2025 felt like a filler year even though a lot of positive things happened. I think it’s because it was the first time in 2 years, since moving to LA, that life has felt stable. At first I feared the boredom and obscurity in predictable suburban mundanity, but later I realized what a gift it was to be able to direct your energy creatively.
I mean, it wasn’t boring. I was never home. I spent two months abroad: I was in Asia (Japan/Taiwan/China) for all of May; I surprisingly went to Korea in October, and I did my usual time in Canada. I spent over a month back in the bay, and went to Seattle, New York, and Houston. I paid for very little of this travel myself since most of it was for work. My career is going fantastically and I love my job and the people and students I work with. What does one do when they have it all?
Even though I was never home, this first year of homeownership was this year’s consistent stressor. As an eldest daughter I am used to the comforts of my perfectly controlled indoor environments, but the outdoors are untamed, novel, challenging. My sprinklers broke and I fixed not one or two, but four of them, across many months (I fixed the first two, and then two more broke…actually, a fifth one started leaking like four months ago but I can’t bring myself to go back to Lowes’ and buy yet another valve). The standing water bred a lot of mosquitoes this summer; I learned SoCal mosquitoes are bigger and smarter and meaner than their east coast counterparts and my ankles still mark the scars of their nips (often in sequence—greedy!). My hibiscus (the gay man who lived here before me had, as my realtor put it, a very “eclectic” taste in yard plants) got swarmed by white flies. The county assessed my house at almost a quarter of million higher than what I bought it for (lol) which caused an anguishing and long legal appeal process. (Since it took me so long to finish writing this post, I am happy to report back that I won my case! And when I sent a screenshot of myself in my colorful red and green sweater talking to the officers in suit and ties, J said I brought a sense of non-normative joy and whimsy into the court room. And isn’t that what I’m just trying to do all the time!?) I felt too cheap to get a gardener (with the increased property taxes at the time) and yard work, while initially enjoyable, became yet another trigger for my newly developed stress hives. I gave up on the weeds. I gave up on the grass. My dad bought me three trees (that I planted, with P’s help, during a virtual program committee, but had to expose myself when someone tried to talk to me cam-on in a conflict breakout room, and now the program committee meeting this year is in person and I can only speculate if my abrasiveness had the tiniest of effects on that) and two of them gave up on me. My heater broke. Twice. I crashed out about my total housing costs being basically 50% of my post-tax salary but my home value declining since I’ve bought it. When would I in the past have ever cared about this shit!?! And to top it all off, I became a ***!?
My main area of growth this year was developing my relationship to my “creative practice.” The hope is that this sets me up to actually create more in 2026. But at least, this year, I started to view research—and thus my job—itself as an act of art practice (which feels all the more possible due to generous support—emotionally, socially, financially—that I never had as a grad student). I led projects that felt genuinely fun, my collaborators turned into close new friends, and even if the broader research community hates the work (which I don’t think they do), at least I feel like I got something meaningful from spending my time that way.
I turned 30 and celebrated it so much before my birthday the actual date felt inconsequential to the adventures I was gifted by those who love me. My cousins took me to Haidilao which felt like proper restaurant fanfare (and I got a really cute free manicure). J took me to a fancy 3 hour dinner even though they hate fancy dinners, and I told them my whole life story ages 3 to 18. I bought over $200 of Cheeseboard pizzas for my friends for a windy (but crucially sunny!) afternoon at the bay front. In true Leo fashion, I celebrated my birthday yet another time with a joint party with J (a virgo), where we fed each other cake and I told him I loved him and he said it back after we got back from a strange night at the gay-now-turned-straight club (I never go clubbing).
I had some fun side quests in 2025. Like when K came over to help me with yard work—she had driven her dad’s tree trimmer all the way from PV—and J came over, separately and later, because I wanted to talk to him about epistemology. But we weren't quite done yet with the yard work, and K was snipping an overgrown bougainvillea and raking its paper thin leaves into a rapidly filling compost bin, so J hopped into the compost and stomped the leaves down. When he took his boots off upon entering my house, some stray leaves stayed in my foyer, which I noticed as I crossed to the kitchen to brew them barely tea. My friends had a baby and we all went on a walk and she was so small I cried. I went to a wildfire benefit concert and got jumpscared when Brendon Urie appeared, and even more scared when none of the older white people around me knew who he was. I was delighted to learn that the LA feminist bird club is mostly married lesbians and even more delighted to take my birders to Fortune 1 Factory for 豆腐脑, which is easy and abundant here in a way it never was in the bay. I was shown and I spread the joys of Tacolandia. It took me basically 11 months to finish my annual lunar new year painting. I went to several zinefests and mourned their neoliberalization. I made out with my co-worker (whoops) but failed to woo her further before she left the country. I had a brief but intense and embarrassing crush on my other co-worker that made J severely crash out. My friends gave M body dysmorphia when we swam in the cold creeks of King’s Canyon (I reaffirm that swimming in an alpine lake on a sunny day is one of my favorite activities). I hiked the east bay hills with my parents and felt so moved, as I do after every winter rain, at their greenness. I saw a juvenile bald eagle at the southernmost tip of continental Canada. I took the remnants of a dangerous chocolate bar with T in the botanic gardens as he processed a significant betrayal and I observed, for a long time, a juvenile red tailed hawk in a faraway pine. I had a much closer RTH encounter when, walking back to my office one day, one swooped down a foot in front of me to grab a squirrel off the ground: I was stunned by the majesty of its wingspan. I found the woodcocks in Bryant Park (though a singular one was left by my late-March visit) where I learned that my friend’s advisor, despite treating dating as a full time job since she moved to NY, had met her husband at our field’s main conference and I thought, maybe that could happen to me. I felt more powerful than God e-biking around Sun Moon Lake and donated and prayed at a temple for marriage. Then someone I had gone on two dates with like three years ago recognized me on the Taipei metro and I was happy to have a new buddy; we hiked, unexpectedly, through a forest to a monastery built behind a waterfall, which felt profound. After I hiked 泰山 with my dad and my legs weren’t even sore the next day, about a month later I had a dream where we were back on the mountain and I was picking handfuls of low-hanging cotton clouds soaked with water, which also felt profound. I bought a Real Labubu from a street vendor for only $22 USD because it was psychosexual. I went to the $5 AYCE fried chicken lunch buffet at a strip club and two friends’ weddings. I drove into the desert to see Tennis perform at Pappy and Harriet’s (a venue I finally had an excuse to go to) and slept under the joshua trees for 1 hour until I decided it was too uncomfortable and drove back home at 3am. I cancelled an evening lab to see Grizzly Bear because I thought they would never play a live show again. J and I are working on a visual novel titled “wmaf game” that is basically an excuse for us to crack jokes and process our own relationship. Throughout all these sidequests, I learned that it’s not shameful to do things alone, and that I do cherish my own company. Of course, most of them were with others whom I love, which is really the point of life!!!
I kind of already know what to expect for 2026. It’s weird that I’ve gotten to the point in life where it is predictable, but exciting. I’m going on sabbatical! I get to hang out and make art for a whole year and I’m (temporarily) moving back to the bay area (before Singapore in 2027) as soon as this semester is over. I have a document titled “times I felt like I’ve made it at 30” which lists: being invited to Japan to talk with anime directors (12-year-old me would be freaking out), the c*mpany whose creative software I’ve used in various levels of legality for over half my life suddenly gifting me $20k of research funds because they like my work (12-year-old me would be freaking out), and my undergraduate advisor taking notes on stuff that came out of my mouth during a qualifying exam we both served on (19-year-old me could never imagine this, though this technically did not happen in 2025).
Revisiting my 2025 resolutions, I was not too good about doing the weekly artist dates, though I deepened my relationship to artmaking and generally create more things than I had when I first started my job, so I think it’s a win on that front. I’m not sure if I went on one date a month—I’m bad at keeping track—but certainly I did go on many first dates where the person just immediately started trauma dumping to me. (A “hi, how are you?” is too much to ask for I guess.) And thus is my 2026 resolution: I want to become conventionally attractive. I want to be an object of desire rather than simply a good listener. Part of this was getting way too much into Heated Rivalry over break (I haven’t been this invested in a ship since Hannibal) and realizing how inspirational H*dson is to me. We both are wh*res who love to say ins*ne shit, but the difference is he has a much better body. Look: I have a wonderful life which consists of high quality yet occasionally inconsistent friendships, a long-distance married partner of a consistently excellent quality, a family I actually enjoy spending time around, a fulfilling and not too busy job, employment and housing security, and the leisure to pursue my hobbies. I’m smart and funny and kind. I have no personal issues with my appearance or weight. When one feels like they have it all, maybe they can put forth effort into the one thing society thinks they don’t have. When I was 15 there was nothing I wanted more than to be a cyborg. It’s funny that the past 15 years of being perceived, liking being perceived, and living within a culture that blames (and just as much rewards) individuals for the appearance of their body has meant that at 30, I want to be hot. Maybe I am able to subjugate myself to choosing a disempowered life because I see few other alternatives in the increasingly harrowing quest to find suitable partners looking to raise children together. It’s not about conforming to the pilates-salad complex. (And anyway, for most of the latter half of the year, it was just my department who showed up to pilates class, which I found unexpectedly fun.) It’s about getting what I want, which means changing my body to be what other people want, something that I have never once seriously cared about. (But I would love to be proven wrong!) This manifests as a weight loss diagonal on my sidequest bingo card. But my 2026 sidequest bingo also consists of many squares about making art and experiencing life and live laugh loving, so we’ll continue to live as we do: an individual secure in their own position and community, doing what good they can in the circles they influence, as the buzz from the cognitive dissonance of watching the world burn gets, for yet another year, even louder.
It was a big year for me: I started a new job, I adopted two cats, I made new community, and I bought a house.
That’s all surface level stuff though. This year I journaled more than usual, so I’ll let my past self carry this year’s reflection post. Having reread my entries, the unifying themes are (1) I want to be making more art. Why am I not making art? and (2) penduluming from feeling extremely lonely to feeling extremely loved.
I wrote a retrospective of my first semester of faculty life back in May, so I’ll link that here. Overall, I love my job. To repeat some of the stuff in that post, the students are so wonderful and engaged here. My colleagues are really kind and supportive. I feel like I have the resources to be successful, I feel like I make a difference in the classroom, and I feel like I’m trying my best to (and mostly succeeding) give computer science students a radical political education (though many of them are already there. Honestly, I learn from them). But it was also challenging: for the first time in my adult life I moved away from a community that I worked so hard to create. I was desperately lonely at times. I think now, a year later, I feel more secure in my friendships and I've certainly had good times in LA. But the isolation was unbearable in the beginning. My journal entries from January:
I just feel like I have no time for myself. I don’t want to become my job. I walk 5 minutes from my office to my school assigned rental home (which is lovely). I have to work at night because I don’t have any time during the workday to do so: teaching or students filtering into my office. How do I regain my sense of self? I was unemployed for so long and did whatever I wanted to (or nothing at all) but now I actually have to do work, otherwise there is no material for class. […] Part of it is that I’m lonely. No one wants to hang out with me (or rather, it’s hard to get people to hang out with me).
