself, I’d quiet the anxiety—or if I just found enough people who were exactly like me, I’d feel accepted and safe. I’d often fret over which mask, which “me” to be in each new setting. But another part of me chooses to no longer meticulously organize my masks anymore.

I’ve been told many times that growing older is just getting too tired to give so many fucks, but I actually disagree with this take. It’s not from weariness that I stop putting on these masks, but more an active curiosity for what I look like with no guise or pretense, a curiosity I wish I had in my earlier years when the masks seemed more beautiful than my actual face. I suppose the beauty of aging is the earnest desire to discover and celebrate more of who you are underneath everything.

I think back to the last time I was (also literally) bare-faced almost all the time—my sabbatical, what I had seen as an “in-between,” a stretch of time between two peaks that I would typically anchor my identity or story to. It was also during that in-between that I invested the most into deciding how I wanted to live: processing new insights, accepting hard truths, reflecting on my growth, and learning what really motivates me.

This is the main reason I wanted to restart my blog: to tell you about all the times I feel alive in the in-betweens, not just at the peaks. I miss capturing portraits of the everyday, and I miss hearing the resonance from everyone else.

Right now, I happen to be finishing this piece at the DMV on my birthday (lol), waiting to replace my lost driver’s license that also happens to expire today. Yeah, it’s depressing as hell and I’m as annoyed now as I was several hours of waiting ago, but I tell myself that maybe this is just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

But among the buzz and busyness, there is something peculiar. More than once, no, maybe several times each hour, I hear a “Happy Birthday!” from a desk agent to some other soul who’s turn has finally come. While it doesn’t change how long I still have to wait, these small greetings have made my afternoon all the more bearable.

Housekeeping

One of my beige flags is that I write maudlin prose. (Believe me, I want to gouge my eyes out when I read some of the fiction I write.) But since you’re reading a blog that is essentially a personal journal trying to be coherent, you’ll need to settle for some of this writing here and there. *evil laughter*

Still, I know that my readers probably span different interests, so I wanted to share some updates to the Substack:

• For those who are new readers—hello! I’ve created an Index for older posts (organized by theme) to get to know I’ve been and who I’m trying to be.

• I also write guides (restaurant recs, travel guides, job hunting, etc.). but I never know where to publish my guides since listicles don’t fit the theme of this blog. Howeverrr! Substack recently launched newsletter “sections” as a feature, so I’ll now be publishing these as well. You’ve been subscribed by default but you can always manage your subscription anytime.

• I’m also gathering information about my readers to improve the relevancy of my writing here. New readers will be asked to fill out a demographic survey - but even if you’re an OG, I’d appreciate you filling it out to help me with tracking and understanding my audience.

• Lastly, I'm pausing paid subscriptions until I build up my weekly posting cadence again.

As always, thanks for reading! ♡

June’s been a weird month. I just hit my 90 days at my new place, but this week we had to lay off 10% of our workforce, including folks on my team. I haven’t been around long enough to feel like I deserve to grieve, but I still feel survivor’s guilt. I’m doing okay (thank you to those who asked) but my mind’s a jumble… so I’ve been reading more books lately to escape.

Written while munching on these weird healthy chocolate quinoa crisps (?)—hear me out, they’re like Crunch bars but somehow more satisfying to eat…

At the beginning of this month, I sat on a panel, answering some questions about career for our interns. In the open Q&A at the end, one of the interns asked about books—namely, which influential business books I’d recommend.

I swear I wasn’t trying to be edgy, but my mind drew a blank. “I… uh, don’t read.”

Incredulous looks everywhere.

“Uh—” I stammered. I thought of the few novels and Webtoons I’ve casually picked up in the past year. “I mean, I don’t really read business books! I do read… mostly fiction, though.”

I kept digging myself further into my hole: “I think there’s a lot of good content out there, through YouTube videos or blogs that’s more efficient than reading business books. Like, you should try to learn and grow, but I don’t think books are the only way to do that… that’s why I mostly read for fun!"

Even though I spitballed (read: panic/BS’ed) the last paragraph, I realized I actually do believe in what I said. Sadly, I—who once wrote a college admissions essay about growing up at the public library—haven’t read many books for fun since I was in high school (like, I probably average 1-2 each year). Somewhere in between required reading for college and meeting tons of book club enthusiasts who’ve already read every NYT Bestseller that’s ever fueled a TED talk, I got way too intimidated and demotivated as a result.

I tried to catch up and start reading again. I read 60% of (as in, finished 60% before pausing indefinitely) most business books, the first page many times of Simulacres et Simulation and other philosophy treatises (great cure for insomnia). I forced myself to finish The Fountainhead (I found Roark super disturbing) and started on Dune (unless you love extensive lore, just watch the movie). I chose what was “hot” or what I thought would give me the sophistication or intellectualism I wanted to cultivate, but ended up just saying bleh to the whole thing.

I know it’s silly to say, but where’s the book club for adults who Sparksnote’d their way through college humanities and are now too embarrassed to say they have no idea what Socrates or Plato wrote? Who loved Pride and Prejudice but hated The Grapes of Wrath and enjoyed Shakespeare with help? Yet also no longer have the attention span to read through anything that isn’t immediately enrapturing?

Well, I surprised myself when I recently finished a novel. I picked it partially off a recommendation but mostly off the cover artwork. Suffice to say, it’s my favorite book I’ve read in years, since Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. I later looked up the author, and it turns out that she once penned several books I also loved growing up.

I had longed to get sucked into a story, the way I did back when I was a voracious reader. Some of my favorite books from my teenage years included Never Let Me Go, My Sister’s Keeper, The Kite Runner, and The Book Thief… and I was pleasantly surprised to see how invested I was in this new story and how much I wanted to finish the novel. It reminded me of the days when I’d read under the covers with my phone flashlight so my parents wouldn’t find out I was still awake at 5am.

A younger me would have been embarrassed to have the same taste1 as when I was a kid—but now I openly accept that I’ve always been the same on the inside. I still love witty, poetic prose and characters that struggle with complex, relatable, emotions with tons of angst and aspiration. I know when I like something—it’s a spark. While there’s plenty of drier but good stuff out there, I’ve given myself the permission to save those for when I’ve rebuilt the ability to enjoy reading again.

Perhaps my rediscovered love for reading is an aftereffect of me learning to love and accept who I am deep down—so I can now warmly embrace what I’ve always been drawn to, first starting with how I spend my free time.

Bonus: Recommendations

What’s a post about reading without some recommendations? Here’s some (fiction) stories that I’ve really loved in the past month, since reading a lot again:

Currently reading: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Yeah, I missed the boat here—seems like it was required reading for everyone but me. Plath’s writing is a masterclass in relatability, and this book is en route to becoming one of my favorites. It’s her only novel, written semi-autobiographically about a young woman who has it all yet can’t find direction or happiness in anything. This passage made me want to read the book—it captures a lot of of my earlier struggles especially with depression:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Aforementioned “best novel I’ve read in years”: Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

It’s a beautiful, character-driven story about two friends, making video games together—first as children, later as adults and business partners. It’s hard to describe a story that doesn’t have much of a plot (mostly just a theme and angst) but it feels so real, like a love letter to both the highs and the lows of life.

Too-addictive manga thriller: Olgami by Haemuri

Probably my favorite psychological horror story I’ve read in a long time. Also, despite being a romance thriller with vampires (I know, I’m also judging myself) it’s well-written and paced with great trope execution and subversion. Personally, I’ve been surprised by the protagonist many times and have really come to respect how despite being dealt a horrible lot in life, she rejects the easy way out and still fights to survive and avenge herself.

(Note: I also love Chainsaw Man, but I watch the anime in lieu of reading the manga.)

On deck, but accidentally read 20% in one sitting because it’s so good: Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

When you query agents to publish your novel, you have to submit the first page as a sample. I almost never get sucked in by the first page (I have to push through the first few chapters before I get hooked, typically) but this book got my interest immediately and didn’t let it go. It gives Serial Season 1 vibes, but much more angsty and in Jodi Picoult’s signature moral-dilemma-family-drama execution.

That’s it for this week—thanks for reading, and let me know if/what you read these days! Or better yet, be Kristine:

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And one last note to my lovely mailing list—I’m going to take next week off. I’ll be in Seattle and Portland for the holiday, and afterwards need some time to decompress. The next post will come out ~July 12.

James also gave me the helpful feedback that he didn’t enjoy last week’s piece so much. He said, “I like it when you share insight, but it felt like you were just complaining about life being hard, and I didn’t think the stories connected to each other so well. The week before’s was better.”

I feel a little proud that I’ve written often enough that those close to me can tell when the quality is off. I can tell from my lack of varied sentence structure that I could probably pay more attention to style as well, but I’ll prioritize publishing consistently for now. Thanks for sticking with me even in my low weeks—I’ll still work harder to write content that’s worthy of your time!

Written while munching on cherries from a farm we visited last weekend where we picked $70(!) worth of peaches, nectarines, and other stone fruit. Lmk if you have any recipes—I’ve already made peach jam, and we still have half a fridge worth of fruit to finish…

Recently, James and I started talking about what it’d look like to move out of downtown San Francisco. We’ve had some pretty interesting moments here over the past two years (like learning what sideshows are by Googling “large crowd watching cars do donuts in intersection with fireworks 2am Reddit”), but as I’ve often said, I’m getting a bit tired of living in FiDi.

Many of our friends have been moving to San Mateo or Burlingame, so I looked at rent prices there—only to find that they were the same as rates in the city. Out of morbid curiosity, I wondered, “Would buying be more affordable?”

An hour later, I was playing around with mortgage calculators and trying to see what we could afford in the bay, and was surprised again at how expensive everything was. I’ve always talked about how one of my dreams is to design my own home, and always assumed that it would just happen for me one day—after all, I earn a decent amount, manage my finances well enough to save and invest, and seem to have a strong career trajectory (now that I’ve re-entered the corporate world).

It only took an hour of Zillow surfing to cement that home ownership isn’t a given. If I want to even think about buying a house someday, I really need to start planning for it now, I concluded. It’ll take at least a few years to save up for the down payment and set myself up to earn what I need to reasonably afford a house of the quality, size, and location I want. I wasn’t panicked, but I did get a nice reminder that my dreams weren’t just going to fulfill themselves.

The first person I met in San Francisco who lived in Presidio Heights (one of my dream neighborhoods) was a senior I worked for named Briggs. If I had to describe him, I’d say he was very… well-coiffed. Like, literally (I remember wondering how much time it took him to do his hair every day), but also in that he was always so proper and organized. At one point, he got a transfer into the diligence group, and he pulled me aside to tell me the news.

“That’s awesome,” I said. “It’ll be great for you, since it’s what you want to do and also since it pays better too.”

“Oh no, you’ve got that part all wrong,” he corrected me. “Every cent of my salary in excess of what I currently earn for the two years is going to my wedding. My girlfriend’s been waiting forever, and so now I need to start thinking about our wedding. Did you know it costs $40 THOUSAND on average to get married in San Francisco? $30K back in Chicago, but like, even that’s crazy expensive. Don’t get me started on destination weddings, those can be a crapshoot. So part of why I took this job is because I need to save NOW if I’m ever gonna get married… and she was like, definitely gonna walk if I didn’t propose this year…”

I remember people teased him over how over-the-top and anxiety-ridden his financial planning was, but looking back—maybe he was just being prudent and reasonable. Most people grow up thinking they’ll eventually get married, but nobody grows up being told they need to save up for their wedding. It’s definitely not something to take out a loan for, so doesn’t it make sense to start planning early if you know it’s something you eventually want? Even if the path to get there sounds contrived and ridiculous to everyone else?

A few weeks ago, I started helping someone searching for a job. They were just getting started and it was their first time seriously looking for a job since college, so I was mainly helping them with planning the steps in their process.

“When are you hoping to find a job?” I asked. “What’s your timeline?”

“Mmm, I was hoping to get a job by the end of this summer!” they said, excitedly.

“Okay, cool,” I said. “Let’s work backwards from that goal. What do you think is an average amount of time for a junior person to find a job in this industry these days—in the macroeconomic environment? Doesn’t have to be exact, but maybe what you’ve heard from anecdotes or other people you’ve been having coffees or informational interviews with. We can set that date for when you’ll need to get your first version of your resume and application materials done.”

“Oh.. I still need to find people to talk to first, so I haven’t done the coffees yet.”

“Okay, how many of those would you want to do? It usually takes anywhere between one to four weeks to coordinate a time to chat, depending on who you want to meet and how you’re introduced.”

