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Things you must beware of right now—

A year seems like a lot of time now at this end—it isn’t.

It took me three years to reclaim my full flow. Don’t lose your sense of urgency on the one hand, on the other, don’t be too hard on yourself—or expect too much.

Beware the terror of not producing

Beware the urge to justify your decision

Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and that painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too.

Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it

Beware feeling you’re too good to need it

Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.

—Excerpt from December 1985 letter from Audre Lorde to Pat Parker from Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974–1989 

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2025 Yearbook

Congratulations to me; it's been a decade since my last yearly review. Me in my twee twenties: 2015.

Since then I've moved cities three times: from Seoul to New York, then back, then from Seoul to Berlin. Berlin is where I spent most of 2025, but on January 1, 2025, I was in Seoul.

January

I began the Year of the Snake with a bowl of ddeokguk, at my parents' in Gwacheon, South Korea.

I got emergency dental surgery. For a few days I had a gap where my front tooth should have been.

February

It snowed in Berlin. It was magical.

I went to the Berlinale. My favorite film was Magic Farm.

March

I went on a bike trip with J. We went to Dessau(-Roßlau), a key Bauhaus location. I hadn't realized I had known so little about Bauhaus.

April

I spent the Easter holidays with J and his family in the south. I really liked seeing J with his grandma.

May

I flew to South Korea for part two of my dental surgery.

J came with me. He met my friends and parents for the first time. It was also J's first time in Korea.

June

I went to Poland for the first time. J and I biked along the Eurovelo from Rügendamm to Swinemünde.

We also went to Cologne to attend the wedding of one of his school friends.

SY and JH, two friends from Seoul, moved to Berlin with their cat, Okja.

July

I visited Y in Geneva and swam in the lake. Y and I went on a two-day hike, and spent the night in a hut. Another first.

I had no fixed address for two weeks in July and August because I had to vacate the apartment for my landlord while she did her two weeks of Berlin Summer.

August

I cat sat for my board for part of August.

J and I went to Sarajevo for the Sarajevo Film Festival. We saw some incredible films and some terrible ones.

We broke up and got back together again. Unbelievably, this wasn't even the worst part of the trip. The worst was when a crown fell out of my mouth during dinner, in a continuation of my nightmarish dental experiences this year.

September

I moved, and J moved in with me (with a little lot of help from our friends).

October

This summer in Berlin had been cold and rainy. As if to make up for all that, fall was relatively sunny.

November

I made kimchi with SY and JH.

I went to Saxony Switzerland with J.

December

I turned 37 and celebrated at a bar with friends. SY and JH made kimbap.

I went to Seoul for Christmas. I was feeling under the weather for most of the trip, but Myo was worse. Myo's health had deteriorated dramatically.

I was in Berlin for New Year's Eve. J and I invited SY and JH over for raclette. We headed up to Viktoria Park with an IKEA tote full of fireworks (the legal kind, from Lidl). I'd been warned about the dangers of NYE in Berlin (supposedly a Saturnalian night of amateur pyrotechnics and injuries). I've no doubt there were injuries (although we managed to stay safe) but some of the supposedly amateur fireworks were pretty impressive.

In 2025 I saw dozens of movies, despite my professed dislike of (most of) them. I didn't read as much. I wrote even less. These quantities aren't related to each other (that is, I didn't not write because I was busy at the movies), but I do aim to reverse the order for all that this year.

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The cake from my favorite children’s book

I used to be obsessed with this book called 구리와 구라와 빵 만들기 (Making Bread with Guri and Gura), a Japanese picture book from the 1960s. 

It’s about two field mice (Guri and Gura) who make a giant yellow cake in a cast iron pan and share it with their woodland friends. 

This is the scene that delighted me (and honestly still continues to delight me. Look at the bear. Clasping his little piece of cake to his chest! I can’t! (Photograph from this Naver blog post)

Recently I stumbled upon a recipe while trying to look for ways to use up a carton of milk. And when I made and tasted Old-fashioned Hot Milk Cake I realized that this was the very cake that Guri and Gura made for all their woodland friends (why this friend group includes three crabs of a very cooked color, I have no idea). It’s a mild vanilla flavor—faintly reminiscent of the individually packaged yellow cakes in that you get at a bodega next to the little packets of nuts, but even milder.  

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Clouds

This is a cloud appreciation post, featuring clouds I've seen over the years, in the sky and in texts.