And from March:
Today I was really sad. I cried for like 2 hours. Also I was on the phone with J for a really long time. It’s because this last week was really rough (I was sick) and my parents drove all the way to visit me!! And it was really nice. And I was so sad when they left. I guess I didn’t realize how lonely I was here, even though I like my friends. I guess I want to see them all the time, not just Friday or Saturday nights.
I had gotten sick over spring break, which I spent in Vancouver visiting J (who does not want to leave Canada for #mentalhealth reasons) and also with C. One highlight of the year was getting DP’d and eating at a very chaotic neon skewer restaurant in Richmond afterwards (it was me as a restaurant). I was sick so many times in the beginning half of the year. Probably because I was so stressed and felt overworked! (One of this year's many paradoxes: I feel like I work so hard and intensely, but also work a comparatively small amount of hours.)
The most consequential thing I read this year was Jackie Wang’s Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood, which I bought in Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal (I really loved their selection. It’s like a bookstore just for me!). Little did I know I had already been following Jackie on Tumblr for about a decade! During the summer, I spent the first 8 weeks on campus starting my research lab, but after that went to Europe and Canada after. I first went to Copenhagen for a conference, where I got COVID for the second time, and without Paxlovid abroad, I developed long (though it’s mostly gone…medium?) COVID. My visit to my brother in the Netherlands was spent mostly on his couch. I was testing negative when I visited J in Canada, but made some bad travel-and-not-resting decisions that only further fatigued me. Anyway, at least I had most of my brain! The rest of summer I spent reading and being bored at home, which was good for my writing. I think I read Lemony Snicket’s memoir this year (or was it last?) but his process of bricolage—of collecting and responding to fragments—the same process Jackie calls energy and connective tissue, that relationships are more important than products—is the creative process that speaks true to me. It’s not even just “the process;” it’s everything about making art. From this time (late July/early August):
Do our emotions get less intense as we age and understand more of the world, or become more resigned? The thing is that I don’t feel like I’ve resigned. If I think about what my old therapist who was pro-bono and kind of toxic said, all my life I’ve been making my mom happy and myself happy as well. I am full of life and energy and ambition, so much that 2024 was the year I needed to rest and kept on getting sick. But if my mom wants for me a job, a house, a husband, and what I want for myself to make art, but I know I can’t make money out of that—or rather I don’t want the stresses of making money out of that—isn’t my lucrative job the privilege that grants me to do that? What I’m saying is that I’m in no rush.
This semester's college-prescribed mentor was in the art department, and I told him my goal was after I get tenure (one great thing about my job is that I have almost no worries about getting tenure) was to spend all my summers creating art in like Iceland or something. And he was like, why wait until tenure? Just do it now. This conversation happened in December, but my entry 5 months prior reveals that it’s what I’ve kind of wanted to do all along:
Even though I feel like maybe my days at home are boring or freedom restricted or whatever, I do like viewing it as an artist’s retreat. I’ve been trying to do daily comics and I spend an hour+ a day reading. I’m writing, finally, for godsake. And I have time to reflect. I do think my job was difficult, like, actually really tough in the beginning, but then I got it down and I forgot all about it. The thing about me is that I forget everything.
It’s only a year after I’ve left the constricting environment of being a powerless grad student that I’m like…hey…I could make my research into an art practice (even though I kind of wrote that in the last paper of my PhD). I love teaching, and I feel disillusioned with publishing research papers, but I don’t have to be! I could be working on things I really like! That to me is really exciting, but also terrifying. And I only have a little bitterness that I didn’t spend my PhD doing that in the first place. I know useless methods that have been legitimized by a field I'm sick of. But it’s never too late to learn how to be an artist, and how to be a writer. Like, a good writer, not an academic one.
I do think some of it is that I’m mourning the loss of my writing. Where were my fun pieces, besides the yearly summary I forced myself to do? Where were my cryptic fiction poems of repressed teenage yearning in my graduate school days? Was I too busy living my wmaf life to make time for my art?
Oh, my wmaf life. In other things written by Asian Americans I read this year, I knew I would get nothing new out of reading Rental House, but I read it anyway. Thus I learned that reading for representation sake is disappointing. I loved Stay True though. It made me really nostalgic for my undergrad days. Anyway, this entry goes on to work through my guilt (this year’s therapist said I had “caretaker syndrome”) and lack of food safety:
I’m thinking about how S [my artist friend who works at the museum] is teaching this fall and we essentially have the same job then, but I’m making 2x his salary (though I hope teaching gives him a pay boost). I really won the privilege game in my institution. But didn’t I plan that all along, when I decided to major in something “economically viable”? To pursue what I really want without economic pressure—isn’t that the greatest privilege of it all?
So: why is doing computer science work incongruent with myself? It seems like someone else gave me the goal, I think. The goal of publishing, the goal of tenure. The goal of publishing a manifesto that likely no one will read but still reflects upon my values and beliefs. Why is a research agenda scarier than a fiction book? Because I’m being explicit about change? Because we can’t hide from ourselves? (I think fiction writing, or journaling, may be the truest form of reaching ourselves—and I think that’s why I feel resistance towards the manifesto—because it’s not actually myself; there’s some degree of posturing).
I liked it when T said the salmon J and I salvaged from J’s freezer and was kept in the hot truck of our brand new rented Kia Sorento for 6 hours “did not look happy” after J had baked it. I think we should be asking ourselves, “is it happy?” to more non-human or non traditionally alive things. Happiness for all the earth.
After this, I wrote an entry about how fatigued and depressed I was, and then proceeded to go on a road trip to the Eastern Sierras (I love CA so much. I hope to go to the Sierras every year) with my beloved friend group where we went to natural hot springs at sunset surrounded by cows and a guy played flute for us. The dirt from the springs permanently dyed my white cow bikini brown. Earlier in the day, I swam in June Lake next to a Western Grebe. That was the most beautiful day of the whole year. And some reflections from my birthday a few days later:
A lot happened in 28. I started my first real job and made lots of good academic friends (and honestly just friends). I’m happy most days.
My year end reflection posts really chronicle what happens, but I want to write something about what that means, or how I feel. Here are some things that I am proud to have cultivated in myself:
- I rarely fear. I feel secure and I feel like I can lead.
- I am full of life (minus the long covid). I am full of gratitude, and, mostly, kindness.
- I have strong social ties to important people in my life. I have many reasons for living.
- I seek out abundance.
- I am resilient and rarely make mistakes, and forgive myself when I do.
- I have “a lot going for me.”
In the Netherlands they congratulate your parents on your birthday. On your birthday you should be able to jump through a hole and be reborn again. A clean state. Is that why I want to swim in a lake, though I cannot have an alpine one [note: I swam in my local lake the day of my birthday]? I love our great state.
Is 29 the age of the magical girl? I celebrated 28 with the fool [note: I had a clown themed birthday party], so does the jester evolve into the magician? But do I need magic for powers?
Three days later I was deliriously happy and wrote a very long entry, excerpted below:
I don’t know what it means to live an “oblique life”. I think I was thinking of opaque until I googled that oblique means at an angle. Isn’t that just being queer? But being queer and being sick are very different, because one has been a source of joy for me and the other a source of misery. I’m happy I’m less fatigued.
And about my mom:
What I wanted to write about was our family trip to Point Reyes. It was really wonderful, even though the grass was dead and brown. It was a rare sunny day and the wind felt good against my skin. Even though my mom told me she has a lot of long COVID brain fog she was so happy seeing the rainbows caused by the waves breaking at Drake Beach. That made me really happy. And that she can walk with us a little bit, but not too much, because her foot hurts. That made me sad. And I really enjoyed singing songs in the car with J, songs from video games, even though P hated it and was in a sour mood the whole trip. […] I told my mom that I didn’t want to leave and go home but I missed my house. I think her goal now is to move next to me. But logistics dictate otherwise…the job…retirement…I don’t have a kid. I feel like she’s waiting for me to have a kid so she can have a reason to move down with me. And her life is, as she says, just making money to support her family. And otherwise it’s sleeping off being tired and watching Chinese drama. And this makes me sad too. I want my mommy to participate fully in my life but I’m still figuring out my boundaries. Maybe my life has been oblique with regard to this negotiation, like my toxic therapist said.
And here’s when I knew I was feeling happy:
The thing about hanging out with J is that I always have a good time, and I like his childish sense of fun, because it’s also my sense of fun. When none of my LA friends wanted to go to the lemon festival that made me sad. I liked that M commented on it, how it was ridiculous to write off a family friendly event as something that was impossible for you to have a good time at. You can have a good time anywhere.
I feel like there’s lock in mode and do nothing mode and I’ve really been doing nothing mode. I love to be slow at responding to messages. I mean, whatever.
We were on the beach, so I had to exclaim, “It’s so nice being on a beach, isn’t it!?”
I love seeing red tailed hawks float with the wind. That makes me happy. Along a coastline, it feels like home.
Finally, the last journal entry before I drove back down to LA to start the fall semester:
On the night before my departure both my mom and I only slept for a few hours. I fell asleep around 3:30 and woke up again when my dad left at 5, and she didn't fall asleep until he left. She said her brain was running too much from our mahjong, haidilao dancing, and jigsaw puzzling. I felt the same.
A curious thing happened the day after I got back to LA, which is that I saw a house and 5 hours later it was mine. That is, my realtor told me her friend had accepted the offer. The semester started. I was still fatigued. I failed to submit a grant I had planned to write all summer (and didn’t, because of the fatigue). From September:
Wow. It’s been a hard 2 weeks. Went to the event at S’s house with G and it really made me rethink my relationship with work. It’s good to be told that your mental health matters. I have lots of thoughts. “My life is in constant crisis.” That’s what someone said and I was like do I feel that way? Certainly now. Here are some things:
- Forgiveness. Breathing. Patience. Gratitude. For me I lean towards forgiveness more than gratitude. Literally no one cares that I didn’t submit this grant. So why am I still so tough on myself? Why can’t I let it go? Whom am I disappointing? I’m writing to reduce my guilt. But the writing isn’t inherently enjoyable. I can’t force myself.
- Summer felt like me time because I was kind of bored. And hanging out with my family. In my 20s I did everything I could to avoid boredom because of my suburban upbringing. But now I crave it. There’s too much happening to my body. I’m really worried about my health.
- I want to calm the fuck down. Honestly, I feel like I was just as stressed in the fall but then things got better near the end and I could see the end in sight.