“Oh, hmm. I didn’t think of that list yet, because I first wanted to get my materials done first, so I could get feedback on that too.”

A few back-and-forths later, they admitted, “Finding a job is so much work! There’s so many steps and things you have to do before you even start applying!”

“Uhh.. yeah,” I said. “It’s super exhausting, it’s almost like another full time job.”

“So, everyone goes through this?”

“Yeah…” I said. “It’s not like going to college means you instantly have a job. If anything it just gives you the connections you need to get your foot in the door. You still have to work really hard to actually get the job, especially if it’s one that you really want.”

It’s funny how on one hand, I can preach the importance of planning and making diligent, disciplined progress toward your distant goals, and on the other hand, I’m practically a Gen-Z kid believing I’ll get everything I want by manifesting. To be honest, I’m still struggling to overcome my laziness and build disciplined habits into my life—I’ve pretty much become the adult version of a high schooler who never studies yet still assumes they have a fair shot at a top university.

When I use that analogy, it’s hard to believe I used to be a very studious student. Where did that hard-working, hustle-hard effort go? It feels like self betrayal to admit that I gave that all to work and saved none of it for myself—since all I do when I finish work is just relax and loaf around these days.

I still talk a big game about wanting to be published one day, but when facing the reality of how I spend my time, my goal is just an aspiration right now.

This week, we hosted Geoff and Katie, old friends of mine who were visiting from Phoenix. Geoff and I haven’t seen each other in years, but we still text now and then, mostly about writing.

He and Katie, the ever-considerate houseguests, stopped by City Lights and brought me back a gift: Lunch Poems, by Frank O’Hara.

“These are poems that Frank O’Hara, a famous poet, wrote during his lunch breaks,” said Geoff. “I got it for you, to remind you to always keep writing—every day if you can, even if it’s during lunch.”

That’s where I’m grateful to have accountability—the last piece necessary to go along with discipline and planning to reach my goals. I’m thankful for the encouragement, and will continue to work harder!

That’s all for this week! And as always, thanks for reading :)

Written at home on a Tuesday.

I’ll admit that I’ve dropped my writing practice these past few months. As more and more weeks went by, “Are you still writing your Substack?” messages turned into unsubscribes, and then into “Is writing still something you want to do?”

To answer the question—Yes. It’s been hard, but I want to keep going at it.

Sometimes I’m a bit disappointed in myself, that I cast aside so easily the habit I worked so hard to build. It took so much iteration and experimentation to find something I enjoy doing as much as writing. Yet, it took only a little bit of busyness to demotivate me from writing my weekly posts—or, a more generous take: that in periods of stress time distorts, and when you next come up for air you realize an entire season has passed.

I compare these days of the regular work grind to the freedom and endless present moments of my sabbatical. I’m very grateful to be working, but I can’t help but feel that the speed at which I’m growing now is but a fraction of what I experienced while on break. Perhaps what I really miss isn’t writing itself, but rather the rapid growth that writing (this Substack, at least) helped me synthesize.

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Ironically, the flip side to the demotivation I’ve been experiencing is how much and how quickly I can work when I have a pressing deadline. Fake urgency is so effective because I love the feeling of making progress—even if the goal is arbitrary. While I still have plenty of forces around me enforcing deadlines and asking things of me, I haven’t really asked anything of myself lately. Without a new set of personal goals to reach for, I feel like I’m sleepwalking through life a bit—waking up each day to the same routine, waiting for others’ direction, chasing some short term things like the holiday or trip around the corner, but without much purpose aside from that.

I visited my family in Palo Alto this past weekend, and my sister and I took Lychee for a walk to Piazza’s, the local grocery store in our neighborhood. Steve, one of my friends from high school, was over for dinner, so he joined us for our walk, along with Johnny, her boyfriend.

“I forgot that there was such a big grass field behind Cubberley,” said Steve. His family had moved out of Palo Alto since we’d graduated, so it was rare to hang out with him where we’d both grown up.

“Yeah, I think there’s a soccer field? And baseball field?” I hadn’t seen Cubberley Community Center for a while either, especially since I stopped visiting home as much after Sunny passed. (She used to love chasing the swallows that flew low along the grass, just out of her reach.)

“Seems like four soccer fields,” he observed. “Shall we cut across?” It was a well known shortcut.

Before he could finish asking the question, my sister yelled, “NO!”

We looked at her, surprised at her passionate outburst. “It’s brown beetle season,” she clarified.

The boys were still bemused, so I added, “They’re called June Bugs, in some places—”

“—and they’re these giant brown beetles, like, so big and loud—with really hard shells, and they just stupidly fly aimlessly and clumsily into EVERYTHING for 2 weeks in June and then they die. But there’s so many, like swarms of them, so until they all die out you just get pelted by them, you literally feel them hitting your legs, and they’re SO gross and scary, ugh! And they’re all in the grass!” finished Cat.

“It’s true,” I said. “Like literally, the Wikipedia article says something like ‘as adults, they fly clumsily and aimlessly into light sources until they die.’”

Later, upon writing this piece, I’d spend an hour searching the internet for this exact excerpt. I learned the intricacies of scarabs and rhinoceros beetles but never did find the line I quoted. Part of me felt relief—as if the inability to find that line meant that I couldn’t complete the comparison I had in mind, proving we’re more complex than beetles drawn to more than just the next shiny thing we see. I know it’s a silly, fallacious way of thinking, but I still keep wondering—am I being a June Bug right now?

Sometimes I slip and reveal my worries to people I don’t know so well (something I got desensitized to from publishing my innermost thoughts online, lol). James and I were having dinner with a couple who were a bit older. The wife was in her forties, and point-blank responded to a comment of mine with, “Yeah, but you’re just like that because you’re young. Once you hit 40, you run out of fucks to give. And then you’ll feel so free.”

I looked at her. She was a seriously cool lady, but I felt like she had a life’s worth of experience on me. I couldn’t help but feel so young and unwieldy in contrast. I’d later learn that I was currently the age she was when she first met her husband, who she’d known for 16 years by now. I could barely recognize the woman next to me from the one in the stories of her youth.

I still want to give a fuck, I thought. When I give a fuck, I’m angsty and never satisfied, but at least I feel alive… On the other hand, I want to be happy, and happiness is great in spurts, but as a mode I feel complacent. Perhaps that’s the just the struggle of navigating this phase of adulthood—not knowing which side to pick so you are stuck wanting both, and stuck feeling like you’re chaotically flying back and forth between two extremes.

Hello! It’s been a minute—this week’s post is an extended personal note.

I just finished week 3 of my new job, and have been adjusting to balancing a full-time job again.

When I first quit my job, I struggled with feeling “unproductive” in my new abundance of time. I later grew to cherish the ability to do nothing and just exist. Without endless tasks and calendar events filling my days, I had space to dream, to introspect, to create, because my soul was free to wander and explore. These days, I’ve been feeling the opposite, and I’ve really been struggling with the sense that time and energy suddenly feel scarce.

In some ways, nothing has changed—my new role is remote, so my daily environment is still the same. However, instead of solely working for and on myself, I now have a manager to report to, stakeholders to manage, a team to get to know, context to build, slides to make, documents to write, etc. After that, I had community events and classes I’d signed up for, a blog (and withering novel) to write, chores and cooking to do, a partner and family to hang out with, friends to see, book clubs I should read for, TV shows to catch up on, while trying to make myself choose to go to the gym.

Feeling like this baffles me, because I also recognize that this is almost everyone’s daily life and was my status quo until I took a break. Sure, I knew I was a busy bee in the past, but I never before felt frustrated at having to pick and choose what I could do with my remaining time when 5pm rolls around. I recently met a girl finishing business school who described her life of endless side projects, and thought to myself, “Did I once do all that too? Do I envy that? Do I want to be that busy again?” My answer is now no, but I don’t think my life reflects it at all.

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I realized (maybe 10 years too late, lol) that I have serious time management issues. Not in that I can’t get things done, but that I’ve been constantly making prioritization decisions that result in burnout:

• I’ve always overworked: I’m reachable almost every minute I’m awake, and treat work asks as top priority. I used to work 60-80 hours weekly (for years). Even 3 weeks into my new job, I’ve already worked late on multiple occasions (including the Wendy classic shift, midnight-3am).

• I choose breadth over depth: I meet up with more friends infrequently, which creates acquaintance-friends vs. deep friendships. I pursue many activities and hobbies shallowly, which is great for novelty but prevents mastery.

• I constantly trade off my wellness: I habitually sleep less than 6 hours, I let go of diet and exercise whenever the going gets tough, and am constantly dehydrated and getting sick. Back in my Big 4 days, I used to joke that my default state was general malaise but ironically the status hasn’t seemed to leave for good.

This is where I kick myself. Wasn’t the whole point of my sabbatical to take time, recharge, figure out what gives me life, so that I wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes again? The worst part was that I wanted to spend more time writing over my other hobbies, and it’s the one thing that I haven’t actually done at all for the past month.

I recently read (skimmed?) a self-help book, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, because I was drawn to its cheeky subtitle: Time Management for Mortals. The premise of the book is prioritization: there’s not enough time to do everything we want to do. Instead of productivity hacking, the only way to really manage time is to let go of the idea of doing everything and identify only the things we really, actively, want—and do a ruthless culling of everything else. Its simple point is deceptively difficult to accept—I don’t want to admit that I’m mortal—I want to have my cake and eat it too, even though I now know that it can’t be the case anymore.

I miss the days where I had endless energy, the manic college-student type where I felt limitless, endlessly chatting or partying or writing term papers through the night. Where I could borrow from tomorrow ad infinitum, and my body and mind would never feel the recoil. These days I know and acutely feel that I am only mortal, with the same 24 hours to use each day as everyone else.

Truthfully, I don’t have the capacity to deeply invest in community building, or make a ton of new friends, or go to every book club or meetup or interesting class or salon out there. What I really need is to unbusy myself, to make the space to rest before I get tired. (I now believe that’s the only way to prevent burnout.)

I hope that in giving up many of the things I like, I’ll have more space for what I love. My goal in the absence of busyness is to devote more time to health: to sleep on a sane schedule, exercise regularly, eat nutritiously, and spend time on mindfulness—including the introspection and mind-wandering necessary to write these posts and my novel. I’ve also overextended my social energy lately, and now want to deepen existing friendships than create more new connections despite my love for meeting new people. (I’m not used to being protective of my needs, but I’m also not used to living without hubris…😅)

It’ll be tough, especially since I used to wear my busy bee reputation like a badge, and placed so much of my identity in having myriad interests. My busy schedule insidiously took over my life, which contributed to my eventual burnout. I was the proverbial frog in the boiling pot; but this time around, my break gave me enough time away from busyness to realize how dangerous too much of it can be. And this time around, I’m determined to find a solution for it.

Thanks for reading! I don’t have a great way of ending this, other than to ask that you keep me accountable in writing and to thank you for your support. Let me know if you’ve gone through something similar—I’d love to take notes where I can.

They say that after you turn 21, your birthdays become less of a big deal.1 While I mostly agree, this year feels worth celebrating. Not only have I changed the most this year since my college days, but also my birthday also coincidentally falls at the end of my sabbatical, which was a huge growth arc for me. I also feel apprehensive about getting older (and feeling older), which too is worth processing and acknowledging.

At work today, we were talking about how a test to see if you’re Millennial or Gen Z is if you know Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a wrestler or an actor. Since I didn’t pass the sniff test (me: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson once had hair?!), I’ll fully out myself by mentioning that today’s piece is partly inspired by a TikTok I saw, based on the short story “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros:

If getting older is about collecting more perspectives, I can’t agree more. Today’s piece is a look back at some memories from when I was younger, with some observations on how I’ve changed.

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Written on Caltrain on a rainy day, listening to Ghibli lullabies. It feels simultaneously new and nostalgic to write as I watch the cities pass by, even though I’ve ridden this route so many times I know the stops by heart.

I remember starting my first job at 22, and being confused at how there were so many folks who were in their 2nd or 3rd career in my class starting alongside me. I was fresh out of college and felt so “ahead” as I climbed the career ladder voraciously, chasing my early promotions and certifications, proud of the fast growth and trajectory of my professional life.

