Taking the train 8 hours from DC to Boston getting in at 1am was not the best thing I’ve ever done, but it also wasn’t the worst. I met my friend Lee, and we went to a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square called Hong Kong. I ate a quadruple stack of scallion pancakes (plus #1), and a fried tofu dish – totaling an additional 1500-2000 calories at least to my count for the day. Well, it was past midnight, so I do wonder which day I would allocate that too. Either way, it’s not good. So far, 1 point in favor and against Boston.

The next day was mostly spent in a coffee shop with me thinking about business and book ideas. It was a day of dampness and dreaming.

Day 3 was the day I met Ezra for lunch and coffee at Algiers in Harvard Square. We hadn’t seen each other in 20 years, but we had an extremely pleasant conversation about love, life, aspirations, and reflections on the days of middle school and high school. For some moments, we talked about Gabe, our friend / my boyfriend of sorts who had died 20 years ago… I held back some tears and explained that I sometimes felt that he was watching me. Continue reading Boston had one plus (ok, two) →

1. Writing songs and performing them while sweating in front of a room of accomplished songwriters.
2. Writing about your life and foibles in a blog.
3. Telling everyone about your Amazon interview, even though it is highly possible that you won’t get the job, further confirmation of loser status.
4. Signing up to lead a project for a non-profit in politics that you’re on the board of when you don’t know shit about politics.
5. Cold-calling apparel manufacturers to see if they will let you come for a factory visit as market research for a startup in a space you know very little about.
6. Emailing people you haven’t seen in 20 years to organize meeting up with them in DC later this week.
7. Oh, and my most favorite most mortifying moment of my day – hanging a note on the building door of a guy you met while doing laundry and exchanged all of a few sentences with and whom you later saw in a coffee shop and ignored / hid from. Why yes, I’m a crazy psycho-bitch stalker. Thanks for asking. Now I can’t leave my apartment. Great.

Yup, these are some things I did today.

Oh yeah, and then there’s real vulnerability, which I’m not even close to touching yet…

When I was 16, I visited LA for the first time. I was supposed to be enrolled in a summer program at UCLA studying chemistry of all things, but I think I went to class three times max. This explains my middling performance in AP chemistry, which I took when I returned to school that fall. I think my mind exploded at the concept of mole and never recovered from then.

That summer was an expansive one in many respects. My best friend was a rebellious girl from Miami named Julie. She has a tough girl vibe but came from a prominent and wealthy family. She was stunningly beautiful with short, spiky, dyed black hair and soulful light-light blue eyes. Her normal attire included striped button-down shirts, chokers, and long shorts with a chain hanging off on one side. There was the remnant of a gunshot scar on one of her upper arms. I’m not sure I ever got the full story on that. She was way too cool to be in my program. Continue reading Butterfly tattoo →

Sometimes, and often, when you say no to something, what it really means is saying yes to something else, even if that something else hasn’t been defined yet. It is about leaving things open for the possibility of good rather than filling it with mediocre.

The hard thing though is identifying the good. There isn’t really a foolproof “process” for doing that other than being self-aware enough to know when things feel right and going with that instead of listening to the voice of reason that might push you towards things that seem like good opportunities.

So do the research. Check and cross-check. And then, once all is said and done, go with what feels right. It’s the only thing that’s ever worked for me. Everything that looks good but feels bad ends up looking bad at some point too.

I love waking up at 5am, even when I sleep at 1am. There is something about being up before the sun is up and having that quiet time to ease yourself into consciousness. I spend the time debating whether I should go to the gym and generally just trying to feel a sense of ease.

There is a luxury to getting up in the morning and not having to prepare to go into an office. My old routine (before I started traveling every week) was one-hour hot yoga followed by running around the Central Park reservoir (sometimes once, sometimes twice), coming home and meditating, taking a shower, and cooking scrambled eggs naked with a towel on my head. I got dressed and was at work before 9am.

Now the mornings unfurl. I don’t need a schedule per se, though I try to either cram my gym routine in the morning or go directly to my computer to work on whatever project happens to be consuming me at the moment.

The best mornings are silence, when I can get through them without uttering a single word except “one cold brew, please.”

I have to admit that I’ve always been kind of afraid of old people. Being Korean-American, I think that partially has to do with my natural deference for authority. I worry about self-censorship, about the role I’m expected to play, saying the right thing, relating to their life experiences. Maybe there’s something to the notion of being a bit closer to death too, but that might be a stretch. Continue reading Class of ’00 meets ’53 →

Eternal recurrence is the idea that the universe and all existence has been recurring and will continue to recur. I can’t claim to understand or even speculate on metaphysical properties of our universe – I mean, how would I know? I leave that to scientists with the brainpower and the equipment to measure and prove this theory.

What I can observe is that all of us do have recurring patterns in our lives. It can be almost pathological. Why is it that some people seem to lived mired in a string of tragedies while other seem to be stably gliding themselves through life? Why do some women end up in a series of abusive relationships while others have a queue of non-committal, wealthy men available to fly them all over the world?

I sometimes do think the universe does send you the same test over and over again in different contexts and forms until you’ve cleared that lesson.

Sometimes life themes find you. You are a mirror for the experiences you attract, so I guess you also find those themes.

Everything I’m doing right now seems oriented around finding and expressing my true authentic voice and self. Every Tuesday evening, I gather with a group of fellow writers, mostly women, to listen and critique each others’ assignments. By critique, I mean mostly compliment. It makes me realize what as asshole I was throughout all of school. I would not only debate everyone in the class. I would also tear the teacher down too. Healthy debate.

My first day felt like time travel. I walked into the little brick West Hollywood building and rounded the corner to enter a suite decorated with all sorts of art, writing posters, and an accumulation of artifacts probably dating back at least a decade or two. Eh, maybe three.

Jack Grapes the instructor was there to greet me. “Ah! You’ve been all around the world!” he boomed and welcomed me with an equally boisterous handshake. My email communications with him included him needing to mail and remail packets to places because I was no longer receiving mail at my apartment in NYC and a check sent by my friend because I was out of the country, wary of sending a check from Cambodia.

“Welcome to the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective,” said the TA, Lisa Segal. Continue reading Writing like you talk →