- Maybe the cr*zy women (not the white women) were right. Maybe it is about frequency healing and chakaras and stuff. I think I need to listen to my body. I feel like that was some form of my new year’s resolution before and I never actually did listen to my body. But like. I feel the stress. So I need to drop it and stop and just do something healing.
Here I went on a month+ long spree of listening to healing frequency music. One time I was playing YouTube research videos in class and all the recommendations that autopopulated after were like 518 kHz for telemere regeneration or whatever, and my students definitely saw. Oh well. There are worse recommendations…
Late September I went back to the bay, yet again, my emotional support creature:
The bay is so healing. Walking around SF with my friend is so healing. Eating food and gossiping with my parents is so healing. I love everyone so much. I wish J was there and it would be my perfect life.
Like I love my job but my job is just a job.
These are not good thoughts to have when I have just bought a house!!!!
I guess if all my friends and family lived in LA I would be happier here too.
And back to LA in early October:
Even when I see my friends I feel lonely. If I’m not stressed I’m depressed. What’s that about.
I guess I have really good friends who are far away. I should feel some security in this but I don’t. And like when I hang out with my LA friends I feel like they don’t truly see me. I love them but we’re misunderstood, but also we’ve really only known each other for a semester and things take time. I can’t compare to my decade long friendships.
How can we fix this. There is only so much one can do about loneliness.
And back to SF in late October, this time for a conference (where I presented that manifesto I mentioned earlier):
Yesterday I got really happy at my dad being in his run club and hiking with his friends in the morning. I am happy he is staying active and social. And he said eating his Costco Business Center goat and thinking about his kids was a good life. That made me cry. I’m always crying here.
Being at my parent’s house again makes me want to make art. Yet I never. I wonder what will get me to make that leap.
I didn’t write a single entry in November (nor did I see many friends—we were all busy, I assume) because I moved. A week later, I smelled a gas leak. And then I didn’t have gas for three weeks and it was the most stressed I’d been since no longer needing to work with my old advisor: at first I thought it was just the laundry room, which my realtor came and fixed with his handyman without my consent, and he called the gas company to come turn back on the gas, but I had a Caribou concert so my poor neighbor had to stay home for me and what I thought was going to be a 15 minute favor turned out to be a 2 hour one because while the gas technician couldn’t detect any more leaks above ground or in the home, it was still failing the tests, which meant it was a leak through the 150 ft of pipe from the meter to my house underneath the driveway that I was quoted $17k to fix, so I had a brief moment of panic where I was like, my nightmare was that becoming a homeowner would bankrupt me, and now that nightmare is coming true, but then I got 2 other quotes for $5-7k and I was like wow actually it was just a scummy company with fake Google reviews, but the whole thing was so emotionally distressing it reaffirmed my Marxist want for social, government provided housing, and made me upset that I had to play the game of capitalism or property appreciation or asset diversification or whatever, and then when they finally fixed the main line the gas guy (a new gas guy) was like, the good news is you don’t have a leak anymore, the bad news is your oven and fireplace have no gas, and I was like what the hell, and then it was another weekend of my realtor and his handyman and I trying to figure out what happened and eventually we found a cut pipe, so the plumbers came back to fix it, and finally the whole fiasco was over. And my parents came over Thanksgiving and I had finally mostly unpacked. And then we went back between Christmas and New Years and put in LVP flooring which was so hard, honestly it felt harder than my PhD, and I was like wow. Home ownership, huh.
Our main player (loneliness), back in December after my housewarming party:
I am so lonely. When Beyonce lists all of her desires, “I need a prescription…I want to go higher”, is that liberating for her? Does liberation always preclude the I? I miss the bay. I’m excited to be home. I guess LA still doesn’t feel like home. I wonder when it will ever. I was so happy when the SoCal suburb I grew up in stopped feeling like home.
[…]
I’m thinking about what I want from my life. How it can be so hard to cultivate a daily writing and drawing habit, how being creative and seeing the world and understanding the world and interpreting the world and creating new things to go out in the world can be so challenging. But maybe that’s what I need to feel alive.
Or if I have a spouse, will that fulfill the same need? A child? A literal creation?
I spent today and Friday being very lonely despite the 20 so people in my house on Saturday.
A lot has happened this year. I’ve matured past my wmaf phase but I’m still deep in Hannigram.
I think humanities PhD students* are smarter than STEM ones by far because they can use critical thinking skills. Anyone can code. But people are becoming illiterate at an alarming rate!?
*The ones who end up writing and publishing because people have decided their work is relevant. Life is just a big judgement, no?
Is that why I haven’t made any art?
I feel like, constantly, I need to be smarter.
In pasting my journal entries here, I feel the same sense of discomfort and vulnerability as I did 15 years ago when writing my cryptic middle school Tumblr posts. Mainly it’s because I think I sound too neurotic. I promise if you’ve ever met me IRL I’m friendly, chill, and sweet. Writing is where the inner insanity gets an outlet, or something. Wasn’t there a quote about this and the 3 necessary components to be a writer?
The thing is, despite all of my complaints about LA/SF, on my most recent trip to SF, I didn’t feel a need to move back. I still like my life in the bay but I feel more positively about my life and friends in LA. I don’t know what’s changed. Maybe it was just that I finished the semester? Maybe it’s that my friends who have left SF (and have come back to visit, like me) are disillusioned with it and that rubs off one me? Or maybe it’s simply that I can be happy wherever. It’s easy for me to keep myself occupied and find meaning most of the time. My job which takes up most of my time is super fulfilling. And now that it's no longer causing me undue financial stress I have a beautiful house to live in. It’s unfair to index this post on journal entries because I mainly write when I am feeling lonely and have no one to talk to. I promise that overall I had a great year!
My 2025 resolutions are to begin to answer the lifelong art making question and to do something about my loneliness in LA. As I’m also a high power professional girlboss, I’ve expressed them as SMART goals: (1) to spend at least 1 hour a week either creating something or going on an artist date to nurture my inner creative child (an assignment I stole from Elif’s substack, which she stole from Julia Cameron, that I gave to my students this semester with much positive reception, despite the paradox that making it an assignment defeats the point), and (2) to go on at least 1 date a month (where date doesn’t have to be something with romantic intention—in fact, I can’t think of a single date that has advanced my romantic interests with someone I’ve met on an app; the romance comes after a year of friendship, always, for me—but could be like, finally going to a birding or community art event in LA so I can make friends who aren’t my coworkers or their spouses). My only 2024 resolution was to work less than 40 hours a week. I am so, so pleased to say I accomplished this with flying colors! And thus, the time tracking section of our year in review.
Time tracking
Because this year was my first real full time job, I tried my best to track my working hours each week. Lots of people think they work 8 hour days but actually spend several hours mucking about in the office (I certainly did this when I was working in tech). All of these hours were actual working (or meetings, or email, or whatever). I used a Midori Traveler’s Notebook weekly vertical to time track: I had been experimenting with planners all throughout grad school and this one was the one that I liked the most due to its compact layout and size.
At the end of each week, I totaled the hours of each category of activity and transcribed it in a Google Sheet. I had 3 separate sheets for each semester (spring, summer, fall). My categories weren’t exactly the same across all three as I was figuring out the best system, but here are some summary statistics:
In the spring semester I worked for an average of 32 hours a week (37 not counting spring break or before the semester began), in the summer I worked on average 16 hours a week (keep in mind summer is unpaid), and in the fall I worked on average 30 hours a week (38.5 not counting the breaks—fall is 1 week shorter than spring). I worked about 1400 hours total this year. Not bad for my first semester of faculty life!
As planned, I didn’t do any research my first semester: teaching was 55% of my time. Over the summer, research was 45% of my time. When I did both in the fall, teaching was 36% of my time and research was 18%. (In the fall, I didn’t have any new course preps, which helped a lot. Also, this year I had no service requirements to the college, only to my academic community and to the department. Finally, the “startup” category is because the part-time startup I guess I’m technically CTO of launched.)
I’ll end this post with a photo of my baby cats, whom I mentioned in the summary but failed to talk about at length. Mimi (black) is sweet and gentle and loves getting her ass rubbed. Huahua (chaotic) loves to play and eat and is stupid. My mom calls her 傻白糖. They were feral and bonded but not related. They like to chase each other. Mimi is older by 3 months (they’re both almost 2). I hope they can stay with me for a long time. Without them, I would have been even more desperately lonely!
In my haste of class planning and making the most of my time in the bay, as I moved to LA for work in December of 2023, I completely forgot to write my year in review. So now I tell that it was a great year!
It was a year of milestones: I finally finished my PhD and graduated over the summer, spent the fall funemployed and traveling, and the last month moving and preparing for what, at least right now, seems to be my dream job. Yet when things are too good, I harbor a greater fear it could all come falling down.
I write this sitting on a plane from SFO to LAX (wretched airport) because 1) it was conveniently timed with my brother and his fiance (!)’s flight back to the Netherlands, and 2) I had airline credit from when I got COVID and could not make my friend’s wedding in Florida. In 2023 I got a PhD, my brother got a bachelor’s, and I got COVID from my mom when we went to Boston for said brother’s graduation. Last night (which isn't technically 2023, but 2024 starts, for me, when my health insurance card finally arrives in the mail and I get in a classroom with students) I hung out with my friends, who largely live in San Francisco, in the endless Asian strip malls of Union City. “When you get to the suburbs, SF and LA aren't so different,” said a friend. This has helped quell my anxiety about the move: that driving 30 minutes to neon plazas of Rowland Heights was semantically and experientially the same as the imitation mission plazas of the East/South Bay. (Since starting to read City of Quartz, again part of my migration south, I have thought: how funny that the lasting impact of the Spaniards, besides white supremacy, is their architecture. How funny it is that Asian immigrants now occupy these sites of worship.) This year, despite being filled with drama and (claimed) abandonment and reconciliation (or not despite, perhaps because of?) was the year of my mostly queer, entirely Asian diaspora friend group. In LA I believe I will have everything I need except for them (so although I'm scouting, I know what a rarity and a privilege I've had).
To put my move in perspective, I haven't changed geographic regions since I started college. Leaving high school was exciting (I couldn't wait) and for the last decade of my life I've had solid friends and community, as well as my family nearby. Sure, it's just the other major metropolitan area in the same state, but the distance is non trivial! For the first time in my adult life I don't have a reserve of people who are willing to hang out on a moment’s notice. For the first time in my adult life I am also living alone. I have loved the control (especially around having a clean house), but I get lonely very easily.