There was one woman I talked to in my start class, 27 and just married, who used to work at a suicide prevention call center and did a master's degree to pivot. Everything about her past and personality differed from mine. She seemed like the type who didn’t want to chat unless she needed something work related… yet here we were, carpooling to an inventory count (which, for those who are unfamiliar, is the Big 4’s way of hazing first year auditors).2

I’d asked her why she wanted to work in accounting, and why she made such a big change. Perhaps she was annoyed at the subtext of my question—the belief that saving lives was so much more noble and glamorous than accounting, where we effectively earned minimum wage as first years. Still, the monotony of the drive led her to answer me.

“I got too tired, and I didn’t want to shoulder other people’s burdens anymore. I have a husband now, and I wanted to create a stable life. Accounting is a perfect profession for that, and EY is a great company.”

I forgot about her when I turned 27, and I wonder why I remember her now. Perhaps it’s because I’m now at a point where I feel both desires—a youthful one driven by passion and hunger, and and an older one that craves serenity and stability.

Earlier this year, one of my former coworkers and I were catching up after we’d both left Forward and were taking breaks in our career. I shared how I was struggling between wanting to be inspired by work yet also scared of feeling disappointed again, and needing to accept that I quickly needed to find an income and provide for myself… and wondering why it was so hard for me to accept the natural rhythm of adult life the way that others so easily have.

“I feel that so hard,” he said. “It’s like that quote in Jujitsu Kaisen, where Nanami says, ‘Finding more fallen hairs on your pillow, watching your favorite stuffed bread disappear from the convenience store… The accumulation of those little despairs is what makes a person an adult.’” I don’t like the idea of despairs nor accumulating them. In this regard I wonder if I’m refusing to grow up, or if I’m trying to accept that I already have—and then I realize that I’ve been doing both.

My relationship is one area where I’ve noticed this duality. At 22, I had a serious boyfriend at the time who had mentioned marriage several times. His mom warned him that people don’t stop maturing until they’re 24. She was right and wrong at the same time—she was right that we weren’t meant for each other, but she was wrong about my capacity for change. Since our breakup and dating other folks, I learned a lot about what I both wanted and didn’t want in a partner, but overall grew more jaded as I got older. I grew uncertain about whether I even wanted to get married or start a family. I was scared of having a family fall apart or be the reason it failed—to the point that I’d almost given up on the idea, discouraged by all the disappointment I had both received and given in the past.

Children have a lot of faith, a bold, risky action driven by belief. In that respect I’ve become more like a child; I started acting out of the faith that I could be fully myself and be accepted and loved for who I was. I didn’t realize how many masks I had collected over the years and how good I’d gotten at putting on the perfect one to please the audience in front of me. James was the one person who I was just myself around and stopped having to calculate who I wanted to show up as. When I started to fall hard for James last year, I got scared again—I didn’t want him to see and be hurt by my imperfections. However, he decided that he still wanted to try his hardest and commit to our relationship, regardless of how difficult it might be. At 27, I decided to take a chance on love again, with someone motivated enough to take the leap first and kind enough to hold my hand as I try too. My biggest lesson to grow into was fully accepting that relationships involve finite, flawed people, and how we can choose to accept and love them anyway.

At 29, now, we’ve been living together for almost two years. It’s funny how in letting go of the idea that a partner could hold your hopes and happiness actually brings about the opposite effect—and in this aspect, I feel like I’ve grown more youthful, able to dream again and get excited about my hopes for our future.

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I’m also thankful of the ways that time has matured me. I think of 23-year old me, bemoaning the fact that my closest friends were all in Los Angeles and New York. There was one night I felt particularly disconnected, and I got into a random Facebook conversation with the older brother of a girl I used to be close with growing up. He was close to the age I am now, kind enough to answer my distressed questions about keeping up with my friends, staying in touch with people that had now become a social media rolodex, and adjusting to the slowed pace of life post-grad.

“I’m trying to stay motivated,” he said. “Life pace is a lot slower than it used to be—in suburbia things are sleepy and a lot of time passes in between life updates. You see the same people all the time,” he said. “I’m now almost 5 years out of college though, so that's kinda scary. So now I'm actually trying to get outside and meet more people before real adult life sets in.

“I think if there were two extremes it'd be on one side the routine and predictable stable life, and on the other side the ultra spontaneous life,” he added. “My take on it now is that the 20s are a good time to build up good habits, but also gives you enough room to try things out and mess up a few times. Sometimes I find myself too much on one side or the other. Now I'm finding that in between space where I can establish some routine but leave some wiggle room to try out things… For married people with kids you throw the rest of that free time out the window though, so beware.”

I don’t know if I’d give the same advice as he did—but I’ve also deliberately chosen a different path from others several times. I left accounting, I broke up with my college boyfriend, I moved out of the suburbs, I quit my job with nothing lined up. I also let go of some friends and refused to let other friendships atrophy. I feel proud that a lot of those efforts have paid off in some way, years later.

And I think that freedom is the heart of it. As I grow older, I both gain more resources to do what I want, but I also feel my energy and time becoming more limited. Part of me is unhappy with this never-ending optimization problem raising the stakes each year, but another part of me—the me I discovered during my sabbatical and am still growing into at 29—remembers that our lives are what we make of them and is excited for the changes that come as I learn and grow.

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Thanks for reading!

Can you tell I’ve been extra introspective lately? Since signing my offer, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my novel and the characters within. My protagonist feels a lot like a younger me (in all my toxic traits too, lol) so I’ve been digging through many of my old journal entries to see what I used to say.

In other news—I’ll be celebrating my birthday and end-of-sabbatical with a small thing in San Francisco. If you’re around next Sunday, reply to this email and I’ll shoot you the Partiful link. I’d love to see (and meet!—for those I don’t already know) you all.

Lastly, next Friday (3/10) is my last scheduled shift at Butter&. I’d love to see you if you haven’t dropped by yet—we’ll be doing an Irish coffee cake for St. Patrick’s Day as a limited flavor this month! :)

Written after helping teach a poke class at Founders Inc., a community I’ve been spending more time with recently.

Lately, I’ve noticed a change in my personality. Perhaps this change had been gradual, but had now progressed far enough for me to see a departure from who I used to be. A younger Wendy romanticized non-stop travel as the epitome of the luxe life, following travel bloggers and planning dream vacations to different destinations whenever I had the money. Not that I have the money now to jet-set (far from it, lol), but I’m now no longer drawn to a life of tourism. I’m now more interested in learning what it means to grow roots in a city.

A part of me always spurned calling San Francisco my home. Having grown up in Palo Alto, I joked about my life feeling like HBO’s Silicon Valley, rolling my eyes at how many aspects fit the many SF stereotypes. It’s as though if I rejected the city through enough self-deprecating jokes, I could still separate my identity from the collective culture of my surroundings.

Yet in the Great Pandemic Migration, I weirdly enough had no desire to follow the trend and restart my life in New York. Again, during my sabbatical, when I no longer had a job to tether me to one place, I also had no desire to become a nomad and live in a different country every week.

“Is it because traveling or moving like that is too impulsive? Too unplanned?” someone asked me at one point.

I had to think a lot about that question, and I think I finally have an answer that rings true when I repeat it. There’s nothing wrong with traveling, but deep down, I knew it would not give me what I needed. While I tell myself that I love to travel because I love seeing more of the world and experiencing foreign cultures, I also use it to run away from feelings of discomfort and stagnancy. The novelty of being in a different country is enough to shake up my life, especially with the blessing of impermanence—where I’m just Wendy here to have fun and nothing else.

It’s comfortable being a tourist—someone who can just consume, observe, borrow with no expectation of return. Every interaction belongs to the moment, with no consequence or significance from them—it’s consumerism at its most convenient. Admittedly, I was also a tourist at home in San Francisco—despite getting to know the city’s best food spots, I had taken no ownership of trying to build its culture or better its future.

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I think about my role (er, lack thereof) in the community more often these days, especially as I reflect on local scenes I’ve witnessed and enjoyed in recent weeks.

I think of the lady who owns A K Meats in the Richmond. I didn’t catch her name, but I watch her converse happily in both fluent English and Spanish with locals who visit her shop. She checks in on us as we eat on the sidewalk, asking us if we have enough hot peppers with our hot sandwiches, remembering to take care of us even though her shop is so busy. A passerby walks past us and yells, “Best pastrami in San Francisco!”

I think of The Berkeley Kitchens, the commercial space home to locally beloved (and top rated) eateries. Where locals gathering for lunch at Standard Fare on a Wednesday make the scene as buzzy as a Sunday Brunch. Where Alain, the owner of La Noisette Sweets, runs after us down the block to give us a baggie of canelés, exclaiming, “These are really good! Try some, I forgot to recommend them!”

And most obviously, I witness it at my part-time job at Butter&, a bakery in the Dogpatch of SF, where locals excitedly enter our new shop.

“I’m so glad you all are in this space! I remember when this used to be Kin Khao!”

“I used to come here all the time, back when it was Piccino’s Noon All Day!”

“This spot is so gorgeous. I walk by it every day, but now I finally have a reason to come inside! When did you guys open?”

Working my best front-of-house smile, I’ll reply peppily, “We’ve been around since 2017, just down the street—but we just opened our retail store last month!”

“I heard!” some would say. “I saw that you guys had so many issues with the renovation, especially the floor tiles?”

“Oh yeah, we had these gorgeous black-and-white tiles done, but the city made us redo it all,” I’d explain, not from my experience but from the stories of the owners and other employees I’d heard. “It took over $15,000 to redo the floors! And it delayed our opening by over a month.”

“Well, I’m glad you guys are finally open. This space is so beautiful. Congratulations, you must be so proud!”

I feel like an imposter whenever I chat with locals like this—I want the owners and employees to hear the praise directly, without me intercepting. I feel like I don’t deserve the congrats, since I hadn’t fought through all the hardships and built this business from the ground up like they had. Here, I was also a tourist of sorts: a series of coincidences landed me a part-time gig helping run their front of house and assist in operations. We all accepted it as a temporary thing, evidenced by everyone greeting me with a “Yay, you’re still here!” when I show up for my Friday shifts.

Especially now that the pandemic has ended and folks are moving back into town, it’s easier to picture the city coming back to life. I wonder if there’s a part I want to play in its rebirth—if there’s something I can do to contribute to the warmth I feel from the small businesses in our neighborhoods or the positive aspects of San Francisco. I’m not about to start a small business, but I do wonder what it’d look like to grow the spaces I’ve been enjoying lately.

I don’t have any answers; I only have a small nudge in quiet moments: If you’ve reluctantly accepted that you love this city, why not give back to it? Perhaps that’s why I’ve been so fascinated by communities and third spaces lately—they seem to gather others with the same inklings that I have, as if we were kindle huddling around a campfire.

I’m still learning what civic engagement and community building means to me, but it feels good to accept that as meme-worthy as it may be, San Francisco is a place I can see as a long-term home.

That’s all for this week—sorry that I don’t have a tidy end for it; it just means I have more processing and learning to do still. 😅 In the meantime, here are some spaces I’ve been in recently, alphabetically listed with Google Maps links, if you are so inclined to explore:

• Arcana, an event space/plant shop/wine bar in the Mission

• Founders, Inc., a laboratory and studio for tech builders (oriented toward AI, Web 3) in Fort Mason

• Founders You Should Know (FYSK), a Slack community and local monthly event connecting SF founders and talent

• Manny’s, a long time event space/restaurant/political bookstore in the Mission

• Minds Matter Bay Area, a volunteer organization focused on helping low-income high schoolers get into college (I’m part of the leadership/admissions team here!)

• The Center SF, a yoga studio/cafe/spiritual center open to the public

• The Ruby, a coworking space for women and non-binary writers in the Mission

• The SF Commons, salons/discussions in a shared living room in Hayes Valley (I’m a member here!)

My friend Patricia also wrote a thread on Twitter about some of her favorite third spaces in SF. I haven’t been to all of them, so hmu if you want to check them out sometime.

Apologies for the missed post last week (and the late post this week)—I’ve been working on an extensive New Zealand guide that I ultimately wasn’t going to finish this week, which I also didn’t finish last week. Instead of forcing my hand and rushing the guide, I’ll share about my latest update in my personal life: applying to jobs.

Posting consistently matters more to me than writing a lengthy piece, so this won’t happen too often again in the future. 😅

Written while eating red-braised pork belly—they make for such yummy leftovers. It’s one of my favorite Chinese dishes as a kid, and I’ve been so pleased to finally have made it for myself.

I read a beautiful piece the other day on the dangers of National Parks and the risks that come with any adventure. There’s a quote that stood out to me that I started reflecting on this week:

There is a reason why they call the Grand Canyon the Inverted Mountain, why there are signs at the top that read going down is optional, going up is mandatory.