•

“…every meaning will dissolve like a cloud and fall down like rain."

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigg.

• 

"Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information."

—Susan Sontag, On Photography

•

 Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?     "I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother."     Your friends, then?     "You use a word that until now has had no meaning for me."     Your country?     "I am ignorant of the latitude in which it is situated."     Then Beauty?     "Her I would love willingly, goddess and immortal."     Gold?     "I hate it as you hate your God."     What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love?     "I love the clouds the clouds that pass yonder the marvelous clouds." —Charles Baudelaire, L'Etranger, from Paris Spleen (trans. Louise Varese)

•

Vladimir Nabokov, Cloud, Castle, Lake

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Feed Tumblr nostalgia with this newsletter

I’m currently bingeing the entire archive of Noah Kalina’s newsletter. It’s technically for work, but it doesn’t feel like work. The video that made Noah famous also feels like a very Tumblr artifact to me. But even without that context the newsletter has a strong Tumblr energy, from the very first dispatches to the very middle—I’m halfway through, so I can’t honestly comment on the later bulletins.

I’m struggling to articulate what about it is provoking (and simultaneously feeding) this strong sense of Tumblr nostalgia. Is it his affinity for fog or the Atget-meets-Americana photos of restaurants and gas stations and liminal space and organized collections (coffee cups, hotel rooms, trees)? There is something very calming about his images and the way he writes. I used to get the same feeling from my Tumblr dashboard. 

I also enjoyed some of the more overt expressions of Tumblr tribalism:

I clearly remember HATING Instagram during this time period. I was a Tumblr snob and looked down on Instagram. In my defense, smart phone screens at the time totally sucked but I'll admit I was wrong. But actually... maybe I was right!? 

There is more to the newsletter than Tumblr, obviously, and my reading it through this lens is not to deny its originality and charm. 

It’s like what Robert Kirkbride wrote about the concept of a Renaissance Man:

Curiously, historic icons for a given period –Alberti or Leonardo as ideal “Renaissance men,” for example– are often exceptions to their own time.”

That’s from “Veils and Velocities”—one of my favorite papers, ever.

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Comma sentence

I care about commas, but it feels passé to have a strong opinion on the Oxford comma. Commas are confusing in general. 

The strongest case for the Oxford comma is that you don't have to think too hard about when you need it—i.e. when there would otherwise be ambiguity or not. I defaulted to the Oxford comma when creating my company’s style guide because it’s great for people who don't otherwise have the strongest grasp on the language—they can stick hard and fast to this rule. 

The strongest case against it is that people seem to think it's the golden ticket to clarity (please, no more Stalin, no more strippers) and good sentences. If the clarity and strength of a sentence is frequently dependent on a single Oxford comma, maybe there’s something wrong with the sentence.

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There’s a path that connects the old Taormina city center and the medieval commune of Castelmola, perched higher up and further inland, said to have been a trading path for ancient Saracen traders (Sicily was once upon a time the Emirate of Sicily!)—hence the name, Sentiero dei Saraceni (“Saracen Path”). 

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Last summer in Taormina. I cannot overemphasize just how transformative the beauty of this small Sicilian city was. When I first arrived, after a miserable series of flights stretched out over 30 hours and an unpleasant night at a grimy backpackers’ hostel in Catania, I truly thought myself the unhappiest person in the world. 

I was surrounded by beauty, but also confined to my room: in five days I was supposed to present at a conference and I really hadn’t made much progress beyond the one-page abstract I’d submitted months ago. I was filled with guilt, shame and disgust—part of my regimen of self-flagellation involved depriving myself of all the touristy delights (no irony here: Taormina is very much a magnet for tourists, but somehow it manages to attract and absorb these tourists without allowing the industry to mar its beauty). 

But my self-imposed imprisonment didn’t work very well, and so I devised a system of “rewards” where I’d “reward” myself with a walk to such-and-such location if I finished x number of pages. I’d have laughed at anyone who suggested that a simple walk through a beautiful Sicilian city could effect such a change in mood, attitude and even inspire ideas in a completely unrelated area (keep in mind that I wasn’t writing love poetry or a travel article, but a quasi-paper on “corporate empires”). But I guess that’s what moods do: they change! And Taormina was solely responsible for this change. 

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Avoiding Work

Felt guilty because deadlines, but also not because that’s the magic of picnics

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Birb

My new baby.