This year my Canadian partner left the PhD program and moved far away (back to Canada) to my immediate and eminent grief. I'm better now: daily calls help, as does begging for attention, as does turning an old friend into a lover. Japan was a sex vacation. Banff was a sex vacation. Oahu (where my lover’s aunt lives) was a sex vacation. 2023 was the year of having really good sex: public sex in a Petaluma park, sex in a ryokan with paper thin walls, hookups of varying but generally positive quality. As a consequence of my partner leaving, I finally became a real slut. It's been liberating, except for the fact that, even as of writing, I never heard back about my Medicare application so I was fucking uninsured. Out of the many indulgent days of unemployment vacation, two instances have stuck with me: hiking 12 miles while it was snowing in Banff to two teahouses nestled amongst glaciers, and landing at LAX after a sleepless flight from Japan, with a grueling 7 hour drive back to the bay ahead of us.
As I knew I would be leaving the bay area in 2022 (do you sign a year before you start in any industry besides than academia?), in 2023 I whittled away at my bay area bucket list. While I never managed to get up Sutro Tower, I did go to the Fallorons, which, despite my throwing up twice, was everything a birder could have wanted. (I took two boat rides this year, the other at Cape Cod when my brother begged for us to vacate his suffocating studio, and in that one I saw a great white shark attack. How lucky I am!) As usual, I went to many shows. New this year were shows my friends performed in! The past winter had the most rain I’d ever seen in the bay area, so I did a lot of hiking amongst the luscious green east bay hills, which stayed green until May. This made me also really happy, but I don't want my relationship to the bay area (like it is for so many people I know who have moved) to be one defined by lack.
One thing I will not miss, however, is West SF’s fog. This summer, as well as the ending of Daylight Savings time, particularly pushed me to my limits. As I get older my need for two daily hours of direct sunlight exposure grows more dire. The other lowlights of the year were having to replace my phone screen twice, and, after a decade in the bay, finally having my car broken into. I found it ironic that it was not because of petty theft (I also never leave anything in my car), but a TikTok trend encouraging teens to steal Kias and Hyundais. At least they failed with me!
In 2023 I organized a really big (600 people) party for a conference. I wrote a paper with my friends about power dynamics for the same conference (which usually only talks about “technical” things) which was also the last chapter in my thesis. Thanks, advisor, for believing in me. As the party was on Halloween, I hosted a costume contest. The winner for scariest costume was my labmate who put a photo of our advisor (my other one) on a programmable LED screen strapped to his chest.
In 2023 I also started getting paid an hourly wage that made me happy looking at the number doing contract work with an old undergraduate mentor. Beyond this, and the volunteer labor, and the paper/thesis writing, I did not do much of “working” this year: also part of the reason why this year has been awesome.
Thanks to an Asians with dyed hair and pronouns art accountability club, in 2023 I made more art than I had in past years. I did gouachetober and the occasional digital illustration. I did not, however, accomplish what I sought to do during my unemployment: dedicate myself to being a full time artist and making something great. (In retrospect, rest, recuperation, and being excited for my job instead of burnt out from my PhD was the more important goal, and I definitely achieved that!) I feel like one’s relationship to their creative practice is a lifelong evolution (mine certainly is), and at least I had time to slow down and think about how I want that to shape out (the answer which is, more than it has been.) I didn't sew much of significance (a robe with black cat fabric I bought in Japan, a very hungry caterpillar Halloween costume, a Pokémon fanny pack) this year. It was, however, a great year for video games: I really enjoyed Tears of the Kingdom (timed well with my COVID recovery), Super Mario Wonder, Pikmin 4, and I wouldn't say I “enjoyed” it, but I did play the Scarlet Violet DLC. My brother started playing Pikmin Bloom (so I have been playing it more) and I also “play” Pokemon Sleep every night. The best thing I watched was Beef. I listened to a lot of Caroline Polachek.
At a zine making workshop at Sour Cherry I got a 4x6 photo print of a cat that says, Wow! I'm looking forward to the future! That's the energy I'm approaching this new year with (I'm going to hang it in my office for my students). I am looking forward to adopting cats. My only resolution is to work less than 40 hours a week. Recapping how I did with last year's resolutions, I 1) did not really exercise more consistently, but I did run more consistently, and did a 5K with my dad on Thanksgiving! (Middle school me would never imagine.) 2) am unclear if I developed a more methodological way to conduct literature reviews, because my thesis related work was mainly copy/pasted from my old papers, and 3) did very much enjoy my last year in the bay. Here's hoping I can find community, nature, and food (rip China Lounge, I love you so much) as good in LA.
With all the gratitude: in the end, it was a good year.
Here’s the narrative I’m telling myself. There were three main developments this year. Around May, I fell in love. This gave me enough strength to finally end (amicably, I would like to imagine) meeting with one of my advisors in August. Lastly—and this one took me by surprise—I accepted a tenure track job at a liberal arts college in December.
Love
Unfortunately for me, I have only ever dated my colleagues (i.e., other PhD students in my discipline) as I have never loved someone whom I wasn’t friends with first. Towards the aspiration of “being in my ho era,” and thanks to my now-partner booking a motel an hour away from the convention center, we hooked up…at the first in-person academic conference since the pandemic, in a room in a Airbnb shared with the rest of my lab mates.
It was less than a month later, I think, did they tell me they loved me while I was leaving their apartment for the night. Three months later, I traveled for 12 hours to attend their wedding in rural Ontario. While walking through downtown Toronto a few days later, they told me that it was so wonderful we could fall in love in so many different places this year.
I’ve never felt more alive and desired. I’ve also never been more horny. I had every desire indulged, every wish granted. This relationship was also crucial for taking off my rose-colored glasses towards my last relationship, to the delight of my friends. As both this tweet and Maggie Nelson (in On Freedom) say, a lot of energy—certainly mine—is spent chasing love. Because I was so fulfilled in my relationship, I found myself growing in wanting more.
Support
Last year I conceded and started working on a Bad Project my advisor said I should do to make my thesis. I kept on doing it through the start of this year, and among many therapy sessions and mental breakdowns, I did make some progress. Around the end of last year, I was also increasingly interested in greater teaching responsibility careers. I taught my first course as the instructor on record during the spring quarter, which was vastly fun and rewarding compared to the emotional damage I took every time I sat down to work on the project.
In July, I had to submit a written thesis summary as I was applying to a doctoral symposium. In my heart I knew it wouldn’t be about the project I was doing at all, and I ended up writing a different framing with the past projects I had done. I was shocked that I didn’t hate what I had produced. Suddenly a path to graduation that didn’t involve doing the project didn’t feel so unobtainable. Riding the newfound confidence bestowed by my relationship, I talked with my other advisor (a good egg) and committee member to strategize pivoting my thesis direction and stopping work on this project in late August. This took a while as folks were in and out of summertime travel, but was less scary than I thought and ended in me dropping both the projects and my meetings with my advisor.
It was wild how transformative this sequence of events was for me. Escaping the power dynamic of my advisor took a year of mental preparation and trying to appease his ways, and five years of miserable collaboration. It’s also certainly not over: he is still my advisor on paper (for logistical reasons) and needs to approve the final steps I’m taking towards graduation. And nothing really changed—he’s still awful to his other students. I don’t think he’s a bad person at heart, but I do think he lacks the skills to be helpful in any way in a mentorship capacity.
Only when I had left him—once I wasn’t trapped in the narrow and immediate reality of how much suffering he induces (as my partner, who is also advised by him, still is)—did I realize how supported I am. Particularly supported by women—often queer women and women of color—who wrote me recommendation letters, whose values match mine in an academy that feels so hostile, who treated me to meals and dispensed life advice and have given me opportunities. The job search that marked the end of my year would not have been nearly as…honestly…non-stressful…without them.
Finding a job
If you’re not familiar with getting an academic job, it’s its own ordeal: often a 6 month process from application to signing a contract. This year, the “teaching track” (liberal arts colleges, community colleges, public comprehensives, teaching faculty at research institutions) was expedited and had no overlap with research focused positions at research universities: I sent my first application October and received my first offer in December, before I could interview at any research universities. Thus was my surprise: that I would know where I would be going by the end of the calendar year, and that it wasn’t where I was originally anticipated.
I approached the job search by telling my advisor (the good one, now, and for the rest of this post) my values: to stay in California (as a proxy for being close to community, to family, to a life outside campus), to have free time (as a proxy to not have my labor exploited by an institution while still gaining the privileges and protections of their resources), and to do work aligned with my values (as a proxy for making scholarship also a creative practice). I applied to 10 teaching track jobs and received 5 offers, and 8 research jobs with one scheduled interview that I couldn’t get to because of the timelines.
I thought the process of applying to and interviewing for a job was actually kind of fun. Everyone I met was really nice, though it could come from my own institutional privilege of prestige. I also really like meeting new people! Even writing the statements to pitch myself weren’t so bad as I realized last year one of my long standing goals is to write a book, so when I thought of them as book pitches (I mean, it’s like, a hire me pitch) it was way more bearable. The job search was a full time job, as I had to make a new hour long teaching demonstration for each school I interviewed at. The most stressful part, however, was negotiation and handling exploding offers.
The school that I eventually accepted gave me a week to respond to their initial offer. I got this phone call 10 minutes before joining our holiday party, where I had not felt my blood pressure that high since watching NBC Hannibal and stress felted a frog while crying to faculty for (good!) advice. Initially, I wanted to say no—my first choice school was my undergraduate alma matter, so I could also stay in the bay. But after talking to a current teaching faculty there and learning about many red flags of the department and role (as well as they fact they might have a failed search this year due to bureaucratic lag), and after my advisor had a heartfelt but life changing conversation with me that the offered job was better in many ways than my envisioned dream job, and after getting most things I negotiated for (including a delayed start to Jan 2024), and after remembering that this is just the beginning of my career and that people move all the time, I accepted.
This was probably the most stressful decision I’ve ever made—I constantly told my partner I felt like I was dying, I forced a close friend to quiz me on if this job was worth leaving the bay, I cried a lot, and I’m sure my Twitter friends were tired of reading my Tweets about the matter. I’m not thrilled about moving to suburban southern California again—but I’m so, so excited about everything else. Even though the faculty barely know me they (even ones outside my department) have all been incredibly kind, supportive, and welcoming. I think what is most important to me in a job (besides the values I listed earlier) is being in a work environment that is bigger than myself: where I am in solidarity and camaraderie with my colleagues, where I can serve as a mentor and teacher for students, and give back my dumb luck to the community. As the initial stresses associated with making a major career move tide out, I increasingly feel lucky and in disbelief about it all.
Personal
The other big change that happened this year was that I moved down the block to a much bigger apartment. I now have two rooms—a bedroom and an office—a unique SF luxury that I am grateful for every day. Crucially, this apartment actually gets direct sunlight exposure so on non foggy days I am very happy. This is what I have become: a simple man who just needs direct sunlight and a walk in nature. I love going to the Children’s Garden and sitting on the benches near the east side, as they get direct sunlight, and one of my most joyous days this year was discovering a secret garden/walking path nestled in the redwoods in a random neighborhood in Marin, or going to see wildflowers in the East Bay hills (IMO the most underrated feature of the bay) with my parents and finding a Chase Sapphire card (that I too got this year, anticipating the travel) that belonged to a lecturer at my alma matter. I held my birthday party in SF’s newest park and I ran into my PhD student mentor when I was an undergraduate, who is a professor in Denmark now, and I was truly astounded by those odds. I feel like I really do live in the most beautiful metropolitan area in the US and every day I am so grateful for it.
