On notions of creative control and stability (reflection)

So I'm back to school now, and I'd say kind of the hardest thing to adapt to is sort of a feeling that I don't have control over my time anymore (though nothing has necessarily changed). I think it's mostly that being a student and being in the student mindset has the requirement that you must be "on" all the time, and after a year of taking a break from that, it's hard to get back into. 

At this point my plans are fairly set. I'm recruiting for jobs this quarter, and then come July 2024 I will move to New York. The problem is that day-to-day there's nothing super interesting me; part of that is that I've just transplanted myself back to this alternative environment. But truly, it's not like there's some kind of Netflix show or video game or hobby or something that is being used as my guilty pleasure to kind of balance out the day-to-day living. That might actually be because I cut my Vietnamese lessons down from 6 times a week to 1 time a week, and that was probably the hobby that was keeping me occupied. A great example of kind of the boredom rearing its head is that I woke up at 8am today, slept super well, fully rested, no headaches or funny business, but then I was immediately bored of being student so I scrolled on whatever addictive content Instagram fed me all the way until 1pm. 

So I think this necessarily elevates the role of this blog here, to give me a bit of sense of control and creativity while I go about my day-to-day, never day-off student life. Since writing a blog doesn't take up much time and it it's something where I am "progressing" or "making" in a sense. 

Letter to a friend making a bathroom finding app

I'm proud of you [Friend]! I think this is really great work. I see this vision very vividly, and it's one where the moat very clearly comes from your strengths in design. I mean, that's why I've never used let alone heard of an app that helps you find a bathroom. Because nobody's actually done this with any seriousness or talent.

This pain point has been very painful for me in the past, literally just for trying to do basic living, no different from being a local in Boston or New York. One time I basically invited myself into a private college building at Boston to pee, and it's not like California, so the security guard yelled his ass off at me, but ultimately I needed to pee so I just kind of did what I had to do. Then also in New York, it was literally impossible to be a human being because my cousin and I were always hunting for bathrooms. Sometimes you find a bathroom and it's "employees only" so even if you paid to be a patron you're fucked. I even tasked my Virtual Assistant with putting in hours to find bathrooms for me, but that was a failure.

I just think about how many parents suffer, and old people suffer, and how many people with chronic gastrointestinal issues suffer. And tourists who don't speak the area language suffer. And we haven't even gotten started on folks who are less privileged like food delivery gig workers and the homeless. This is applicable to so much more than just New York, Boston, and Disneyland.

[Other Friend]'s cousin lives in NYC, and she was a random +1's+1 to my big family's Thanksgiving last year, and when I asked her worst story about New York, she said she struggled to find a bathroom and almost passed out from the pain. I was like jesus I've never been in that much pain before.

I think this is a problem and solution space that is overlooked and yet can be very well scoped, and all of the success depends on execution instead of unknown risk, which is really rare. I don't know what your timelines are but I imagine you are doing this as a side project. I think also there is a potential here to eliminate the designer-needs-an-engineer chicken and egg problem because I am willing to commit to just implementing your design project myself. Sounds like it would be fun. It'd be my first project developing against a formal design spec. I can't start until Christmas break.

Lately, because I think I'm taking a hiatus on startups, I've been more into the notion of starting micro-software/micro-businesses in constellations as a way to scratch the startup itch. I wonder if it's more sustainable and successful that way, at least when one is early career. And basically the idea is that you have a bunch of ad hoc micro-partnerships with friends, etc., and that ultimately adds up into a lot of value creation, and also startup experience. I think I agree with Cal Newport's view that "being successful is really important because success begets success". So that's an argument in favor of micro-businesses rather than weird venture-backed hot air cargo cults. I think this is the kind of project where it would be a very successful first micro-business. It probably has more business value than it seems, and is not just a charity project. The quality of the app will probably stay higher if it has a business interest. I doubt this is the kind of project that can become a full-time job, but it does seem like one of these micro-businesses where you can put it in your pocket and start a pile of latent wealth / career capital.

Changed perspective on taking photos

I thought it'd be interesting to note my changed perspective about taking photos (of people, of trips). For the majority of my life, I subscribed to the idea that taking photos wasn't very Buddhist (to put it shortly), because you weren't living in the moment or seeing things with your own eyes. So I'd almost never take pictures of things, even of things that were pretty meaningful to me or very photo worthy. 