Though the author is explaining the dangers of staying in the canyon base for too long, she makes a grander point that many folks—especially those with experience, like she—will disregard warning signs, believing they aren’t the target audience for such novice advice. For her, she overestimated how much heat her body could withstand, and lost energy while climbing back up the canyon wall. Her hubris bought her a slow, hazy death by heat stroke—until a chance encounter with a park ranger saved her life.

You can tell my anxiety’s at its peak when I start comparing my comfy city life to a near-death incident in the Grand Canyon. However, I still felt like she was speaking to me: Had I treated my sabbatical like a hike in the Grand Canyon? I had told everyone how excited I was for the “canyon,” and gotten to enjoy the beauty of its depths—but had I, like she, overestimated my ability to climb back up?

A hike is a good analogy for me, because I tend to also have low stamina in physical activity. I’m not a runner, but when I do, I have a moment about 5 minutes in where I think, Oh, yeah, this isn’t as fun as I thought it’d be. The initial adrenaline wears off, and I’m reminded that this is difficult. I probably don’t look too hot anymore. This hurts. I’m losing steam. I’m tired.

This month, I’ve been reflecting on endurance—in particular, the fear that I lack it. I feel this when at the end of a week, I’m exhausted from applying to jobs, from trying to serve a tiny slice of myself to various strangers facing a buffet of candidates to to choose from. Each action of putting myself out there—be it a message, text, interview, call, rejection—costs more energy than I had initially planned for. Perhaps it’s an aspect of growing older. Perhaps another aspect is realizing that failure doesn’t exist in many situations—there’s only pivoting: deciding that the fight isn’t worth it anymore, choosing to find a different path, hoping that we’ll find success in that new direction. When it comes to any type of difficult feat, how willing am I to push past my setbacks and continue fighting?

“Your skills don’t seem like a fit for this position,” recruiters write back. “But you’d be a great candidate for a senior finance role,” they’d add.

“You’re being picky and you’re applying to roles outside your finance background. Naturally, it’ll be harder to land,” well-meaning advice-givers would say.

Am I being obstinate by pushing forward anyway?

“Applying to jobs feels like dating,” Kristine said to me. She isn’t the first person to make this comparison.

I laughed at how true it was. While we were now commiserating applying to jobs together, we had spent most of our mid-20s commiserating dating. If there’s anything I learned from those years, it’s that most of the time, things don’t work out because of timing. Who they are in that moment isn’t what you need or want, and vice versa. Alternatively, you could be rejected for a plethora of reasons beyond your control: they forgot to take down their profile and weren’t looking, or had just decided to get more serious with someone else. I’ve been amused and simultaneously triggered as recruiters have gotten back to me with similar statements (including a “Whoops, we filled this position a month ago! We should have taken it down, sorry!”).

I actually really hated using dating apps because of how icky it felt to judge someone based on just a cursory sample of pictures and some witty lines (that female friends likely wrote for them?). At the same time, I felt exhausted trying to make them work for me. I tried to be genuine—I never ghosted anyone and told them the truth if I thought things wouldn’t work out, I treated each date with intentionality even if I was dating multiple people at the same time, I filled my schedule with exciting activities so that my romantic life wouldn’t be the only one I had. I stayed in relationships and situationships that didn’t feel right for too long, wondering if this was just part of love. Was I being too picky? Were my standards too high? Was it something wrong with me?

The Netflix hit Indian Matchmaking follows Indian singles as their families hire Sima Auntie (the matchmaker) to create “good matches” and teach them about relationships. Spoiler alert: While the show is entertaining, Sima Auntie is objectively bad at her job. Moreover, she chides women with too many preferences for their prospective partners—she’d quip back, “a full head of hair is sometimes too much to ask for.” (This never sat well with me, especially since she was willing to accommodate the men who wanted the Indian equivalent of Emma Watson.)

What stood out to me though was that the most attractive, have-it-all singles (thinking of Shital or Pradhyuman) didn’t just rely on Sima Auntie. Despite her telling them over and over that they’re too picky and need to change their personality to be more tolerant, etc., they were open-minded and creative in who and how they met, and kept putting themselves out there despite so many dates on the show not working out. Ultimately, they both found awesome matches outside of the show, and called in to tell Sima Auntie how happy they were that they didn’t give up.

James, in a similar way, is an ideal partner for me—and I don’t think I’d have been able to date him (er, grown my feelings beyond friendship) if I’d settled for a bad fit earlier or closed off my heart after giving up the search. I worked hard to get my emotional health to a state where I could support a healthy relationship, and had learned enough to detect and avoid red flags before we decided to date. Even now, we still work hard on our relationship—we refuse to give up on our problems and figure out how to overcome them together, be it his building a company or my figuring out my career and life.

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The hard part about having ambitious goals is that you have to have the endurance to see them through. When I went on sabbatical, my goal was to find what I loved doing and to figure out a career that could facilitate that—and that I’d either have to build or find one at the tail of this break. Because I have a strong vision for my life, I’ll need to work harder to realize it. Right now, that looks like accepting the reality that finding a job that fits might take longer for me than what I’m comfortable with.

I’m also not doing this trek alone. Kristine and I support each other in our job search and sabbaticals (she and Janelle also literally supported me during our 5-day Inca trek in 2018). James, our families, friends, and readers(!) have been supporting me as well, and I’m thankful for everything.

Moreover, many of my close (and newer!) friends are also those who want to carve their own path, who want more than the 9-5, who are insistent on finding what freedom and truth look like for them. Some are even in the exact same boat—currently or thinking of going on sabbatical, actively applying to jobs, or fighting to create and build something meaningful.

Though I’m offer-less at the end of my first month of job hunting, I need to remind myself I’m just getting warmed up. Though the pain is starting to set in, I know the view at the end will be worth it. Until then, I’ll just need to keep pushing on.

Written under a fluffy fur throw, sipping on osmanthus oolong tea. So cozy.

Last week, I wrote about finding inspiration—ways that I expose myself to new content, get the creative juices flowing, and find ideas that pique my interest. Some refer to this as the “information diet,” and it’s been a longstanding trend to carefully curate what media we consume online, as one might eliminate junk from a food diet.

While there’s merit in choosing nutritionally dense “food” to consume, we too often overlook the importance of digestion: the process of breaking down food, pulling out the nutrients, and choosing what to absorb and throw away. It’s a slow but necessary process for our bodies, as only after digesting do we have enough energy to continue in the next day.

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Similarly, idea digestion is also critical. If we intake too much content but can’t process it, we feel overloaded and weary. When we only take in the thoughts of others, we give away the space for our own opinion. Only after we finish processing do we gain the clarity to determine what we believe and are able to grow.

Lastly, idea digestion can only happen through action—specifically, creative action.1 I define this loosely as any act where you create something from nothing, whether it’s making a statement through an art piece, building a product from scratch, or privately journaling about what you’ve learned. When you’re given a blank slate to start, you’re forced to pull from all the tools, references, and experiences in your mind. It’s self-expression in its purest form.

In all earnestness, I’m often surprised by what pops up when I create: personal insecurities, news and/or propaganda, editorials and hot takes, popular gossip that may or may not be true. It’s only through this audit do I realize how many messages I internalize, often without knowing, and almost always without choosing what to take with me and what to throw away.

That’s why digestion is so much more important than ingestion. We might discover loads of inspiration from research, but until we actually put our pen to the paper, we have nothing that truly belongs to us. Only through action do we actually begin tapping into the raw materials to find what we want to create.

And yes—action is difficult, especially when it also requires consistency. How many of us have had great ideas, only to have them wither from lack of follow through? I have so many examples in my life:

• I started this Substack (originally about food) in 2019 and brainstormed over 60 ideas for future posts, but didn’t touch it for 2 years (until August 2022) out of fear of rejection.

• I wanted to start a tea company early in my sabbatical. I bought tea and experimented with blends, but didn’t like them enough. Overwhelmed by the startup cost, I didn’t feel strongly enough to push through my block.

• In college, my friend Fay and I thought about starting a poke food truck, before all the hype. (We cleverly were going to name it The Pokenom Center.) I remember getting excited and then getting too busy with school.

When action falls short of ideas and inspiration, there’s only missed potential—something awesome that never gets actualized.

I now know for me, nothing feels more depressing than unrealized potential. It’s a passive concession to stagnancy, a story arc that never gets explored and thereby can never resolve. It’s a feeling of stuckness, without admitting that I’m stuck. It’s the quiet self-rejection, my choice to say that everything is more important than what I’m trying to tell myself.

On the contrary, when I synthesize these ideas and commit them to paper, I surprise myself with how much insight I gain. It requires discipline to intentionally make and commit time to think about what I’ve learned, but I believe wisdom and clarity only come when we’ve processed the past.

Similarly, the beauty of creative expression is that I can invite others to understand my perspective. That becomes the next challenge: in addition to the discipline of creating consistently, I must also express my thoughts clearly so that I don’t confuse myself and those around me. (Perhaps that’s why I’m so frustrated when my skill doesn’t match my taste. It risks me being misunderstood when I’m trying to be vulnerable.)

It’s an inefficient process, for sure: to tinker with words until I land the message I want, to deal with the discomfort when I don’t, to decide to try again despite my bruised ego. However, if I can’t own my words and thoughts, I may as well be sleepwalking through life: disconnected from the present and content to consume without conviction.

So, to better build the discipline of processing and creating my own thoughts, I’ll remind myself: Just pick up a pen, and write. Becoming your own agent is worth the hard work.

Liked this? Consider helping me by sharing it on social media or liking/commenting/cross-posting within Substack. I appreciate your readership and support!

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As a bonus: Here’s the first paragraph(?) to what I might turn into a prose poem or flash fiction piece, inspired by a strange dream I had yesterday afternoon. I usually ignore and forget my dreams, but I was so fired up from writing this week’s post that I dropped everything and just wrote.

Hopefully you’ll think of this post as a midweek pick-me-up too—it’s on luck, inspiration, and how I plan to create more opportunity for myself.

Written at Asha Tea House, sipping on (unsweetened) Asian pear oolong tea. It’d taste better at 20% sweetness but I’m still on my new year’s health kick, so… 🥲

One of my intentions this year is to write more, by:

1. Publishing my newsletter consistently (weekly)

2. Getting a piece accepted by a publication (literary journal, media website, or magazine)

In order to do any of these, I’d need to create the system to enable my writing habit. While I write fairly consistently now, I still pine for ✨inspiration✨, that mysterious wind that generates ideas to propel my words onto the page.

Whenever I’m not inspired, I create self-defeating excuses:

I don’t have any inspiration, so my ideas won’t resonate.

I don’t want to write today; I’ll just do it a different day when I’m feeling inspired.

How do these writers create such good stories? What inspires them? Why am I not like them?

Inspiration is a lot like luck

I’m starting to think that inspiration is a lot like luck—it’s what I want to blame when I can’t achieve a certain outcome or can’t find the right opportunity. “I have no inspiration” becomes an easy cop-out to continue doing nothing, just as “I’m just unlucky” can be used to justify a loss or rejection.

While I can control some things, I can’t just will inspiration. Instead, I’ve been reflecting on how to create an environment that will summon it more consistently, or a system where I can write without it.

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4 Types of Luck

I’m reminded of what James H. Austin describes as four types of luck, which Marc Andreessen and others have written about in an entrepreneurial context. I like the way Naval Ravikant describes them:

1. Blind luck

The first kind of luck you might say is blind luck. Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened. That’s fortune, that’s fate.

2. Luck from hustling

Then there’s luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.

It’s almost like mixing a petri dish and seeing what combines. Or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines. You’re generating enough force and hustle and energy that luck will find you.

3. Luck from preparation

A third way is that you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field. When other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice. So you become sensitive to luck and that’s through skill and knowledge and work.

4. Luck from your unique character

Then the last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind. But that’s what we want to talk about. Which is where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, where then luck finds you.

For example, let’s say that you’re the best person in the world at deep sea underwater diving. You’re known to take on deep sea underwater dives that nobody else will even attempt to dare.

Then, by sheer luck, somebody finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast. They can’t get it. Well, their luck just became your luck, because they’re going to come to you to get that treasure. You’re going to get paid for it.

Similar to entrepreneurs, writers often have to create something from just an idea, relying on a combination of hard work and “luck” to have their piece succeed. I don’t think I’ve found success yet, so I frequently feel like I’m hustling but not getting to where I want to be. How do we create and capture more luck for ourselves, then?