But back to my house: unfortunately one of my roommates does not know how to clean pans and the other one—despite many conversations—cannot keep the kitchen clean. It increasingly annoys me and I will continue to keep trying, but I think part of me is excited to live by myself (something I’ve never done before! Well, I want two cats) so things I clean will stay clean. Having experienced my most formative years in a 140 person student housing cooperative, I see the loss of living community happening to myself, and feel sad about it. But is it also because our priorities change? For instance, I am now into buying more expensive higher quality clothing (most of my closet came from a “normal” (e.g., Goodwill, Savers) thrift store, Costco, Target, or Uniqlo). I see many of my friends with Silicon Valley wealth trend towards this lifestyle: of buying high quality things second hand, of finding happiness in nice things. This will soon be me with a nicer road bike—but only because while my landlord was replacing our water heater, my reliant white and lavender Fuji (that I got for $200 off some rich guy in the Oakland Hills whose wife didn’t like the bike) mysteriously “disappeared” from our garage. :(
My last rat, my dear old George, passed away in August of this year. He, unlike my other two rats, lived a long (2.5 years!) and full life. He was so sweet and held out for me to come back from two back to back trips to die in my arms. I also think his death was way less traumatic than the other two rats’ so it was a lot easier for me to accept and process. I will love my rats forever, but boy will I not get another pet whose lifespans are so short.
This year I grew out my hair and I don’t entirely hate it. I am always pining to look like I did at the beginning of 2019. I’m having more fun with femme forms of gender expression (not unrelated to my relationship) and, shockingly, wearing more neutrals. Maybe in 2023 I will start taking T?
Art
I started this year by painting tigers with my family. I optimistically set an intention to draw a thing every month which went no where. I did manage to paint a huge griffin that hangs above the dining room table, though.
Perhaps more drawing can happen in the fall of this year, where I chose to become unemployed and a full time artist! (I want to get better at drawing, rendering, all of it—and also make a furry comic about my time in graduate school. We’ll see.)
It felt like I saw no shows this year, but going back through my photos revealed that I saw at least 15 (The SF Symphony, Caribou, Mitski which resulted in me driving to Lake Tahoe for a ski retreat at 4am the next morning, Rina, Sigur Ros, Jbrekkie+Courtney Barnett in which I was behind my advisor the whole time and I think he chose not to see it, Daniel Rossen, Andrew Bird (in which Iron and Wine played way too long of a set), Dudamel conducting Dvorak 9, LCD Soundsystem with a horrible 2 hour DJ soft opener, Avalanches, MCR after 2 years, CRJ, and SF’s wonderful free festivals of Hardly Strictly and Toro y Moi at Stern Grove). Renaissance by far outclassed any release this year which my Best of 2022 playlist reflects. Of note is that I started a very, very deep Harry Styles obsession when I saw his Coachella set livestreamed. I also really enjoyed playing with the Awesome Orchestra, and was flabbergasted when I learned good old Pat sponsored this year’s Flower Piano.
Travel
I traveled quite a lot this year, given a pandemic is still happening! I went to Seattle in February, New Orleans for a conference (the last conference I went to pre-pandemic was, ironically, also there), Canada for a mosquito-ridden wedding, Bend, Oregon for another conference (which I gave my bad advisor a lot of shit about since he helped plan it, until I made friends with someone with a car and went on a gorgeous hike, visited the Last Blockbuster, and walked through snow), a forest lodge in the middle of upstate New York for a grant retreat, Austin for a career workshop, and finally, Los Angeles five times—twice to visit my partner over the summer, and thrice for job interviews.
Resolutions
Let’s revisit the resolutions I made last year.
(1) Stop interacting with my bad advisor, thus to necessarily submit Bad Final Project. → Yes, though I didn’t even have to submit BFP to do so.
(2) Secure what my next adventure will be post PhD. → Yes! I’m really excited about it. The end, finally, is in sight. I think many people experience a bell curve during their PhD (if it was a measure of how bad it is) with the beginning and end being less bad than the middle. I’m honestly thrilled that I never have to write a line of code again unless I want to.
2023 will be my final year of being a student. While at times I felt frustrated with this nebulous status, wanted to leave, wanted to have a real job etc., now that I have one lined up I feel like I am more appreciative of the privileges students have—the privilege to learn and basically be accountable to only yourself.
In 2023 I want to:
(1) Exercise more consistently. I was good about this in 2022 and then the job stuff happened and I stopped, but it’s about time to start again.
(2) Get better at academic reading, note taking, and synthesis. The only things that lie between me and my degree are one more hot takes paper and a thesis. Both of these are mainly rhetorical projects (no more building for me!) that require consuming, understanding, and organizing large amount of text. I feel like I’ve approached literature reviews relatively haphazardly in the past, so here’s a perfect excuse to develop and iterate on methods I’m sure I’ll be using a lot going forward!
(3) Enjoy my final year in the bay area! I made a bucket list. I love this place so much, and am always grappling with my relationship to Silicon Valley and its various institutions, the influence of Randian libertarianism and California Exceptionalism, the housing crisis, as well as my position as a non-binary Asian American who did not grow up here but whose parents now live here. I also think about my friends and peers whom I’ve met (mainly through undergrad) who have, for the most part, stayed, and how their lives are being shaped by these forces 5+ years after graduation.
The end of undergraduate was a great time in my life filled with travels and new experiences. Similarly, for the end of graduate school, I hope to manifest 2017 energy into my 2023. I write this post on a day of a bomb cyclone sending widespread rain and wind across the region. I’ve spent most of the day waiting anxiously if my partner’s flight would land safely. It did, and they are here, and we are safe.
The only time I ever post on Tumblr anymore: I yell into cyberspace signaling I am alive, but barely.
Continuing the format of these posts, the broad strokes of 2021 were...bad. It felt worse than 2020 to me. In 2020 it was socially acceptable to be miserable and burnt out and things were scary and no one really knew what was happening so we were kind to each other; in 2021 the long awaited arrival of vaccines (which, don't get me wrong, I'm immensely grateful for) brushed aside that care. I am not saying anything new by expressing my frustration at how, when privileged people can party, take vacations, and increase economic activity, we (the US I live in and experience, because I am one of those privileged people) ignore the ongoing pandemic. I distinctively remember going on campus again and being like, "wait, I haven't processed anything that's happened in the last 18 months?" and continue to feel that way about just about all the whiplash that's happened to me this year, pandemic related or not.
There was a lot of death this year. My friend A died. My brother's boyfriend's mother died. Reigen, my beautiful perfect angel rat died an excruciating, frustrating, and traumatic (for me) death. These three deaths were within a few months of each other. Small Baby, my second perfect boy, was great one Friday night and dying Saturday morning. The death of a pet, my first time experiencing loss of that scale as an actualized human being, was really difficult for me. On top of this, I am actively trying to graduate. I have completely lost any respect I had for one of my advisors, who constantly gaslights me, has made me seek therapy specifically to deal with him, and makes my therapist make this face whenever I tell her of what transpires in our meetings: >:O. I have been coerced—I would probably even say manipulated—to do a research project that I actively contend, both morally and research-wise (which, of course, I have expressed numerous times over the course of 6 months in which my concerns were completely dismissed) in exchange for a PhD as I think he knows we disagree epistemologically on everything. Thus my active graduation is more of a forced escape: I debated the choice for a good 4 months, saw no better alternative, and have only been working fueled by resentment and the abstract promise of a future without my advisor, which is like getting a car to run on corn oil. Speaking of car, I drive a lot more since I moved to the city, an hour away from campus now. I went into the pandemic still a junior PhD student, not knowing what I wanted, and I'm emerging (still in the pandemic) as a jaded senior student who knows what they want, but has been repeatedly denied the opportunity to do it.
My end of year posts are usually a chronological retelling of things I did, or made, or how I passed the time, rather than how I emotionally dealt with things—I usually reserve that for my therapist and E. But this year there was so much emotional hardship. My therapist called the month of August a "constant slap in the face" which was very validating and very resonant. She also made me realize the literal full work day I take out of each week to be frustrated and angry and seemingly not productive is actually...necessary for my work to get done. And I fucking hate that! I'm so mad about it! As a person I am so rarely angry. 2021 has been a year of rage and being deeply dissatisfied and not having any good solutions. I'm trying my best. I really am. And I hope 2022 I'll see some good results for my efforts because I'm so exhausted from feeling like they aren't enough :')
Okay the catharsis of screaming how far away I am from the person I want to be (both in situation and reaction) aside, here is my long boring wall of text where I recall what I did per month.
January was, as all Januarys are in my childish optimism, a good start. The entire first quarter of the year was fine, honestly. I was back in my apartment with J and took an ear training class and this really bad "creativity" class in the anthro department that made me do really bad (I truly have no better descriptor, nor do I want to elaborate) art projects each week.
In late February I finally moved up to the city with M, and J in the third room before he want back to school in the fall. It kind of just happened in the span of a week. Saying goodbye to the place I had lived in four years was definitely bittersweet but my only regret was not moving up earlier. Living in the city—and especially so close to lush, abundant nature—was incredible for my mental health. It gave me the final push I needed to submit my summer internship project with W to an April deadline. I will particularly cherish seeing all the baby ducks and geese grow up in my weekly walks along the lake, which I feel like is an avian metaphor for America's melting pot. My time management skills improved a lot; I started using planners more intentionally, tracking my time, and doing weekly review meetings with myself. Still, the deadline involved more all nighters than any other deadline in the past, probably because it was just me working alone in my room. I missed the camaraderie of a lab. I got my second vaccine dose two days before, but thankfully had no symptoms.