What changed is that I traveled solo for so long that I saw so much stuff that it was clear that a lot of memories will get lost if you don't take photos. It's not that 100% of the memory is stored in the photo. It's that you retain large portions of the memory deep in your mind somewhere, but you do need the photos to jog said memory. What also changed is that from traveling solo I started to realize that life is much longer than I thought it was, and so if life is that long you end up forgetting a lot of stuff, so it's really nice to have the photos to, again, jog your memory. I guess that's to say I shouldn't have been so judgemental of "older people" always being so eager to take photos at every moment, whereas I had seen myself as perhaps somehow arrogantly or smugly wiser than people years my elder by practicing what I thought was a greater degree of mindfulness. 

Here's the thing, though. I still don't let trips and events get consumed by taking the perfect photo. I kind of just do the "snap and run" thing, even if the photo is a little bit blurry. I'd still rather make time to experience to moment. But also maybe I should take some photography classes because a lot of these photos suck. I'm not sure how to balance these things out. 

I will say this. I love that AI and the falling cost curve of data storage totally increased your productivity on taking photos. Since it's so good at sorting your photos into timelines and search boxes, and also if you have duplicate photos it's just not important to delete them anymore. And the best feature that Google Photos etc. seem to harbor is that they surface these "memories" string of photos at the top of their apps each day. So you get to benefit from the nostalgia of a bunch of happy memories. In fact remembering happy things in your past is a free and extremely easy way to boost your day to day happiness, and I do think that is a Buddhist technique that has been described before. Especially if you're doing good or compassionate deeds in your past. So yeah, I guess taking photos is just a human thing to do! 

New York City reflection (September 19, 2023)

Okay, so this plane ride (EWR-LAX) that I’m currently sitting on feels longer (on my patience) than other long haul plane rides I’ve done in the last year of mega traveling. Part of it is that I’m not super inclined to pick up my Kindle and read some stuff because my head is already filled with a ton of stimulus after visiting NYC for the first time as an adult (I went once when I was 10). It was “only” 7 days but naturally I felt like I aged a year. This is pretty impressive because I’ve already done so much traveling this year, and this rate of learning and experience was competitive with or even surpassed some of the most intense moments of my Asia travels. Which is to say that NYC is a pretty unique place on Earth.

So that’s why I’m writing this reflection, because right now my brain is more interested in processing all the stimulus than adding new reading material stimulus. 

There was so much shit going on in New York that I’m not sure where to start. It’s interesting, that’s for sure. New York is like the mature big brother of Boston. It really does fit the caricatures whereby New York is Boston grew up and graduated college and is now experiencing the next level up in terms of personal growth and socialization and exposure. 

I am almost too scared to try to think back on the itinerary in a linear timeline right now, because it was so jam packed with experiences. 

So I took this trip from September 12 to September 19 with a second-cousin of mine, whom I will refer to as CS (Cousin-Second) for this writeup. I have a big family, and my mom and CS’s dad are cousins, and were really close growing up. So naturally some of that legacy percolates downward. Although that reminds me of Confucianism, it probably isn’t in this case. Just big family life. 

Also I’m hungry on the plane right now but there’s an hour and 20 minutes to go. So my writing pace will be a little bit slower or maybe less spicy or cogent than usual.

As you know(?), I spent 10 days in Boston in December of last year, and for half the time crashed on an airbed in CS’s apartment because she was going to school in Boston. That was pretty good traveling partnership, and CS kind of got to be a tour guide slash be a tourist in a city in which she had been studying for 4 years. I would say CS’s strength as a traveling partner is that she is chill and a homie who’s more often down for something rather than not (which is so great because people who are negative Nellies or require some coaxing can be so tiring sometimes). Like whenever I propose a trip somewhere as a half-joke (dragging along adventure) to CS, she just immediately starts looking for tickets. Even I don’t have that low of an activation barrier. 

Anyway, what was nice about this trip was that it was it was mutually productive, so it wasn’t like I was just going to be dragging my cousin along for a random trip. My entire family is on the West Coast, so actually CS is the cousin or age peer in the family with the most ties to the East Coast. So for her it was like (1) a way to visit friends in NYC, (2) a way to scope out the different neighborhoods of NYC to figure out where to live because her industry is concentrated in NY, (3) a way to push on to visit her friends in Boston afterwards. And so it was great because I like walking tours, but also I wanted this trip to be for me to decide whether I want to move to NYC (hard to do if you’ve never been to said place before), and thus I also had an interest in touring neighborhoods for housing, and also making sure I got to see as many sides of NYC as possible so that I can provide as fair of a judgement of the place in the little time that 7 days is. You don’t want your sampling to be too small and then draw the wrong conclusions out of ignorance. 