Austin writes a recap:

Chance I is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it.

Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.

Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations.

Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

Andreessen interprets this through a set of questions:

How energetic are we? How inclined toward motion are we?

How curious are we? How determined are we to learn about our chosen field, other fields, and the world around us?

How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing—at linking together multiple, disparate, apparently unrelated experiences on the fly?

How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view—a personal approach—a personal set of “eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” that will uniquely prepare us to create?

Thus, I’d like to do more to nurture these aspects in my life to nourish my brain and soul—my creative playground. I’ve decided to use these questions to guide some of my personal growth goals this year as I pursue becoming a better writer, thinker, and human.

Pursuing Curiosity

Here are a few directions I’m excited to explore:

Masters of the craft

I’d like to learn more what it means to master the technique and art of storytelling. While I enjoy beach reads as much as anyone else (and even like writing them), fiction written by notable authors teaches me the most. Here are two pieces I read this week that I loved:

• Barn Burning, a short story by Haruki Murakami, about a writer who meets a man with a peculiar hobby. He’s a master of saying nothing and everything at the same time. This story tripped me up and got me questioning everything I just read.

• The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir by Joan Didion, on losing her husband of 40 years. (I finally finished!) She captures a portrait of her marriage through memories that come and fade as she’s processing her grief. It depicts the unraveling of a famous rational mind, delicately and beautifully.

I get the most fired up when I read (or watch—I like TV and movies too!) something I find masterful. I’m left in awe afterwards and bask in the story’s halo, impressed and inspired. I never have explicit reading goals (I tend to favor quantity over quality when meeting goals 😓) but I’d like to have more of these moments this year. If you have book or short story recommendations, send them my way!

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Becoming more open-minded

Ever since the 2016 election, the idea of living in an echo chamber has been one of my biggest fears. Ironically, I still subconsciously self-select into only accepting thoughts similar to mine—to the point that I’ve unintentionally shut others down despite believing that cancel culture isn’t good for society. I’d like to become more open-minded: someone who can listen to an argument and refrain from judgment and believe there’s something to be learned regardless of how I feel.

I read plenty of Internet stuff, but I also wanted to meet real people who’d expose me to new ideas. At the risk of becoming even more of an SF stereotype, I decided to join The Commons, a community that leads classes and discussions on a wide range of topics. Here’s a snippet of the course catalog this quarter:

A lot of these are outside my comfort zone, but I’m planning to sign up for a class or two to learn something new. I want to become someone who can think listen to new ideas, chew on them, and formulate what I’d like to believe only after thinking everything through.

Older, foundational texts

I recently started following several talented Gen Z writers on Twitter. Their problems sound very similar to ones I’ve experienced, and many people resonate with their writing. It made me wonder: are we all trapped in cycles of the same struggles, because we refuse to look and learn beyond ourselves?

James loves a book, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It’s actually the personal diary of a former Roman emperor, likely the most powerful person in the world at the time. It’s baffling how relatable his problems were, which makes his diary so interesting to study—his thoughts, conclusions, and aphorisms still resonate centuries later. (This guy would have killed it on Twitter.)

It makes me realize how much content I consume has been created recently vs. in the past 500 years. Moreover, an audiobook binge of self-help/business books on our New Zealand trip made me realize how much modern content chases profit by regurgitating older wisdom in more simplified, pithy, Tweet-size chunks. (It further reinforces my belief that most nonfiction books can be distilled into a 10-minute TED talk, and only the ones that can’t are likely worth reading.)

I wish I had a more extensive library to borrow wisdom from whenever I struggle in life. However, I’ve mostly only consumed content made in the last few decades—so I’ll have to start reading more to build those references for myself. Until then, I’ll just share this motivational quote I like on the importance of reading foundational texts (again, from Naval Ravikant):

No book in the library should scare you. Whether it’s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book… when you’re reading a book and you’re confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you’re working out. But you’re building mental muscles instead of physical muscles.

I have people in my life I consider to be very well-read who aren’t very smart… they started out reading a set of false or just weakly true things, and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their worldview. Then, when new things come, they judge the new idea based on a foundation they already built. Your foundation is critical. When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality…

If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book. Then you can just learn.

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I’m out of room this week, but I’ll continue on this topic next week as I write about building a discipline around synthesizing my thoughts and capturing what I’ve learned. Hope you enjoyed the discussion, and as always, thank you for reading!

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I used to write postcards to close friends whenever I traveled, jotting down the daily events from our temporary lives in a foreign land. While I don’t write postcards anymore (I’m terrible at sending them on time) I still believe that it’s not the places you visit, but the unique circumstances and people you meet that forge memories so special.

I wanted to reminisce, so think of this week’s newsletter as three postcards I would have sent you vs. a logistics-oriented travel guide (which I’ll also publish soon).

Written while drinking the last of my Jin Xuan “milk” oolong tea… 🥲 Oh well, time to buy some more!

Cathedral Cove

Dec 17 • The journey along the way

Having arrived in Auckland early with a few days to ourselves, we drove 2.5 hrs to Cathedral Cove, a famously beautiful beach that we then hiked to for another hour. I know it was mostly the weather’s fault, but we still felt somewhat catfished once we arrived at the end of our hike.

To be fair, it was a nice beach. However, we found ourselves impressed with so much more along the way, such as the views of Hahei Beach or the lush jungle we hiked and drove through. We’d even stepped into a church accidentally (which actually turned out to be a cute restaurant?) before reaching our destination.

We sat on the beach for a while, trying to make the most of the view we’d journeyed to. James likes to meditate, but I find it difficult to let my mind just wander. Similar to the hike, I fixate on destinations instead of what I can observe while finding my way. Still, I tried my best, jotting down the thoughts that came so that I could let them go. These thoughts soon became motifs, popping up again at later points of the trip. Still, I was the most thankful for the reminder to live in the present.

Just for fun, here are my meditations from the beach:

• It’s the journey, not the destination

• Sand feels different in every place you go. This is something you’d only know if you’ve been to many places, and took the time to play in the sand.

• In order to write good stories, you need to witness growth.

  • See new sights —> traveling? hear new ideas?

  • Experience extreme situations —> hardship, discomfort? growth is exclusive to only those who opt in?

  • Maybe that’s why people like solo traveling? Because it’s both of the two?

• New Zealand is a dream destination, but it also looks like home. Maybe California is also a dream, but I haven’t sought its beauty as intentionally.

• Breathe in the sea air. It’s good for your lungs but better for your soul.

• Nicest portapotty EVER

Milford Sound

Dec 23 • Awestruck, my new favorite emotion

A lucky glitch in a booking system led James and me to each have our own guide for a twilight kayak adventure through Milford Sound—an accidental private tour. As a result, our tour guides, Damon and Jack “Fluffy,” took us off the typical path to explore different parts of the sound.

As we paddled, they told stories of previous tours: how on a rainy day, the mountains would trickle hundreds of waterfalls like tears; how in the iciest winters, they’d kayak to a cacophony of crackling as ice broke from the glaciers above and plummeted into the surrounding sea. I could hardly believe it as I dipped my hand into the temperate waves that rocked by, already overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of everything around me.

Suddenly, James’s kayak zoomed past us, riding a large ocean swell. My guide, Fluffy, yelled to me, “Wanna go surfing, too? PADDLE! PADDLE! PADDLE! … aaand HOLD!” We chased and raced, splashing in the choppy surf.

“This part of the sound is over 200 meters deep,” said Damon. “Out there,” he gestured backward, “that leads to the Tasman Sea—the Pacific Ocean.”

We discussed the surrounding ecosystem and fjords, Kiwi slang (chur! sweet as!), their education system, identity and the relationship between the majority white population and the native Maori people, various book and podcast recommendations, how New Zealanders can seldom afford the lamb and crayfish they are so famous for exporting, and how to cook the abalone and blue mackerel native to these waters.

At one point, we arrived below Stirling Falls, or Wai Manu in Maori, which translates to “cloud on the water.” Damon explained the ancient Maori ritual that involves taking pounamu, a sacred green stone, directly under the falls. Then, he added, “If you guys are down for it, we can take you directly underneath the waterfall. See that little crack there, where it’s all white? We can get the front of the boat into that if we work together. But you’re gonna get hit with a ton of water.”

James and I looked at each other, knowing there was only one response. Few people can say they’ve taken a waterfall to the face. I’m glad I became one of them.

Lake Tekapo

Dec 25 • The endlessness of the sky and new beginnings

Lake Tekapo sits in the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve—an area protected by the government from aircraft and light pollution, ideal for stargazing. What we didn’t consider was that they limited the stargazing observatories to tours booked weeks in advance—which we learned the hard way as we faced the closed gate at Mt John Observatory at 10:30pm on Christmas.

“I mean, isn’t it just the night sky? Don’t you just look up?” I exclaimed, flabbergasted. Truthfully, I was feeling guilty for not researching tours well enough in advance.

“I mean… maybe we can just pull over somewhere and try,” said James. By now, we were the only car to be seen for miles. We pulled into a small dirt lot, turned off the ignition, and looked upward, but the stars had not yet emerged. We waited as the sun’s hazy yellow glow faded and for it, and then the moon, to both set beyond the horizon. It was midnight when the sky became black and our eyes started adjusting.

In the darkness, we could finally make out a few speckles, then constellations, and finally the streak of luminance that was—confirmed—not a cloud but the milky way. Without a fancy camera, we could only capture the ephemeral sky with our memory.

“If only I had a better camera,” I muttered. I lamented my inability to preserve this moment as I squatted, trying to position my iPhone against my makeshift tripod (purse) on the ground. I had little to show for my results, but I was proud of my inventive attempt.

The darkness also called us to contemplation, with James sharing his goals for the new year, and the rest of us following soon after. To my surprise, his dad’s resolution was to take more photos.

I knew his dad liked photography from the comments he’d make—the lighting was too harsh, the focal length too short, the composition was off—only people who wanted to take good photos would care about those elements. He had brought his nice DSLR camera on the trip, but it had seen little action. He left it at home for stargazing since he needed a tripod for the long exposure shots he envisioned in his head. I thought it understandable, especially since I was feeling the same frustration, but I also felt sad that his high expectations prevented him from even trying to capture the beauty before us.

He explained he wouldn’t be able to take great photos without first taking bad or okay photos, and that’s why he wanted to practice just taking more photos, regardless of his current limitations. He asked that we all keep him accountable as he shares his photos online, to which we all heartily agreed.

I’d like to think that something about my shoddy attempt to document this night at all costs perhaps inspired him, but he was the one who inspired me more: earlier that day, I had read a Twitter debate about whether people are less open to learning new things as they age. While I disagreed, almost everyone else had agreed with the OP that older people become more risk-adverse and reject opportunities to learn new perspectives or try new hobbies. It worried me to possibly have a limited window where I’d want to put myself out there and live boldly, and I couldn’t exactly banish the fear.

Instead, James’s dad’s yearning for self expression confirmed my hope, at least for me and those I like to surround myself with. Deciding to share ourselves with the world takes courage, no matter if you’re 28 or 58, but it’s never too late to start.

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That’s all for this week! I hope you enjoyed these 3 short vignettes from my trip. I’ll be brainstorming a content calendar for the coming weeks—If you have ideas on what you’d like me to discuss in future posts, why don’t you leave a comment or reply to this email?

New Zealand has been on the top of my travel list for a long time. I first dreamt of it in high school, convinced it was the most pristine place on earth—a must-visit for anyone. I told myself I’d go as soon as the timing worked out.

Maybe after I graduate college!

Maybe after I’ve saved up after working a few years!

Maybe when this project finishes!

Maybe for a honeymoon!

Eventually, it became a distant dream, something I would say to sound interesting and relatable, yet always backed with an excuse to keep it out of reach. Blogs and guides advise spending at least two weeks there, if not a month—so I waited around for a window of opportunity, except that I’d also close the windows that came.

It’s funny how I do that to myself: going to the gym, going on a diet, even going to the doctor. Heck, I’ve even gotten two surgeries because I didn’t get myself checked out soon enough. So when James and I were planning for the holidays and he suggested we go to New Zealand, I habitually rejected the idea.

More than practical reasons though, I felt like I didn’t deserve to go to on a break—I always treated travel as a reward to look forward to, a temporary escape from the grind. Breaks were for people who had been working and productive, whereas I had been resting for the past few months. I felt guilty somehow, even though I had been invited by James and his parents.

These conflicted feelings revealed a darker truth: that I still hadn’t learned how to rest, despite telling everyone that I was taking a break.