-

In Seoul, I rode with a loose, ragtag fleet (although not all were fleet) of bicyclists (it sounds more casual than cyclists) dubbed the Tender Butts--we’d go on long, butt-tenderizing rides out of the city. Now I am recruiting for the Upright Cyclists’ Brigade—no road bikes or Citi Bikes, no fuckboys, and yes, the ground is lava at the red light. Our logo will be a Lisa Frank-style unicorn with a sad bull, mid-charge, skewered on its rainbow uni-horn. Just kidding, but what if...

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I don’t like the name TOMS, nor the logo. But I’ll take a drawstring bag please. 

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Ode to an Expert

Her office is an unassuming shed, albeit with a sign that announces a very specific expertise: packaging packages for international shipping. She’s conveniently located halfway down the hill from the Seodaemun Post Office. 

She'd just come back from the acupuncturist and she should be resting, she said. But she saw us waiting by the door, and she attended to our oddly-shaped items: a skateboard with two additional decks taped to it, and a plastic tube filled with rolled-up posters. 

The parcel dimensions had to be precise. Not a millimeter more than 1.8, said the post office employee. What's 1.8? They'll get it, said the employee. 

This granny understood. She put measuring tape to large sheets of corrugated cardboard and scored straight lines freehand with a pair of workhorse scissors. The sound of blade scraping cardboard was intensely satisfying. 

She had a gold tooth that winked at me every time she smiled, which she did, frequently.

The shipshape interior was plain, but not severe. She had a desk with charts listing the proper dimensions of packages, by country. A desk calendar on which she'd written out, in Korean, how to say "have a nice day" in English. "Ha-beu-a-ni-seu-da-y." 해브어나이스데이! An electric kettle and a mug filled with sticks of instant coffee. On the wall, a faded map with outdated country names. Under that, framed photographs of a younger her, and pictures of children and grandchildren who resembled her. 

I had plenty of time to look around. She was slow, deliberate and extremely precise--and worked with a supreme casualness. Deft and meticulous without visibly fussing. Sprezzatura. 

A box materialized around the oblong items, as neat and trim as if it had always existed as a box. But then we discovered that the dimensions were off by 2 cm—domestic packages, she explained, were capped at 2 meters and she'd assumed that it was the same for international. Without stopping, she took out the measuring tape and pen knife again and started to slice segments off the edges. A corner here, a strip there. The end product didn't have the perfect right angles and clean edges of the first, but it was a perfect 1.8. 

It was less aesthetically pleasing but more impressive, simply because the second parcel was so irregular—a heavily-taped half-sibling to the first box, almost cylindrical in its blurred-out angles and edges but without any of the radial symmetry or balance. 

"I've been doing this for 46 years. I used to work with five employees beneath me," she said. "But the years passed and the demand tapered and it was just me." 

(Today people can buy and package the right-sized boxes at the post office. They don't need an expert in international parcel dimensions and box cutting. She lives on the exceptions—people who need to send plastic tubes of posters and skateboards.)

"After my husband passed on to the sky kingdom [하늘나라, an old fashioned or childish way of talking about death, which I noted and appreciated] I thought about closing shop. But I'm an old woman. There was nothing else I could do. So I came back." 

[fwendy]

I ordered the hardcover version after I read an enthusiastic review from Laura Miller at Slate and it was worth it. The Feud is everything that the premise promises–witty anecdotal tidbits, like candy for Nabokov fans.

The more biographical, semi-biographical and autobiographical material I read on famous writers, though, the more I realize that many of them despised their peers. Makes sense—that there is an inherent incompatibility between being a strong writer with a distinctive vision and being less discerning, excessively generous and accepting of everyone and everything. I mean, you can like two wildly different artists/writers but surely you can’t claim to have any sort of taste if you find everything to be equally fascinating, beautiful and worthy. Right? 

Nabokov is sui generis of course, in his tendency towards the opposite extreme, with what seems a complete lack of regard for anything or anyone else. (Except Pushkin, although who knows what might have happened had Pushkin been a contemporary). That’s definitely a key part of the appeal of this book: Nabokov’s petty but very well articulated hate!  

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Ginger fields on Anmyeondo—an island about three hours south of Seoul. 

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Some of my favorite things in one frame. 

In Tokyo the toast is always cut thick. 

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Cheers to this succulent (a Valentine’s Day gift), which managed to grow a new nub despite the disadvantageous conditions of my first-floor room (which has famously killed many a potted plant with its lack of sunlight)