Okay, so plane lands on Tuesday night and we meet CS’s friend J for a late dinner in Chinatown. I loved how blunt the staff were in there, though actually after the whole trip I’d say most of New York is not as extreme on the bluntness (borderline rudeness) scale as that restaurant. Cute restaurant, though; it was in a cramped basement and all the walls were lined with photos and signed dollar bills. 

Our hotel was in SoHo, and only on the 4th floor.

For some reason, that first Tuesday night in SoHo and Chinatown the streets were super quiet, and so my very first jet lagged impression of New York was like, Err this is kind of underwhelming — This is not too different from LA and thus probably not gonna be worth it for me to leave my family and warm weather behind for this mediocre place. 

Also, sorry for another interruption, I recently promised myself that on this blog I’d switch over to more academic/English professor prose because I’ve been doing the Paul Graham “write like you talk” style for too long and I’m running a little bit out of practice on the academic prose style. So I might switch right here.

What I intend to say for how my NYC experience went, is that through the course of the week, my first impression was that this locale was underwhelming, then distasteful, then I gradually warmed up to the city once I saw parts of it that were more likable or interesting to myself (e.g. Brooklyn). And this trajectory was due to a coincidental convergence of a number of factors. Right, so for the first four days of the trip I was actually going through a recovery cycle of some headaches that were incurred prior to the trip. And headaches are simply not conducive to tolerating the stimulus of New York. The second is that I was staying on the 4th floor of a SoHo building on a very busy intersection, leading to some insane noise pollution. The third is that we had rearranged our itinerary to accommodate a show on Broadway on our first day in NY, but this meant that the first chunks of NY were all the most heavily touristy, commercial sections (i.e. Times Square and the disgusting monstrosities which surround it); so it basically replaced my underwhelmed impression of New York with a feeling of distaste. 

Ok plane’s landing. Peace.

Elementary school teachers (May 20, 2023)

When I was in third grade, my homeroom teacher was… not very inspiring. My mom insists that, whereas I seemed to have learned a lot in second and fourth grade, it wasn’t necessarily clear that I was enriched going to third grade. Part of this I can verify. The main memory I have of third grade is my friend and I sitting in the back of the classroom doing the next day or next week’s math homework, since class must have been sufficiently boring, and the lesson plans sufficiently easy (??). We also did a couple other antics, like come up with our own code language pooling together our small vocabulary of broken words of Vietnamese (we both had Vietnamese blood but neither of us spoke a word) to make jokes about the class; or draw comic strips and sell them during recess for $0.10; or effectively pass notes during class, but because we sat next to each other, we didn’t have to physically pass the paper and just shared a line sheet of paper between us and formatted it as an “Instant Messaging” chatroom. These are not antics disruptive to the class, just symptoms of bored students. I think our IM paper got confiscated by our homeroom teacher once, but she didn’t even make us read it aloud to the class, probably because the contents were so boring, or (to exaggerate this story) maybe said “I’m bored.”

By contrast, my second and fourth grade teacher seem to have been much more invested in my learning. Now granted, these were the kind of teachers who can be credited as, wow, totally responsible for sowing the seeds of my success and who I am today. My second grade teacher was a little bit intense, but because she cared about her students so much. I was a very shy student in second grade. She built up some of my confidence by telling me that I have the trappings of a “silent leader”, and coupled it with some tough love (constructive criticism) by telling me that I needed to raise my hand in class more. “Participate” was the magic word. Ooh, I can still feel the sacredness from hearing her say that word, and my mom repeating that word after the teacher-parent conference (I cried in the middle of the teacher-parent conference). In retrospect, I’m not sure whether “silent leader” is even a real thing, or if that’s just a thing a second grade teacher would say to a kid because second grade teachers are excellent at inventing magical words for everything. I really took it to heart nonetheless.

Distribution of businesses in NYC

Instead of clustering, they seem pretty evenly mixed. Probably because the transit means it's better to space your territories evenly as opposed to compete in clusters. Game theory something something. By this I mean eg non-Chinatown Asian food in the city.