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Early in my sabbatical, I craved structure and productivity, desperate to feel like I was still bringing value to something, if not a workplace. This was in July, when I spent every day exploring a rotation of what seemed to be everything—professions, industries, side hustles, prominent figures, business rules, food regulations, you name it. However, because I hadn’t rested properly, I oscillated between manic research and experimentation and intense physical rebounding, sometimes sleeping for more than 12 hours straight. Exhaustion had forced me to lose my grasp of the discipline and structure holding my life together, and I was fearful of what remained.

About a month later, I admitted to James how insecure I was that he was working so hard while I was a bum, with nothing to show for so many days of staying at home.

He looked at me, as if confused by the remark. “But you’re not bumming,” he said. “You’ve been hard at work figuring out your life, trying so many new things to see what you want to do. That’s a full-time job that most people never even start, because it’s so difficult.”

James’s kind comment encouraged me to admit that it was okay and normal to feel so tired. But besides just sleeping and napping (which I admit I already do plenty of), how does one rest?

The Practice of Resting

Back in college when I was a Christian, we were taught to practice “sabbath”—a day where we’d rest and abstain from anything that could be considered work, just like how the Bible says God did after he created the earth. It’s where the term sabbatical came from, incidentally—and it’s a practice I was guilty of breaking all the time. After all, my responsibility as a student was to study and learn—Any minute not making progress was a minute wasted. How could I rest for an entire day each week and trust that everything would still be okay?

I had similar thoughts about practices like meditation, as well. “You just sit there?” I’d ask. “I’d fall asleep doing that,” I’d sneer, quick to dismiss a millennia old practice just because I found the idea boring. (Oh, the hubris of youth…)

As I got older, I grew to see a different angle. Every time I’d complain to my therapist that I was feeling unenergized and unmotivated, the first thing they’d ask is “Well, how have you been managing your energy?”

The question feels simple yet infuriatingly invalidating—like someone asking if you’ve drank enough water when you have a headache. If the solution was so straightforward as just getting 7-8 hours of sleep, you’d think I would have solved it already.

Different Types of Rest

I once discussed the topic of burnout with the head of R&D in my last job. He’s a calming presence with a steely and systems-oriented stoicism. He connected burnout to rest, and said something that stuck with me:

“I see my life outside of my job as important work, too. I work hard spending time with my family to nourish my soul, exercising to increase my strength and stamina, reading and pursuing hobbies to keep my mind and spirit sharp, and sleep to ensure that I recover. It’s because of how intentionally I do those other things that I am able to do good work here.”

He touched on an interesting point, which some experts1 agree on, too: that resting is not the same as sleeping, and that we need different types of rest in order to take care of ourselves.

Some of this is obvious—like saying “no” to a party or hangout when you feel socially overexerted, or unplugging from technology when you feel mentally overwhelmed by the stimuli of notifications and infinite content. What’s less obvious is spending the time to disambiguate the type of “tiredness” we’re experiencing, especially when it’s so tempting to slap a bandage on and sleep or numb the feelings away.

I didn’t realize at the time what I needed the most was emotional rest—to take a break from feeling like I had to give and give until I had nothing left, or that I couldn’t say “no” to anything that seemed like an opportunity to demonstrate that I was a capable and competent ______. Worse, my expectations for myself made me the biggest culprit at hand for emotionally tiring myself out (cue Taylor Swift lyrics).

Eventually, I had to accept that emotional rest meant creating a safe space to process through all of my complicated feelings—and I finally started to feel energized again as a result of taking taking the extended period of time to pursue all forms of rest.

Now, I no longer feel conflicted about going to New Zealand. Instead, I couldn’t be more excited to spend these next few weeks seeing a new country and all its natural beauty, deepening my relationship with James’s parents, and taking in inspiration for future stories from all the experiences I’m about to have (which may or may not include skydiving, tbd). 💀

What about you? How are ways that you’re resting these days and in the upcoming break? Let me know in a reply, or better yet—leave a comment on Substack or share with someone who might also want to read this.

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In other news…

Since we’ll be in NZ for the rest of December, I’ll be taking a break and will return to Not a Morning Person in January. I’ll see you all with fresh content in 2023—some topics lined up include my love-hate relationship with reading, some surprising side effects from writing every day, the beginning of the job search, and (of course) my vacation highlights.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting photo/video updates on Instagram (@_wendywu) and tweeting about anything and everything else that comes up @alsowendy. (I created a new Twitter recently after a new writer friend told me that Twitter is like LinkedIn for writers.)

I recently met a woman who travels around the world full-time, who commented that Americans are the only ones who go all out with Christmas decorations, and that’s what makes the holidays here so special. I have to agree—James and I are only spending 3 weeks at home in between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, but I still insisted on putting up our tree.

In the words of my sister: “It changes the vibe.” I’d like to think so too :)

This week’s post is a short personal update, looking back on a recent interaction with my mom where I share how I found joy in writing. It’s the first part of a series on this topic, which I’ll share over the next few months.

Next week’s post is about going on vacation (even while you’re already technically on vacation?), as James and I head off to New Zealand for the rest of the year. While away, I’ll be taking a break from the blog, but I’ll see everyone in 2023.

Lastly, apologies in advance for any typos—James and I have been on 24/7 poo-poo patrol dealing with the aftermath of the Lychee Baklava incident last week. Suffice to say, we’re a little sleep deprived… But at least Lychee is now feeling better!

As always, thanks for reading :)

Written while eating a homemade salad of organic lacinato kale, heirloom cherry tomatoes, and Persian cucumbers, tossed in Kewpie deep-roasted sesame dressing. I’m convinced this dressing can make anything delicious.

My mom complains I don’t visit her enough—which is probably true; I mainly visit when I need something. In today’s case, I’m in town because of a dentist’s appointment. I have an hour before I need to head home, so we decide to hang out at Whole Foods while I shop.

I push our cart through the aisles as she chatters freely: about her hikes, about Lychee’s health, about how I should be nicer to James, about my sister’s sticker shop, and of course—how my unemployment is going.

She’s different from my dad in that she won’t exert overt pressure, nor is she as fazed by the negative stigma of being unemployed. She herself had to navigate getting laid off last year after almost 20 years of stellar service at her last job. Not ready for retirement, she quickly found a job within a month. The speed and simplicity surprised her—but she also always knew what she was looking for and never wavered from the path.

She’s a pharmaceutical scientist—a specialized, technical role—and a good one at that. But when I ask her if she likes what she does, she looks at me quizzically. “There’s nothing to like or dislike about my job. Work is just work; you just do it. Seems like everyone in your generation is always complaining about toxicity or getting burned out. You should just find any job; work isn’t supposed to make you happy.”

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I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving! Apologies for the missed post last week—my lovely computer broke last Wednesday, so I was dealing with that. As the Apple Genius said to me after hours on the phone, “The bad news is that since your computer is so old, it might not be worth it for you to get it repaired… the good news is that you couldn’t have picked a better time for your computer to break!”

The prospect of needing to buy a new Mac out of the blue was stressing me out, and the last thing I wanted was to visit the Apple Store on Black Friday of all days.

Thankfully, the resident tech boy saw me in my lonesome panic and offered to help. He ended up reformatting my disk and wiping everything, but it worked. I essentially got a brand new computer with none of the costs.

By then, James’s friends, Shine and Su, had arrived from New York. We had originally planned to take them skiing in Tahoe, but changed our minds last minute. We then brainstormed what we could do with them over the next four days as they stayed with us for the Thanksgiving long weekend.

I once read advice on the internet that said, “Get to know your city and neighborhood so well that you could give a two-hour tour. It’ll benefit you more than anyone you show around.” This idea, and our first experience hosting guests together, inspired this week’s post: a Thanksgiving “tour” of SF. I added in a bunch of photos too, as I practice my photo documenting and editing skills before we leave for New Zealand.

⚠️ This post is a bit of a long one (because photos) so if your email app truncates it—make sure you click “view entire message” so you get to see everything! ⚠️

Written while drinking a Honey Haze from Philz Coffee down the block, living the romantic “writer at the local coffeeshop” life while I can.

11.24 - Thanksgiving

James and I are over turkey—it’s dry AF and we’re convinced nobody actually likes it outside of the tradition. Instead, we thought it’d be fun to take our friends harvesting for fresh mussels. Truthfully, I don’t like mussels but I can eat a whole plate of the fresh-foraged mussels myself—they just hit different.

Mavericks Beach (Pillar Point)

Half Moon Bay, CA

You can buy a single day or an annual fishing license and harvest shellfish and crustaceans (mussels and sea urchin) on a low tide. Make sure you check the wildlife advisory though—we went for the mussels, only to find that they were still on PSP quarantine in San Mateo County. Still, the beach itself was beautiful and perfect for a sunset walk.

Haidilao Hot Pot

Cupertino, CA

Haidilao is a popular Sichuanese hot pot chain with two branches in the Bay Area, often at the top of many “best hot pot” lists. Its name in Chinese (海底捞) loosely translates to “scooping from the bottom of the sea”—which was a timely coincidence, considering we failed to harvest anything for our original Thanksgiving dinner plan. Thankfully, most Asian places are open on American holidays, and we joined the Yelp waitlist remotely and avoided the infamous 2-3 hour wait.

11.25 - Friday

Turtle Tower

SOMA, SF

We slept in (the best part about vacation) and went to grab phở ga (chicken pho with giblets) at Turtle Tower, one of our favorite restaurants. This is a dish I will always want to eat.

Because I was feeling tired, I ordered Vietnamese iced coffee—and learned they serve it to you in an espresso drip cup set over a cup with condensed milk! Color me impressed; I was not expecting this level of authenticity.

After, we stopped by Sports Basement to rent a racket before heading to Balboa Park to play tennis. They were having some pretty amazing sales, with 20-40% off most items! (I eventually went back on Monday and bought a few things for New Zealand).

ZERO&

Hayes Valley, SF

We then went to Hayes Valley, which our friends compared to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. James and I wanted boba for a post-tennis snack, and we had to show them ZERO&. This is one of our new favorite boba places, mainly because we love coconut. (Their other drinks are also pretty good.) Their signature drink is the coconut zero, which is an entire blended coconut with coconut pudding and milk.

Rintaro

Mission District, SF

We then took our friends to Rintaro for a nice modern Japanese meal and to visit my sister’s boyfriend, Johnny, at work. The staff were nice enough to accommodate us despite the restaurant being packed. They revise their menu seasonally, so we got to try new items despite being regulars. Here were my favorites:

• Yuzu Aisu Choux - new dessert, say no more! This cream puff filled with house-made yuzu ice cream sounded way too good. Apparently, the owner grows the yuzu in his backyard in Oakland. I had trouble deciding which dessert to get since I also love their Hojicha panna cotta with almond cookies, so we compromised and got both.

• Oden bar - We ordered the assortment so we could try all the featured pieces. My favorite was the mochi kinchaku—a tofu pouch that soaks up all the comforting dashi broth, filled with warm gooey mochi inside.

• Off-menu - Rintaro often has special off-menu items (ask your server). This time, we tried some saba (mackerel) sashimi and chicken knuckle yakitori (my favorite) and both were delicious.

11.26 - Saturday

We opted for a business-as-usual Saturday, to show our friends how we like to live normally. This meant a chill day playing badminton with our friends, lunch afterwards, and some loafing around. The exception was an early birthday dinner for Shine, where James had made a reservation at a restaurant I was very excited for.

Souvla

Mission District, SF

After playing badminton with the weekly crew, we grabbed some lunch at Souvla with Cat and Johnny. My go-to order will always be the chicken salad, Greek fries, and a frozen Greek yogurt. Shine and Su got to try the Black Sheep, the gamey vegan lamb that we first discovered a few months ago.

Alice Marble Tennis Courts

Russian Hill, SF

We actually played more sports after lunch—surprising, I know. This time, we went to the Alice Marble Tennis Courts at the top of Russian Hill, my favorite courts in the city. The views are breathtaking and there’s always a pleasant breeze with plenty of sun. It’s also a stone’s throw away from SF’s famous Lombard St, which we drove down on our way back home.

Baklavastory.

Mission District, SF

After Souvla, Cat and Johnny visited a bakery where they bake fresh trays of baklava every hour with imported sheep’s milk and freshly chopped pistachios. They were kind enough to drop off a tray for us, and I have to say—this was the best baklava I’ve had in my life. It’s not too sweet, super flaky, and simply delicious. I cannot hype this up enough.

