“Maybe I should just be a waitress. I’m seriously considering it,” I texted Jon.
“Aren’t those jobs really hard to get in LA?”
Sigh. Probably.
“From GM to waitress.”
“Yeah that would be funny.”
“I’ll write a book about it.”
“Why don’t you just sell haircuts on the street? That was lucrative for you.”
When I was 14, I used to get letters in the mail every day from my boyfriend Gabe who lived in San Jose, CA. In response, I dutifully snail mailed long letters back to him, replete with professions of love and probably some immature doodles.
“I feel floaty,” he would write back.
I don’t know if this was a form of first love. I seemed to always be falling into intense passionate love scenarios, probably dating back to kindergarten if I had to guess. In any case, not to belittle it because it was real.
We talked on the phone (landline) almost daily. This was on top of our handwritten communiques, which traveled between San Jose and Massachusetts, arriving every three days. I know we would both run excitedly to the mailbox every day to see what we had written each other, the drawings and cryptic encoded love euphemisms that would be on the cover to evade parental monitoring.
I met Gabe at a summer camp called Center for Talented Youth (always referred to as CTY). The criteria was passing a certain score on the SAT. Looking back, it seems preposterous that we as 6th graders took the SAT, but that’s what happened without even my real comprehension of how or why. I remember entering that room full of big kids and sitting down in the back, filling out bubbles in number 2 pencil. Do people still do that? I’m pretty sure my brain wouldn’t be able to handle thinking electronically, so I’m glad I grew up in the age of number 2 pencils and non-adaptive test-taking. Continue reading Floaty
Conversation Type 1
Dad: “Grace-soo. How are you?”
Me: “I’m good.”
Dad: “Call me.”
Me: “Okay.”
Dad: “You okay?”
Me: “Yes.”
Dad: “Okay.”
Sometimes I would try to say something real, but this was always cut off with… “OK.”
Me: “How are you?”
Dad: “Good.”
Me: “What’s new?”
Dad: “Nothing. Okay, bye.”
Me: “Bye.”
Decades passed by with us only going through the motions of this one conversation, not veering off-script. I wondered why we even bothered to call each other.
Our conversation diversified a bit after my mom left, and I would go visit him for my max 24-48-hour visits.
Conversation Type 2
Dad: “You hungry?”
Me: “No.”
Dad: “Eat this.”
Me: “No, I’m not hungry.”
Conversation Type 3
Dad: “You need to get married! Have a baby. Make a family.”
Me: “No, I’m good. I’m never getting married.”
Repeat ad infinitum
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.”
Joshua Tree, not to be confused with JTT (Jonathan Taylor Thomas), love of my teenage years.
Ruben came to visit from SF on Friday evening. I think he tried to time it so he’d land before sundown, and we could cook Shabbat dinner together. I was of course running around town from meeting to meeting. I met with PE dude where I’ve been interviewing for a year. They kept dragging it out because they weren’t sure if they wanted to hire away from the operating group at Vista, and everyone had a different idea of what the operating partner profile should be. I guess traveling bum of a confused Korean chick wasn’t top on their list of priorities. Hm, I’m pretty sure woman wasn’t really top on their list of priorities, but I don’t want to assume. OK, I do lol. It was pretty obvious. Anyway, we sat in the courtyard and talked about PE, LA, and startups and agreed to try to go to some meetups in LA periodically together. Continue reading JT!
It’s 2:51pm in Los Angeles. I’m multitasking by which I mean switching vigorously between various tasks / activities, including playing the guitar, writing emails about the name for a startup I might be co-founding, reading a book on de-cluttering, and eating various pieces of carbohydrates while hovering over the kitchen counter.
It’s quiet in here as it can be when the neighbors aren’t home. The dog (ahem, dogs) aren’t scuttling around here on either side of me at the moment. This means that my startle effect has been lowered at least temporarily. I think my newly prescribed bipolar meds that are apparently not being prescribed to me for bipolarity but rather to calm down my racing thoughts (huh?) are supposed to help with that. Ah, just kidding. I think I heard echoes of high heels. It really makes me feel like this place is haunted.
I spent the morning putting together my final “chapbook” for my writing class. It’s meant to be a book of journal entries, the product of a string of assignments we’ve had over the course of this course. Mine kind of sucks, so I added a few things I had written in high school, which elevate the contents substantially. Scarily. When did America stop learning how to write for real and instead write for the web? Amirite?
Then I read some stuff I had written a while ago, and it made me start to cry at the coffee shop called “Bru” with a dash over the “u.” (Could ya BE anymore pretentious?)
So I walked home (oh, right, I sort of have a home now) to my apartment that oddly smells like cats at the moment and started the carbfest.