And then 2021 went downhill. Emerging from my room I found not one, but two, $110 parking tickets from my NIMBY quasi neighbor for occluding their driveway by literally 2 inches. I got positive reviews back for my paper and my collaborators didn't say anything acknowledging them? Which was hurtful and confusing? And then M demanded I add all these new things into the paper during the rebuttal, which felt morally wrong? Doing work until the last minute to meet his arbitrary and last minute demands: that's me. The spring quarter did bring some joy, though; I lead two sections of a "how to do CS research" class which reminded me how much I love teaching, even if most of my students had their cameras off and I could not visually gauge how they were learning. I took a lot of beautiful hikes on sunny days. I applied to two funding sources and got both of them. One I really wanted—a fellowship for diverse senior PhD students to prepare them to be better faculty. The community I've made there has been amazing and I feel like it's been one of the only legitimate things this university, which loves to give lip service to promote its reputation, has actually done that's been beneficial for minority students. (Money in the pockets of students. We love to see it.) One was project specific and I was told to do by M; I proposed some future research projects I would be interested in which he rejected and then proposed a bad direct follow up to my previous work. I wrote the proposal because it was little effort on my end, got the funding because M is on the board who choses the projects and told me not to include his name, talked about potentially rejecting the money since I had another fellowship, but wasn't logistically fully funded for the fall because I didn't have enough units yet, so accepted the money and thus...was pushed into doing this bad follow up project. As a conciliation M said "yeah I think if you finish this we can get you out of here and into a postdoc," which completely threw me into a weeklong existential crisis of, "am I...going to graduate? Am I ready?" (which I decided, after several months, yes) and also "am I going to do a shitty thesis about a topic I'm embarrassed about?" (which, after several months and a lot of tears and my other advisor telling me repeatedly that no one will ever read or care about your thesis and also that this is the "path of least resistance", I have accepted).
In May, I took my first vaccinated trip to visit E which, again, transformed the boundaries of our relationship to something cherished and beautiful. I don't know how to write about people I'm in love with so we'll leave it here.
Summer in the city brought intense fog, moreso because I lived on the west side, that was an apt backdrop to all the shit that went down. It was the worst summer of my PhD by far. I spent the entire time trying to communicate with M why I didn't want to do this project I now had funding for to no avail—he would literally respond to my concerns with "eh, just do a little bit and maybe you'll like it more than you think." I didn't go outside because I was depressed I couldn't see the sun. I bought a national parks pass and went to Yosemite with M and D, and then Sequoia/King's Canyon with my family, both of which felt necessary. When I got back J, visiting, was in my house and M and I threw a solar solstice party on a day with no sun. The next week I saw Perfume Genius in a free outdoor concert, which was the biggest crowd I had been in since pre-pandemic times. I went hiking with S's lab, also seeing them for the first time since pre-pandemic. Several weekends in a row I waited two hours in line for a pastry. I had a brief obsession with Hollow Knight. I treated my brother to omakase, met T, an internet friend from when I was 10 who also lived in the city, hung out with D who visited, and drove to Pinnacles with A, also from out of town. Then M, L, and I went to Kauai to visit C and M who were living there for a month. These times were good. Then I came home, Reigen's eye was popped out of its socket, and we endured a grueling week of shitty access to proper care. J moved out and S moved in. I was convinced into buying $500 glasses as it was the last time (until I get a real job) I'd have actual vision insurance. I threw a birthday party and was sad the entire time about Reigen having died. I made spreadsheets for my plants and frogs. The smoke came in, though it wasn't as bad as last year. My dad and I went to MA to help J move into his new apartment, and I finally visited the place I had grown up in CT, and I was stunned by how small it was. Everything truly is much bigger when you're a child.
M moved out in the end of August to also go to school and G moved in. Our quadplex also filled its vacant front unit with college kids who drive a car with an ahegao sticker on the gas tank that begs, "Fill me up!". I went on many first dates, all unsuccessful for a wide variety of reasons. R, C, and T all moved to the city as well. I redyed my hair in preparation for the fall quarter starting back in person and bought a $50 bike I could leave on campus. With J gone, my parents and I went on a lot more hikes. I drove down to campus twice a week, which was more bearable than I thought. One day I spent 6 hours making shipping labels to send 40+ T-shirts all around the world. Another day I won a pair of Airpods in a raffle for an event I was asked to take photos of (and got paid $400 for doing, woohoo) which I regifed to my dad. In general I filled my days with meetings. I spent Mondays talking about academia with my fellowship cohort and scheduled my thesis proposal for the end of the quarter, which was the latest it could be for logistical funding reasons. Resigned, I made progress on Bad Final Project at a snail's pace. At the end of September I went to Emo Nite, my first indoor concert, and no one was wearing a mask except for me and G. The next day I saw Japanese Breakfast, where everyone was masked around me, and I cried when she struck the gong in Paprika. I saw Tennis the next week. Going to shows felt so, so, good, so I bought a few more for later in the year, where I realized that it wasn't the act of going to a show that I had missed; I just really liked Michelle's new album. (Jubilee and Happier Than Ever were basically the only music I listened to this year, besides KCRW's MBE which automatically plays at 9:05 as my weekday alarm.)
In October I got boosted and spent about 50 hours (I counted) making a Kass cosplay, as I was going to spend Halloween with E, who was Gerudo Link. Tommy Wiseau did a meet and greet at the theater by my house. I played in a pop up orchestra (how I missed making music!) and hosted a beach bonfire. N visited in November and I lost my $500 glasses. I became re-addicted to ACNH with the DLC, and also started (and streamed) a hardcore nuzlocke of BD to try to make the game more fun. My health was bad—I would always get just sick enough to not do work, but not sick enough to not game, or relax, or take care of myself. I think my body was trying to say something. I did a*** on the nude beach where D and L convinced me to climb over some rocks, I overestimated my ability to control my body, fell, and bled all over said rocks, but at least it's a good story.
Small Baby died two days before my thesis proposal in December. At about the exact time of his passing I had to take the biggest dump of my life while walking through the park; I never felt such a voracious need to get to a toilet before and on the seat I felt like I was purging my body from itself. That night, after driving over an hour north for bio-luminescent kayaking, the trip was suddenly canceled due to high winds, which I took as an omen to head back to my parents' home to bury him. During my proposal, J, the person on my committee who is not my advisors, gave feedback on things I had argued with M about the whole summer which was extremely validating. M didn't say a single word except announcing he had to leave. I tried to focus on making more research progress but found myself spending hours on other tasks: setting up my new phone, sewing skirts (around this time, I also became more femme), walking. I picked J up from the airport and acknowledged I was burnt the fuck out. On Christmas J's boyfriend joined us and I cooked a turkey that wasn't dry. Friends coming back for winter break on top of omicron meant a lot of drama for our new year's plans in SC. Mainly I ended the year playing a lot of Mahjong.
Now it's the part of the post where I review and refresh my resolutions. For 2020: (1) Get laid: yes. (2) Submit the two research projects I’ve been doing forever: kind of, I did one, and then M discouraged me from working on the other, which made me really sad. If I can finish Bad Final Project we'll revisit it. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, “Oh, that’s interesting, I should write it down.”: I did do this, but only for like two months, but I don't think it's because I got lazy; I think it's because I stopped having good thoughts.
I really want 2022 to be a better year and I really hope I can make it so. My biggest goal for the year is (1) to stop interacting with my bad advisor, thus to necessarily submit Bad Final Project. My other goal is to (2) secure what my next adventure will be post PhD. My ideal timeline is to finish Bad Project for the same April conference (it will be a lot of work, I'm definitely way behind where I was at this time last year) and then write my thesis over the summer while also taking art classes. I have a full other year of funding after this summer, but if I have an exciting thing coming up, I don't have to stick around—but I'm also totally fine with basically chilling for a year. Nice to have goals, though I won't beat myself up for not achieving them, are (3) lose 15 pounds and (4) leave the house at least once every two days.
I have no concluding paragraph. It's barely past midnight but I'm tired, so I'm going to bed.
A lot happens in a year, even when nothing seems to happen at all.
There's nothing new my commentary about a global pandemic (and the particularly frustrating experience of living in America during it, even with all my privileges of continued employment, owning a car, rent stability, and living in the bay area) will bring to the reader, but I will underscore this: my feelings aren't that 2020 is any kind of exceptional year, but the point where, hopefully, we finally realize that economic/climate/racial injustice has been a terrible problem for a long time, and will continue to be unless we enact massive collective change. A vaccine is not going to make any of those issues disappear, and I worry the people in power (including myself) will return to their comfortable life styles as if the next decade won't be even worse.
Anyway, general DOOM aside (RIP man), here's my year in specific!
From looking through my photos: January was off to a great start. I celebrated the new year with dim sum with J/M/M, as per tradition, and went on a foggy hike through SF with my family that involved my dad and J getting hilariously lost. Soon after I went to Sonoma with J/M -- for all my years in the bay, I had never explored north of the Golden Gate that much -- which was a wonderful trip seeing J's hometown. I helped my lab demo research at the Exploratorium, started growing my own microgreens, and went on more (to become semi-regular and my only source of cardio through the pandemic) bike rides with my lab mates. I finally saw Hamilton (though feel a need to justify here how "cringey" I think LMM is). I went to Genesis, my first gaming-related convention, and it was a lot of fun despite seeing no women. I did so many things, was making progress on research (I think? I don't recall any breakdowns) and my mental health was generally good.
The doing of things continued in February. After not going last year, I went to the Tet Festival in SJ (which was kind of sad). I joined a Chinese learning club and a crafts club and had a delicious omakase. N visited again, I went ice skating and tried to rescue a giant rat from string lights, and saw the Sonic movie in theaters (which would have been my last movie in theaters, sigh). After having a drink at Wursthall with T, I felt terrible (to the unaccustomed reader, not only do I Asian glow, my hands/feet itch whenever I drink and I feel like I want to die), and decided that was the last drink I'd ever have -- thanks to the pandemic that's stayed true. I went on a ski retreat with the lab that felt particularly special (and not just because I didn't have to pay). We (I, in convincing my mostly Asian office) wanted to make 元宵 on the eve of E's birthday, but it turns out that a bunch of CS PhD students really love singing karaoke for like 4 hours straight into the night, and at some point I was like, okay y'all, time to go to bed. So I hosted 元宵 making at my apartment the next weekend, and we watched another Bong Joon-Ho movie (The Host) to celebrate his Oscar win. Typing this out, it seems wild that this was even in this year. I also did sh*** for the first time, hallucinated white woman in the edges of my vision like a GAN, ate a lot of shaved parmesan from TJ, and let go of any stress I had about the UIST deadline to the abundance of nature and the world.
I break from the month-per-paragraph format now because we all know what happens next. M and I biked around campus to film a virtual tour for the newly virtual admit weekend. Being in Gates that Friday (three days before the bay area wide shelter-in-place order) was the last time I'd be on campus for a while. The next day I adopted 3 wonderful baby rats (my biggest brain move this whole year) and the day after that I moved home. I was counting down the days until Animal Crossing and then J and I were duplicating royal crowns in ACNH. At some point my hair got really bad. The months blurred together. Adjusting to WFH was extremely challenging for me, someone who had structured their whole life around the "I only do work in the office and I leave the office when I get hungry for dinner" logic. I would stop working at 6pm but spent the entire afternoon mentally prepping myself to do maybe 30 menial minutes of it. I binged AtLA. I gave up submitting to UIST. In May I hung out in the park with J, who came home from Seattle, which was the first time I saw anyone outside my family. Sometime in there I decided to become a Twitch streamer and had a brief revival as DJ Noon before I felt bad for roping my friends into listening to my music and ran out of interesting songs I wanted to play. In June I, like many others, took to the streets. For two weeks I donated $50 a day to a different organization. I couldn't get any work done at all and spent an entire advisor meeting sobbing so intensely that they felt bad and canceled it after 10 minutes. I emailed the university and got my housing back for the summer and I moved back to start my internship.