I would have eaten the entire tray (more on this later) but stopped at having just one piece because we didn’t want to spoil our appetites for our dinner reservation.

San Ho Wan

Mission District, SF

I had bookmarked San Ho Wan a while ago, and had been dying to try it on a special occasion. Thankfully, Shine’s birthday was the next day and James managed to grab a reservation for 4.

“You’re going to San Ho Wan?!” said Johnny, at lunch. “Almost every chef I know says that’s their favorite restaurant, or where they’d want to go on their birthday. The only complaints I’ve heard are that it’s too perfect.”

“Is that even possible?” I asked.

“Well, it’s Corey Lee. He has an impossibly high bar, and he was the first Korean chef to earn three Michelin stars, for Benu. San Ho Wan is a more casual concept since it’s KBBQ, but the food is supposed to be just as amazing.”

Well, friends, it was worth the hype.

While they have a prix fixe house menu, we ended up ordering à la carte since we were interested in too many dishes. I don’t think I’ve ever had Korean BBQ that was as tender as the cuts we ordered from San Ho Wan. They even had 5-Year Doenjang and Clam Jjigae (바지락 된장찌개), which is apparently a dish they serve at Benu.

We skipped dessert because we wanted to rush home for more baklava… only to find that Lychee had (somehow?!) jumped onto the table and ate the ENTIRE tray while we were gone! He was so tubby he could only waddle around, and weighed twice as much as he normally did. For the rest of the night, he just sat belly up on the couch in a happy food coma while we played Mario Party Superstars. Don’t ask me who won (I don’t remember! 😡) but the biggest loser definitely wasn’t Lychee.

11.27 - Sunday (Happy Birthday, Shine!)

Hog Island Oyster Co.

The Ferry Building at the Embarcadero, SF

We were originally planning to drive to the Hog Island farm in Marshall, but ended up being too tired for 4 hours on the road. (You guessed it, we slept in again.) Instead, we walked over to the Ferry Building, where we poked around the shops before sitting down at the Hog Island restaurant there. While we didn’t get to shuck our own oysters on the beach, we still got to sample various fresh oysters with a gorgeous view of the bay.

Mensho Tokyo SF

Lower Nob Hill, SF

Shine has a tradition of eating noodles on his birthday, so we took him to James’s favorite ramen place in the city for dinner. This was my first time, too—I was curious to see if it was as good as the lines made it seem.

We went at 9pm to avoid crowds, and our strategy worked—we walked straight in. We ordered James’s favorite appetizer, the spicy fried enoki, and I had the OG Tori Paitan ramen: rich and creamy chicken soup, pork chashu, fried burdock root, kale, green onion, chives, pickled ginger, with the house spicy sauce on the side.

I have a confession: before eating this bowl, I thought I didn’t like paitan ramen. Now, I’m pretty sure Mensho is also my favorite ramen spot in SF. Maybe I should also make it a birthday tradition to get noodles now!

11.28 - Monday

Arsicault Bakery

Inner Richmond, SF

Shine flew out at noon, so I took him and Su out for one last breakfast before driving them to the airport (perks of being unemployed). To show them a new neighborhood and leave a nice last memory, we went over to the Richmond District to get the best croissants in SF—$60 worth of croissants, in fact.

I wish I had a photo to show you, but I ate my 3 croissants (well, 2 were mine and 1 was James’s) too quickly.

And that’s a-wrap for this month’s food tour! lTo be fair, it’s been a while since I’ve written a travel/food guide and I almost miss it. Leave me a note (you can reply to the email) if you like this type of content, and I’ll think about doing this more frequently… until then, enjoy these recs!

Written while drinking lots of plain, still, unflavored water. These days I’ve been enjoying both scalding hot and ice cold water. I hope it’s not a sign that my body’s breaking down.

It’s hard not to be DJ Khaled in this gif while reading the news this week:

Not to disregard the severity of recent events1—but there’s something so enrapturing about watching a massive dumpster explode into flames.

I don’t know how to describe this fascination other than rubbernecking.

“Rubbernecking” is a colloquial term for when someone stares at something of interest in passing. This is generally used to describe drivers who slow down to look at a traffic accidents while driving. There are thankfully not too many opportunities for me to rubberneck in real life, but since I’ve been doing it virtually, I suppose I’ll call it “internet rubbernecking.”

Some important premises to define regarding what I believe it means to rubberneck, both in the literal and figurative sense:

1. There needs to be a perceived distance, where the spectator won’t face the lingering effects of the event (nor is able to affect the aftermath). Otherwise, it’s not rubbernecking, it’s just trauma.

2. The response isn’t out of malice or schadenfreude. Sure, there are sadists out there, but rubberneckers aren’t. You could argue there’s a note of self-preservation, thinking thank god that’s not me, but I disagree that’s the root sentiment. I believe people more frequently think I hope nobody got hurt too badly, or are too shocked to respond.

I admit that it’s not a perfect term, but I struggle to find a better way to describe this phenomenon. I find it bizarre that I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping up with random internet drama that doesn’t concern me, especially because I hate drama in my personal relationships and have only seen a couple of reality shows.

It’s times like these where I wish I had studied liberal arts in college so I’d have a social theory to reference that would explain all this. Thank god for Wikipedia, at least.

From my subsequent dive down the sociology rabbit hole,2 20th century theorists like Guy Debord attribute our desire to rubberneck to our culture of consumerism—where we chase after information or stories from the mass media to create and represent our idea of reality. To some extent, our lives become defined by our perception of the various events that happen and how they impact us. Even if those events are far removed from our daily lives, our attention and belief in their impact allows them to become “real,” as if they happened directly to us. Given our infinite access to sensationalist content, we’re become drawn to spectacular images to make us feel alive.

Huh. I blink a few times and contemplate taking a philosophy class in the future so someone smarter can explain this all to me. I’m embarrassed at how tired my brain gets from reading such abstract concepts, so I put the heady stuff aside for now and think from my gut.

Sure, there’s a dopamine hit from anything entertaining, especially news so wild that it reads stranger than fiction. That’s hardly a unique observation. Moreover, I’d argue that what I feel toward recent news isn’t hunger for entertainment (even though the memes have been *chef’s kiss*), nor is it indignation that such an event even occurred. More than anything, I just feel.. confused? And bewildered.

Have you ever worked with someone who was so incompetent that you weren’t mad, you were just... confused? Where you don’t even know where to begin chipping away at a solution because the problem is just so mind-boggling to you. You think, “How does this even happen?” and “This can’t possibly get worse,” only to grow even more confused when it does. (The SBF fraud sounds especially hard to believe, especially given his status as a golden boy3—I wonder if this is how adults back then felt when Lehman Brothers and Enron went down?)

There’s an old article by the evolutionary psychologist Frank T. McAndrew, who claims that the desire to collect information about the individuals in their “tribe” is actually a social skill necessary for survival. He defines this as gossip—the “predilection for talking about people who are not present.”

I previously thought gossiping meant talking smack about people, a vice for only the malicious drama-sowers in our lives. The article argues this as well—that we are socialized to understand that gossiping is bad. However, McAndrew argues that it’s human nature to do it anyway.

In ancient times, knowing about each member of your tribe (and in extension, your relative social place) was critical to survival. He writes:

Our caveman ancestors had to cooperate with so-called in-group members for success against out-groups, but they also had to recognize that these same i n-group members were their main competitors when it came to dividing limited resources… The social intelligence needed for success in this environment required an ability to predict and influence the behavior of others, and an intense interest in the private dealings of other people would have been handy indeed and would have been strongly favored by natural selection. In short, people who were fascinated with the lives of others were simply more successful than those who were not, and it is the genes of those individuals that have come down to us through the ages. …

A related social skill that would have had a big payoff is the ability to remember details about the temperament, predictability and past behaviors of individuals who were personally known to you… thus, natural selection shaped a thirst for, and a memory to store information about, specific people.

In today’s digital age, information is cheap. The internet is rife with self-proclaimed pundits and oversharing bloggers that you can’t avoid. With social media, celebrities and distant acquaintances still feel like our “tribe” from how often they share personal details with the public.

In our ancestral environment, any person about whom we knew intimate details of his or her private life was, by definition, a socially important member of the in-group… evolution did not prepare us to distinguish among members of our community who have genuine effects on our life and the images and voices that we are bombarded with by the entertainment industry. Thus, the intense familiarity with celebrities provided b y the modern media trips the same gossip mechanisms that have evolved to keep up with the affairs of in-group members.

I’m still figuring out whether I agree with these social theories. My personal theory is that rubbernecking is a coping mechanism. In times of uncertainty and unfamiliarity, the only action we can take is the one that will give us more information—and we become more engrossed the more we believe there’s missing pieces to be uncovered. It’s almost like playing detective, until we complete the “mystery,” we don’t feel satisfied.

Lastly, when everything ceases to make sense, sometimes all you can do is laugh at the absurdity of it all—and it helps that the internet makes it so easy to turn to your neighbor for a laugh. Be it memes, funny tweets, or parodies—I have to say that people have been especially funny lately. I’m especially drawn to a spicy comment section where people so certainly assert their stance—especially when the topic is extra trivial. Who knew that the fallout could be more interesting than the event itself?4

Well, be it evolutionary nature or falling into consumerism, I’m here for it all. Come find me whenever you’re craving some popcorn, and we can discuss: What are your thoughts on internet rubbernecking?

Written at home, after I scrapped a half-written piece on being a happy curmudgeon with no Halloween plans when I realized it was untrue. I am neither an old man nor am I bad-tempered, and my calendar reveals that I still like people. I’m enjoying this year where Halloween is an optional activity, free of being a mouse (duh!) and way before trick-o-treating becomes relevant again.

I’ve finally cut off the last of my blonde hair. Now that it’s all gone, I almost miss it. I find myself looking at blonde k-pop idols with envy and bravado (“I think I could pull that off!”), but I learned the hard way how difficult it is to keep bleached hair healthy.

“It seems like your hair has gotten too dry,” said Gary, my longtime hair stylist, who has been cutting hair for over two decades in Nob Hill. He scolds me like an Asian dad. “You’re using too much shampoo; I can even feel some of the product. You took better care of it back when it was rose gold.”

He sighed after reminiscing. “Well, since we’re not coloring your hair today—What do you think of short hair?”

“So long as it’s flattering… I trust you. I just want my hair to be healthy again and to trim off all the split ends. But please, don’t give me a pixie cut! I don’t want my face to look like a potato.”

Ten minutes later, about half of my hair is on the floor. He holds up three pairs of scissors in his hand. “I finished the texturized dry cutting part. Look, I had to use three different scissors because your hair is so thick! But it’s fine because I sharpened my blades this morning since I knew you were coming in.”

He then goes on to wash my hair, which now barely grazes my shoulders. After blow drying my hair and smoothing it out, he starts measuring out the pieces in the front of my face and pressing them against a blade above my eye line.

“Am I getting… bangs?!”

“I think it will look cute.”

“…”

“Do you not want them? I can cut your hair like normal again, but I think a change will be nice.”

I paused—usually Gary just asks what I want and cuts to his judgment. Today was the first time he suggested something completely off the cuff.

“Okay, let’s go for it.” I said, without much thinking. My current phase of trying new things must have extended to a fringe as well.

He was surprised, as if expecting I would push back harder. As he prepared to cut, he cautioned, “They are a lot of upkeep. You will need to style them every morning.”

“Okay, then teach me how,” I said. “It can’t be harder than having pink hair, right?”

Advisory: The following section contains many bad doodles. I apologize for their quality but I also wasn’t the art major in the family (Catherine 👀). I won’t be upset if you decide to stop reading here. Proceed at your own risk.

Fast forward one week, and almost every day has been a bad hair day.

What Gary didn’t tell me was that I’d wake up every morning looking like this:

I’d follow his instructions and round brush and blow dry my bangs upward to look like this:

About ten minutes later, if they feel like it, they’ll fall into a more flattering position:

And thirty minutes later, they’ll get tired and deflate (sort of like me). At that point I don’t have many options (besides buying more intense hairspray, I suppose). Here are some that I’ve tried:

1. The Farrah Fawcett - you curl your bangs outward in an attempt to keep them out of your face, but go overboard and suddenly you look like you’re from the 70s.

   

2. The Princess Pouf - After spending an inordinate amount of time stabbing your hair with a million bobby pins and smoothing it all out to look elegant, all you need now is a tiara.

   

3. The Sailor Moon - You try to re-curl them, but the bangs are sassy and decide to turn the other way in revenge, like Sailor Moon’s bangs. You can decide whether to pretend like you styled them this way intentionally.