Watch out, world – I’m driving. I moved to Los Feliz from Silver Lake yesterday. After a month of Ubering and Lyfting around driven by purpose and necessity, the idea that I have discretionary power to go ANYWHERE is liberating.
I really first learned how to drive in South Africa. I had learned a month before going there that I’d need a car to get to the office, so I spent a month rushing through driver’s ed, approximating getting your car parked between two cars and a curb, and watched a ridiculously boring video mandated by the state. Well, I did fail my first test and amid tears and camping out for a new online appointment, I passed my driving test two days before my flight and arrived in South Africa with a shoddy piece of paper called a temporary driver’s permit and an equally shoddy piece of paper called an international driver’s permit and got into a rental with no GPS. Then I rolled along the left side of the road, occasionally forgetting and veering onto the right and turning on my windshield wipers instead of signaling. Oh right, and dodging all the animals and potholes on the road at night, particularly after one day when I decided to drive 18 hours straight across the country. Somehow I am still alive.
Continue reading Los Feliz be afraid, I’m driving
On the first day of our songwriting class, a middle-aged woman who looked more banker than hippie introduced herself to the class. “I’m Teresa. Listen, you can call me Mama T. I do mostly spoken word, and I’m writing rap lyrics for my son.” I was seriously perplexed and looked to her wrist and ears for signs of expensive jewelry or watches. Something to validate my expectations. I think she may have been wearing a beanie, the one boho-esque adornment, but it just didn’t add up. I couldn’t see her on the stage at the Nuyorican Cafe doing her thing, though she seemed pretty out there.
Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve grown to know Mama T a bit better. It turns out we went to the same grad school, and she did used to be a banker! And then a fundraiser for universities. She was out in LA because her first son had died of an overdose after getting out of rehab, and her second son (18 years old) was in rehab as well. She was going to do everything she could do to save him. Continue reading Mama T
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
The night after the full moon, Sam picked me up in his fancy BMW motorcycle. We went to Griffith Observatory and then for Ethiopian food. As the wind rushed through my hair, I saw LA streets and neighborhoods connect together. I felt so close to the action and yet a bit numbed by it (or maybe the helmut squeezing my head), as we drove through Hollywood lights and then into the darkness of Beverly Hills, way up high into the hills. It was a chilly night, and the seat warmer wasn’t helping much, nor was the vice-grip helmut. I wondered if he had remembered how big my head was before deciding on getting me a size S.
I was grumpy and went home to sleep early. He tried to coax me into a morning ride as well before a brunch date. I said maybe, and then the next morning, it was so beautiful that I convinced myself to ride down to Hermosa Beach to get coffees and watch the surfers.
Sam reentered my life the day I moved to LA. He would be starting a consulting project and would be out here for a few months. After some coordination, he booked the same flight as me from NYC to LA and picked me up in an Uber. Just like that, he was back in my life. Was it a sign or was it a test? Continue reading Motorcycling the 101, 405, the hills
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.
Some solo eats (haven’t been snapping away while with friends!):
Some of my favorite restaurants so far:
More and more people are going remote or independent in work. Technology, budget cuts, the need for a more project- or capability-specific roles in our workforce are fueling this trend, and it will likely continue. I don’t know if it’s just me and my age bracket, but it also seems as though no one is happy at work anymore. I know only a handful of people who have true job satisfaction. Most of them are self-employed.
It’s a big leap to go from working for an organization to going independent. I remember when I was in college, someone once told me that everyone should try freelance at some point in their lives. That comment always intrigued me, as another life level and milestone I needed to hit.
When I left my job in May, I immediately filed for an LLC to start my own consulting practice. My plan was to work on strategy projects and help startups create and deliver on their growth strategies.
Here are a couple of things I am learning along the way. Continue reading Consulting
I don’t miss meat. The last meat item I ate was a chicken parmesan sandwich I ordered while drunk and crying at a Lower East Side deli. Even more pathetically, it was eaten, still drunk and crying (maybe even verging on sobbing), with only the street lights flickering through my apartment. I woke up the next day to 1/3 of a chicken parmesan sandwich on my couch throw pillow, crusty from the overnight exposure. And that’s the last time I ate meat.
I think it was December 2015 when I was at Kripalu, a retreat in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. I had taken my sister there for her birthday, and we rotated from class to class, from downward dog to mapping out our intentions for the year ahead. I was so stressed out that over the course of those 2 days, I had 5 massages in addition to the regularly scheduled programming.
There was an astrologer on site, and I booked an appointment hoping she would have some answers to help guide me out of my predicament. Predicaments, I suppose. It should have been plural. Continue reading Vegetarian, verging on vegan
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