The internship was the break I needed -- working with W was a godsend compared to the struggle of my advisors. After reaching new lows at the start of the summer, my mental health was sloping positively again -- working on a new research project helped clear the emotional baggage of the last one. I was also getting more outdoor social interaction -- I went to Ocean Beach with M/D, Half Moon Bay with my family, and going on weekly bike rides with M. At the end of June, M, my roommate, her boyfriend M the clown (there are now 3 different Ms) and I waited for negative COVID results before going on a 2 day camping trip to Mt. Lassen, which felt completely surreal, and, at that time, completely necessary.
The summer dragged on and my mental health, at some point, began to slip. If I were to graph it it would probably look like the inverse of COVID cases in the US -- gradually decreasing, but with high variance from the day to day. I got an embroidery machine, I attended a workshop on docu-poetics with CPH that was so ripe with information my brain physically ached, I saw my lab mates again for the first time as we sat in a very, very wide circle to say goodbye to a post-doc who got a faculty job in Israel. Most weekends I drove to my parents' house and would take J on various hikes around East Bay so he could better appreciate his roots before he went off to Boston for college. He was taking the Switch with him, so in August I bought myself a new one and planned out my entire second ACNH town, which kept me busy for a while -- but surprisingly not as long as I thought, as with planning (and money from my old account) the whole project took I think less than 50 hours. The camping itch came back and the day before my birthday, which was also the day before J would leave for Boston, we went camping at a small state park in San Jose where he got heat stroke and we slept on top of fire ants. The entire experience reminded me how much I disliked camping -- but what else was there to do? I had a wonderful (and long, bless the folks who stayed) Zoom birthday party where I wore a mesh shirt I made and covered with worms on a string. The day after my birthday someone backed into my car, which, following the demands of a racist letter from the HOA, was parked in guest parking. (Ultimately this would be a blessing of insurance money, as the damage was mainly cosmetic and the person kindly left their contact information.) At this time I was also unironically watching ASMR videos to fall asleep, so I painted a two Bob Ross style paintings, one in my virtual art club, to pay homage.
Fire season this year was worse than it's ever been. Being trapped inside the house combined with my roommate moving out at the start of fall quarter and now living alone marked the second downward spiral of my mental health. The bad days were more frequent. I TA'd a game design course, my first time teaching at this university, where many students messaged me to complain that their 95s were not 100s. In the end the lowest grade in the class was an A- and 20% of the class got an A+. At some point I submitted a summer-long project I did with J and S to CHI; it is so much easier to produce work when I do not have to wrangle with M. (This paper gets accepted, but my silly grad student excitement is tampered both by general "why are we still trying to publish when society is crumbling" pandemic feelings and the fact that CHI will not be physically in Japan next year.) Maybe once a month I go birding. I feel increasingly as if there is nothing novel in my life; I am tired of it all and my body feels fatigued even though I don't do anything with my days. Some days it feels like if I don't touch someone I will explode. My use of recreational marijuana skyrockets. I start doing exercise videos semi-regularly with A. I briefly consider moving to Seattle with E, who is about to defend, before it's clear we have, as always, different boundaries and expectations. I look for places in Sunset/Richmond with M to little success.
In October I somehow pull it together and organize student volunteers for a 3 day conference that requires waking up before 5am every day. I do nothing the rest of the week. After we get flu shots and I let someone into my apartment for the first time since the pandemic started, I help E move up to Seattle. The trip is comfortable and we get to take care of each other; this fulfills a need in me. On Halloween J and I dance in a soccer field next to a combination anarchist recruitment center and homeless encampment -- now cleared by the cops -- and eat a mud pie that is too sweet. On my last day in WA I ask E if he would like to have sex, as friends, and he politely declines. I am pleased with how easily I emotionally accept this answer, how through time and therapy I've finally come to cherish our friendship without always looking for what could have been. I am extremely nervous on the flight home, and it's the first and only flight I will take during the pandemic, and the N-95 squishes my face so my head looks like a balloon, but I have the privilege of free 5 minute weekly tests through the university and I collect another negative result.
In November I fully embrace the hyperfixation lifestyle. My brain, always looking for novel stimuli, has given up on doing work entirely and instead thinks of Thanzag constantly. There is one day where I play Hades for 8 hours and I feel gross, as if I've completed my regression to my high school self. It takes 90 hours until I achieve all my goals, and with no more runs necessary to roll for RNG-based conversational triggers, I finally feel a sense of freedom. (My Switch tells me I have used it for 580+ hours this year, which is more than double last year.) The second SwSh DLC is a struggle for me to complete as I do not find catching legendaries enticing. J comes back early from university at my urging to avoid the travel surge, a week before Thanksgiving, and starts living with me. This helps a lot. My next hyperfixations come overlapping and staggered: I write 25k words of a second iteration of my 2015 NaNoWriMo with the protagonist I had developed in high school before I get bored with the story and realize I need yet another iteration; I buy a combination air fryer pressure cooker and ask my parents for a functional vacuum and bidet as early Christmas gifts and become obsessed with immaculate inside living spaces. This carries on to re-decorating my room at my parents' house, after installing a shelf in the closet and a curtain to close it off from the living room, and spending roughly 30 hours over December break organizing and cleaning their entire garage--they have not thrown out a single piece of paper or article of clothing since they set foot in this country over 20 years ago. My therapist quits the practice and my relationship with my advisors improve. I watch a few housewife vlogs and make my own. I have the revelation that doing research in a pandemic is basically just like any other creative project -- no one really cares that much if I get it done, it's just harder to do than, say, putting together a vlog in a few hours. This shift in mindset feels life changing to me, having before thought of research more as work, a taboo thing to pursue in a pandemic, and when W compliments me for the progress I've made in both the system and managing our meeting with M I do not know how to respond because no one has ever done that before. In the last two weeks of the year I start tracking my time. In our last session (that I almost sleep through), my therapist tells me that I seem stable to her and she is not worried about me. I believe her.
In 2020 I made a marked point to let everyone know that I didn't have goals. It felt lofty to have personal ambitions in the face of everything at a global scale. With this said I will now revisit the 2020 resolutions I wrote last year: (1) Intentionally seek out love: absolutely not, (2) Do enough work such that I don't feel guilty: also no, (3) sew one thing a month: no, but in the end I sewed 11 things total this year so I was close, (4) improve my Chinese: this was actually the only thing that did happen, and now my mom and I have better conversations because of it and I'm so thankful.
In 2021, however, I feel like I finally have it in me to have goals again. They are simple. (1) Get laid. (2) Submit the two research projects I've been doing forever. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, "Oh, that's interesting, I should write it down." Ideas are unfortunately such currency in what I do.
Last year I wrapped up this post with some candid, but embarrassing, optimism. I will offer no such high hopes for 2021, but I do ask the reader if they have noticed that I switched tenses from past to present halfway through this post. And that's 2021: an incidentally unintentional, but then consciously controllable, shift to the present.
The last day of 2019 was also the day I fainted for the first time--a fitting metaphor for the year.
2019 was overall very emotionally taxing. This year was emotionally defined by falling intensely, deeply in love with someone (who is a very private person so I will try to be vague to respect that) and being in a lot of pain because of situations mostly outside of our control. There were a lot of intensely joyous moments, and a lot of intensely sad ones. Throughout it all I wish I had communicated better. I also made some bad decisions with another person I really loved and cared about that resulted in us growing apart. Do I think I grew from the experiences? For sure. Do I wish I could have come upon these realizations through a different course of action? Also yes. Am I fully healed from the experiences? Not really, but I've been getting better.
2019 was also very bad in terms of research. It was the 2nd year of my PhD. After I submitted my rotation project I basically felt stuck in the swamp of my advisors rejecting new project ideas for like literally half a year. This, combined with my high emotional volatility (partially due to starting birth control), made me really sad, unmotivated, and susceptible to self-blame. I definitely had high expectations for myself and became frustrated at my lack of progress and felt a lot of pressure from myself to get my shit together. I also felt incredibly bad after most advisor meetings and not supported by one of them to the point where I had to have a conversation with him about the lack of support (which was very scary)! Things started picking up, though, near the end of the year. I published a paper in collaboration with a former post-doc/now professor elsewhere whom I learned a lot from, and started finally building out another system. I also started mentoring an undergrad who at some point told me I helped him feel like he had something important to say and belong at Stanford for the first time and those words meant a lot to me. I think I'm continuing to refine what I value as research contributions and increasingly think about what it means to build systems that aren't used outside of the lab to satisfy the annual conference publishing cycle. I'm also starting to feel the pressure of doing work that follows a narrative rather than random projects that interest me.
Oh, I guess in terms of "program requirements," I did finish taking required classes, passed qualifying exams, and got a master's degree. But honestly those weren't hard at all nor do I think are externally valued in the larger research community, so I don't really celebrate them as accomplishments beyond surface level.
In 2019 I saw two different therapists. The first one was awful, I think directly influenced some of my bad decisions, and also didn't respect my gender identity??? The second one is a lot better and I'm grateful to see her, even if 90% of our sessions are just talking about my relationship (romantic/advisor) issues, which is something I want to move away from in the future. But I also feel incredibly privileged when relationship issues are the primary stressors in my life--I am grateful I feel equipped to handle other crap, like deadlines, and don't have to worry about my own health.
Those were the main things that have colored this year. We'll now move into the section of this post where I go through my photos to jog my memory of other events.