   

4. The Severus Snape - Do nothing and just let your bangs hang out on your face like a limp noodle. This is also what happens when I’m out for more than an hour and can’t redo my hair.

   

I’m appalled at how much my mood is impacted by my hair. I care about my looks in that I like to dress cleanly and wear makeup, but I have never been more frustrated at the amount of time it takes to get ready in the morning now. (Should I just go bald?)

Popular advice says you should make your bed first thing every morning, so you can accomplish the first task of the day and start your day right. Starting your day with bad hair is the opposite of that. When your hair goes wrong, it feels like everything will only go downhill from there.

When I dyed my hair pink, it took over 7 hours to safely bleach and another 2 hours to finalize the color. I had so much foil in my hair, I thought my neck was going to give out from the weight. While he painted my hair, Gary and I discussed how getting piercings and tattoos is addictive. He argued that dyeing hair could be just as addictive.

“It’s less about the act of doing it,” he said. “It’s more about making a decision so different from what is the norm that you have to want it badly. Nobody wants things badly anymore, so it feels good when you experience that. I think what is addictive is the feeling of control, where you are the only one who decides how your body will look.”

What he said was true—having pink hair became a decision I had to wholly own. Dyeing my hair such an ostentatious color, especially when I was still working for the Big 4, was pretty polarizing. Some people loved it, and some people hated it (but were nice). As a result, I had to love my pink hair so much that I wouldn’t care about what others had to say—and it was liberating.

The pink hair was a staple of my identity and outward image for a good period of time, which helped me become less sensitive to others’ opinions. In fact, I liked the benefit to my mental health so much, I wrote a journal entry titled “Why everyone should get pink hair.” (Which is super cringe, now that I think back on it.)

With the halo of nostalgia, I let myself forget how crazy the upkeep was. I had to avoid washing it as much as possible, so dry shampoo became my best friend as I migrated to washing my hair twice a week. When washing, I needed to use expensive purple and blue shampoos and conditioners to make sure my hair wouldn’t turn brassy (read: orange) from the hard minerals in tap water. Lastly, if I wanted the color to stay as vibrant as it was, I needed to come in for monthly touch-ups and use rose gold conditioner to tone my hair in between sessions.

Compared to back then, I suppose getting up a few minutes earlier each morning to style my bangs properly isn’t too big of an ask.

It’s funny how in the moment, an option can look so attractive, only to later show us all the hidden costs they bring with them. Even when I anticipated some of those costs, they still threw me on a frustrating learning curve. In that way, everything has its own bag of flaws—and growing up is learning how to roll with them without breaking down, especially when there isn’t an immediate solution. We all choose our own paths—be it career, partner, location, or hairstyle—and we get to live with both the benefits and downsides of each decision.

I still haven’t decided how I feel about my bangs, but instead of letting my frustration override this decision, I’m going to try to lean into this new hairstyle and build a habit so it can be less painful. I installed a mount for my Dyson Airwrap to ease the burden of setting up my styling tools every morning. I also am watching some YouTube tutorials to learn some tricks and speed up my learning process. Lastly, I’m practicing every day to build my muscle memory and figure out what look works best for my routine.

I’m confident in due time, it’ll get easier and I’ll forget about all the downsides of having bangs. Either that, or I’ll grow them out and do some more research before I see Gary again.

“Who is Joe Manchin, and why do we hate him?” I shouted at a girl whose name I had forgotten already as she handed me a stack of index cards and a pen.

"I don’t know, just go with it!” Whats-her-name shouted back.

“I named our team! I thought it was a cool name!” shouted Random#2, a tall bald man.

Thus began Team Fuck Joe Manchin’s campaign for victory at Jackalope bar’s Thursday night Trivia.

I used to think I’d be pretty good at trivia—back in grade school, I still slept at a normal hour which led me to retain an inordinate number of random facts in my long-term memory. I’d won casual Sporcle tournaments with old teams and had played a few rounds of trivia games in the past. I also considered myself decently well-read and well-informed, but… I’ll just give a highlight reel of Round 1: Current Events.

1. What is the name of the British prime minister who resigned in a record 45 days in office?

   What I learned: Asking how to spell a name does not make you sound smarter than just admitting you haven’t read the news (or seen any memes) this week.

   (Answer: Elizabeth Truss)

2. Which state’s legislators voted on the official state dinosaur this past week?

   Teammate’s +1: Oh! I think it’s Massachusetts!

   Another teammate: Massachusetts seems too classy to have a state dinosaur…

   +1: No, I saw a meme about it on Reddit!

   What I learned: I need to read Reddit more often.

   (Answer: Massachusetts)

3. Which Asian-American actress was announced to be featured on the U.S. quarter?

   Me, but also everyone else, simultaneously: “ANNA MAY WONG!”

   Also me: I guess that one was an easy question…

   (Answer: Anna May Wong)

4. Alaska’s crabbing season came to an end this week when a shortage of this number of snow crabs was said to be missing.

   +1: It’s a crazy number. Like more than 100 million!

   Our team: How do you even know that? And that sounds way too high!

   Random person in the crowd: It’s national news! Do you even read the news?

   (Answer: 1 billion)

5. What prescription drug is experiencing a nationwide shortage?

   Drunk Bystander: It’s ADDY! I KNOW! YOU HAVE TO TRUST ME I WORK IN PHARMACOLOGY! I KNOWWWWWW!!!

   The actual medical and biopharma researcher on our team: Uh, let’s just go with what he said.

   (Answer: Aderall Adderral Aderral Adderrall Adderall)

Surprisingly, our team managed to be in the lead by the last round. My biggest contribution was my handwriting, which apparently wasn’t even that great since Drunk Bystander rewrote one of my answers for legibility (yes, I was offended).

All in all, my biggest takeaway was that I am pretty trash at trivia.

That’s my problem with trivia nights—despite that it’s a game, the competitive me still gets irritated when I can’t score “easy” points. Trivia is supposed to be a game with a fairly low skill floor, yet my perpetual blank stare beckons a look that says “How did you not know [exceedingly unobvious obvious fact]?”

It’s even worse when the theme is something people expect you to be good at: The topic is sports and you were a D1 athlete, or the topic is movies and you brand yourself a cinephile. What better way to expose that your knowledge has regressed to that of a layman than to stare back at the teammates counting on your expertise?

Ironically, one of the reasons I came out that night was to learn from trivia hosts. A few weeks ago, I had gotten the idea to host a pandemic-style Zoom party and thought that trivia could be a fun activity to bring together friends from all over. I had a plethora of silly questions and prompts stored in my mind, and I was curious to see what question formats or themes people typically enjoyed.

Now, I was losing confidence that I’d be a good host if I wasn’t also a good player. Was I living under a rock, in an underground empire I had subconsciously carved for myself? And in turn, would I as a trivia host now be holding my friends hostage in said world?

The cool and zen me (Zendy?) would smirk and sip on her drink as she sits, unaffected, amidst the competition at the bar. You don’t want to be good at trivia anyway. What’s the point of knowing so many random facts? They don’t mean anything in real life; it’s a waste of brain space, she’d say.

I could at least prove that I pay attention to what’s around me, no matter how small… and that I at least read the news, I’d respond, still salty about the rando who chided me for not knowing billions of snow crabs had gone missing.

I should remark somewhere about how I have a hidden insecurity: being “aware," the hip little sister to yesteryear’s being woke. I'm not the first to learn about anything, and I hate the anxiety of missing a beat or feeling out of the loop. I feel left out for hearing news secondhand from a good friend. I feel lame when people quote an author I should have read years ago. I feel guilty being late to learn about the latest controversies1 or humanitarian crises2 even though nobody is handing out virtue points for being the first to post on social media.

We all have the same amount of time every day, but this gap in awareness highlights another fear: that I’m spending my time on the wrong things. Or rather—that I’m not spending enough time on the right things, the relevant things that folks connect on, whether it be productive things like important world news or podcasts that lead to personal development, or “cool” things like funny memes, the newest Netflix programming, or sports leagues updates. Ugh, the influence of capitalistic norms.

“I don’t think I’m any good at trivia,” said Trevor, one of my friends, at dinner the next day. I was telling him about the events of trivia the night before and the thoughts that spun out from it.

Trevor is one of the smartest people I know, and spends his day in an interesting field as well—he’s an AI natural-language-processing researcher, who lived and traveled in Europe for several years before moving back to SF. He knows details about so many things that he considerately offers to change the topic when he suspects he’s going into too much depth on a subject.

“Really?” I said. “I feel like you knew so many random facts in college.”

“I spend a lot of my time now rabbit holing on really specific topics, and I don’t know anything about pop culture anymore.”

“What’s an example?”

“Like, I spent two hours taking a Wikipedia walk through pages about the German intercity transit system. The S-Bahn and U-Bahn are so seamlessly integrated and the tracks are so space-efficient—the design and planning is very intentional and you can notice the difference. While other major European centers like London have their own systems, it still isn’t the same level as in Germany. It's because since London and Paris were already large cities before trains were introduced, they had to build their train tracks and tunnels to connect from different terminals and city centers that had already been around for hundreds of years. On the other hand, major cities in Germany all grew and were built after the S-Bahn and U-Bahn systems were established in the late 1800s, not the other way around, so the maps and stations could be planned on their own, which accounts for how there are underground transfer terminals, or how the same ticket can be used across both systems and in different cities too.”3

“How did you decide to do that, on a random night?”

“I’m telling you, I just rabbit hole these days. I was just thinking back on my time in Germany and one thing led to another.”

Jeopardy!, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, and Cash Cab champion Tony Hightower claims quiz competitors don’t need to have naturally great recall to win. I know this, because I read his interview as I continued to look around the internet for more information to answer my questions about trivia. Here’s what he had to say:

The people I know who are really, really, good at trivia are people who are voracious readers, and who process information really quickly. But there’s also a certain dreamer thing that you have to have. You have to let your mind travel down rivers that it doesn’t normally go down, and start thinking, ‘Well, what if this?’ and ‘What if that?’ … I don’t think there’s a right way to remember things. I think it’s just a matter of reading stuff, and staying curious… It’s a matter of engaging with the world, and having stuff wash over you from all kinds of different directions.

And re: feeling like you live under a rock—

All questions are hard if you don’t know them, and easy if you do… We all have our esoteric areas of knowledge… Don’t downplay what you know just because you think nobody knows it… Trivia covers everything. It’s impossibly large.

Lastly, regarding “winning”—I’ll just paraphrase what he says. Go study the particular game you want to win. If it’s trivia at a certain bar, see what that host likes to ask questions about. Study for the test.

In classic Wendy fashion, I was too fixated on the outcome (winning / hosting a fun trivia event) to zoom out and see the bigger picture: There is no right or wrong thing to spend your time on, so long as you are led by curiosity and an appetite to experience more of the world. We all live under rocks of our own choosing—beautiful, infinite, worlds where we create rabbit holes in every which direction, unique in their design. Where quiz games can be just about winning inviting others to see a glimpse of the esoterica beneath, and the lovely chaos and fun that ensues.

Join the Party!

I wasn’t going to casually mention a Trivia Night without also inviting you! This Trivia Night is open to all friends and friends of friends—really, the more the merrier. I’ve put a lot of thought into designing questions that everyone can have a fun time answering or intelligently guessing on.

Here’s a link to the event, or you can click the button below to RSVP (guests allowed!):

RSVP

Featured This Week

Jackalope

1092 Post St, San Francisco, CA 94109 

Lower Nob Hill | $$ | hip • casual • American |

Jackalope sits on Polk St, and features an old-fashioned plinko game (where you can win anything ranging from a Jaëgermeister-Fireball shot to a bottle of champagne) and weekly trivia on Thursday nights along with weekday and weekend happy hours. From what I saw, they are drinks only—no food. There’s also bar seating with a few high tops and a lofted 2nd floor overlooking the string lights and geometric jackalope installment on the main wall.

Donaji

3161 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110

Mission | $$ | casual • Mexican

Donaji is a Oaxacan restaurant with a menu featuring masa—corn—based items: tamales, tacos, sopes, enchiladas. (Cue “It’s Corn!”) They also have my favorite Mexican dish, pozole—in both its red and green variants, a variety of tacos with a Californian twist, and a mole sauce that you’ll be excited to show your friends. Order at the front and take a seat indoors or outside—the restaurant boasts a casual atmosphere easy for anyone to swing by and have a meal without much fuss.