New years started a tradition of getting dim sum with Jasper, Matthew, and Michelle dear to my heart. My high school friend was also visiting and we all attended a really awesome new year's eve party. I was also going on a lot of dates and having a lot of good sex, which made me really happy, and at the same time crying all the time at work. In February I received probably the best gift anyone has ever given me and saw Panic! at the Disco, which I said in an end of the year group meeting was a good memory of my year (it was, to relive my scene days!). In March I roadtripped both to Marin (which I had never to been before, despite all my years in the bay) and LA for Wondercon; it was nice to both see high school friends and go on a trip with the boo. In April I went on a hike with my office which was probably the start of us all becoming closer (we are the social office in the wing now, which I take pride in! Also we draw a lot of Pokemon which warms my heart). In May I went to CHI in Glasgow and then to Paris afterward, and the entire experience was very weird and bad and also too many flights were canceled and/or missed and I vowed to not return to Europe for a while, but man do I love the noodles at Trois Fois plus de Piment. In June we hosted a double apartment party with my downstairs neighbors (side note: I am really appreciative of the place I live in, for the community, convenience, and large-ass space and will be really sad to be kicked out fall 2020) and I started a friendship important to me. I cat-sat for my advisor (the one who doesn't make me feel bad) twice. I went to Redwood State Park with my family and hosted a summer solstice celebration. Over the summer a friend I met in Paris back in 2017 moved in with me. I had a much needed escape from the bay to Seattle where I was reminded how abundant the world can be. I also went to Tahoe to celebrate my parents' anniversary, and really liked stumbling upon a smaller lake with a cheap boat rental. Then I became FOMO about the highly competitive Bay Area camping and did a last minute walk-in at Redwood Basin in Santa Cruz, which made me realize that I don't actually love camping (but was nice nonetheless). I ate an expensive meal at Commonwealth before they closed. For my birthday we made a friendship quilt and I served my favorite dish of cumin lamb but it was also 90 degrees in my apartment (I felt really bad and bought two fans afterwards). I started buying many cartoon frog plush after being gifted a $3.99 on sale Safeway frog (called Baby!). I went on Tinder dates (one of which was at a quaker yard sale marketed as Harvest Festival where I got a 1970s Kermit puppet for like $2) that largely went nowhere. My high school friend visited and we were both sad about break ups. I did Inktober before I went to New Orleans for a conference on Bourbon St where everything felt like it was coated in a sticky film of alcohol. I almost missed my flight home because I fell asleep in a sculpture garden but I had the most amazing Uber driver who snaked his way through traffic (oh and the flight was delayed by like 3 hours). I went to kind of embarrassing haunted houses and pumpkin patches over Halloween, but also had the most incredible bowl of ramen at Mensho. My whole office dressed up as Zootopia characters which warmed my furry heart. I spent like $120 on a Pokemon shirt. I started playing Arkham Horror and rekindled another friendship important to me. In November went on a road trip to Big Sur because again, I had to escape it all. For Christmas Eve dinner I roasted a duck for the first time (which was delicious). Shortly after I waited in line for 2 hours for a rollercoaster at Great America, which taught me the value of buying a fast pass because at this point in my life that money is worth it, and then waited 2 hours in line at the DMV to get a RealID (I had made an appointment, which was the fast pass).
Okay, now we move to the hobby section!
I got really into sewing in 2019, having received a sewing machine last Christmas. I made a Judy Hopps (which I wore to CrunchyRoll Expo) and Korok cosplay (Fanime), several unsuccessful garments, a crab bean bag, a dice bag, a fanny pack, and put hearts nipples on a jumpsuit.
Shows! I think I went to way fewer shows this year. The ones I can remember are Elephant Gym, Thom Yorke the night before I had an 8am flight, Carly Rae Jepsen over pride weekend (also, she is my #1 artist of the year, which makes a lot of sense given my emotional space), Mitski at Stern Grove, Capitol Hill Bloc Party (which was super lame, except for Lizzo, where I cried), and the National (which was a fucking surreal experience as they played on Stanford's campus, I was the only one within earshot of myself who knew the words to Crybaby Geeks, and then the white catalog moms came up to me after to thank me for singing the song).
I also started playing my own music! I started playing viola again for the first time in 7 years (lol) in both pop-up concerts with the Awesome Orchestra (one in Golden Gate Park, one at the Exploratorium) and a string quartet through my school. Sometimes I am filled with joy and delight. Other times interpersonal tensions run high and also I am very bad at being in tune. It's life.
Media! I really liked Mob Psycho 100 Season 2 and Beastars. I feel like those were the only notable anime I watched this year? I saw the Farewell three times--first in Seattle where I sobbed for like 1 hour after the movie, the second time with my parents, and the third where Awkwafina was present for a Q&A. I thought Parasite was incredible and Promare was OK. I have spent an unfortunately large amount of my time playing Pokemon Masters. I finally beat BOTW and completed my Pokedex in Shield like 2 weeks after getting the game.
Resolutions! In my draft of my 2018 end of year post (which I never polished and posted, sorry), I said my resolutions were 1. come out to my parents 2. draw enough to table at an anime con 3. be disciplined about paper reading and have a doc. I did none of these things!!! However, for 1, I feel like I am well equipped to have this conversation but am waiting for my sibling to do it first out of respect. 2 was just bad. I barely drew this year except for gifts. 3 was okay--I did have a large doc in the beginning of the year when I was looking for ideas, but as time went on I abandoned it (I also stopped reading papers, which I don't think you're supposed to do as a grad student...)
My resolutions this year are phrased as intentions (-(c) Matthew). They span several categories. Relationships: I want to open myself to and actively seek experiences of love, because I miss that. That being said, I will only date someone if 1. they have their life together 2. they love themselves and 3. they challenge me to grow. (I do think you can experience love without dating; the thing I'm after is love in an expansive sense.) Work: I want to do enough work so I don't feel guilty about not doing enough work, and also not berate myself for taking a long time to do things. Hobbies: I want to sew at least one thing a month. Chinese: I want to improve my Chinese, especially pronunciation.
Having written this 20 days into 2020, it's not been so bad so far. But I was also really happy in the beginning of 2019. Here's to no global maxima, a monotonically increasing year!
this year i learned that (white) people send holiday cards, and i guess these posts have always been mine. to revive the three pronged thesis from the trenches of middle school: i traveled a lot, i started grad school, and i became more horny.
on travel
i kept track of every place i slept this year. here is a map:
and a bar chart:
locations serve as a good summary of stuff that i did for “work” or “career” or whatever. life fell in segments. having graduated undergrad, i interned at [generic tech company] while living in san jose from the beginning of the year until mid may. one time i fell asleep in a meeting that i called. around late feb/march i also missed over 15 days of work (lol) because i was touring all those phd programs--that was a lot of fun!
i went to 3.5 conferences this year: one in cyprus that was my first talk (though about work i think has fundamental flaws), a preconference in san diego for communications that was awful, one at MIT with an associated week long ‘summer school’ that i enjoyed, and one in orlando for digital humanities that made me very grateful to be in HCI.
i spent summer in europe and that was the dream. i was a really bad researcher, but can anyone focus on doing work when surrounded by the beauty of paris? after my research stint ended (and financed by that internship money) i did what every other college grad with newfound wealth did and traveled around europe. i went to iceland, which i had been wanting to do since i was 12! on my way back to the states, i stopped in chicago to see some friends and also drove down the pnw to see the solar eclipse. a lot of planes this year! feeling bad for my carbon footprint. oh, i also bought my first car (i survived in the peninsula for 10 weeks without one...sigh), so that ain’t helping either. though i do now commute by bike to school, which is really great (and good cardio)!
a brief media interlude
here is my annual best of playlist. this year i went to at least 15 shows, mostly in the bay area. the ones i remember: thom yorke, grizzly bear, tennis, badbadnotgood, radiohead x 2 (berkeley + arras), avalanches x 2 (sf + boston), andrew bird x 2, gorillaz, the national & sufjan stevens et al (planetarium) in paris, mitski, the xx, blood orange, lcd soundsystem. when i saw thom in december my first thought when he stepped on stage was ‘he’s so fucking ugly and needs to wash his hair so badly,’ a stark contrast from the first time i saw him (at 14) which was incoherent crying and worshiping--character development, i guess?
this year, more so than any other (perhaps my nomadic nature), i’ve started to have vivid associations of songs with place. kendrick’s damn (album of the year) or tennis’ (band of the year) yours conditionally: listened to heavily while carpooling to work in the south bay in a truck 20 years older than i. radiohead’s man of war: dashing to the pompidou when it was released to watch the music video as i didn’t yet have data, and then blarring out of speakers in a late night coffee shop as folks wandered the streets of arras, waiting for the first morning train home.
i also read 14 books this year, potentially the most books i’ve read in any year in recent memory--that’s what graduation affords. i started actively seeking out stuff written by asian americans (especially millennials) and i am soooo glad that i did. favorite ones are pamela: a novel (pamela lu), when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities (poetry, chen chen), chemistry (weiki wang), and sour heart (jenny zhang). is this how white people feel all the time, seeing their stories and narratives and experiences captured and validated and published?
on grad school
i spent a few weeks agonizing where and with whom to spend my next ~5 years, which to like literally anyone not in the academy as a computer science phd student just sounds like crying because you can’t decide between artisanal ice cream flavor x or y, so i won’t elaborate. but--i visited the campus i’m now at the day i had to make a decision and met with some faculty on the roof of the new art building. the bay stretched the distance, sunkissed. when they left, i just sat, waiting for my mom to pick me up, and i started crying, because i felt so lucky, because i felt like i really had the opportunity to achieve my dreams, and i didn’t even know what those dreams were (i still don’t). i’m trying to hold on to that feeling.
it’s only been 10 weeks, and i definitely am having a good time (the cushiness of private school!), but i still miss my undergrad. i moved out of a 140 person co-op and into a 2 person apartment (heavily subsidized by my school) in the heart of silicon valley that i think is bigger than the house my parents live in. no more spontaneous dinner hangouts because campus is its own city and the downtown 1.5 miles away is too fucking expensive anyway. while the peninsula can’t compete with east bay, i have met some really radiant folks here, but i wish we hung out more. in the start of this year, when i was still living in berkeley, i was getting dinner or exploring the city or doing something dumb (or just doing work together and getting distracted) with people i really loved every day. i didn’t expect graduate students to be closer to working adults than undergrads in terms of their social lives, but that’s what i’m feeling. 2018: a year of foraging closer bonds, the kind that make you feel like you’re overflowing. also 2018: a year to get serious about school again. i feel like i just had a lot of fun in 2017! gotta work harder.
on being horny
this year i had a very necessary and very belated realization of my attraction to the White Man™ (just look at the kinds of media i idolized when i was younger, or my hometown). i was also in love, at some point, with two of them. one helped me formulate my own definitions and actions around romantic love (granted, this has always been/will always be happening, but it was a catalyst to get me to explicitly think about these things). one helped me further that and also breach into the realm of touch. i had identified somewhere in the grey ace spectrum for the last 4 years of my life (around the same time i realized gender was a painful lie, the same time i went to college and escaped white suburbia, stumbling upon the qpoc oasis i’m still trying to create in grad school) but i think a lot of it was because i associated sex with shame and denial. but hey, physical intimacy is cool! i know it seems painfully obvious, but it wasn’t to me.
six chronological selfies from 2017
mt haleakala at sunrise / cyprus at sunset / me as asian fuckboy / me as asian tourist in versailles / me as european fuckboy post italian haircut + glasses / the most beautiful place on earth
i wore 4 different pairs of glasses (most current not pictured) this year cuz i kept on breaking ‘em!! 2018: the year where my ass sits only on things it should.
