Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Let's get it!

Hello! Welcome to 2024. That means the residential parking permit on my BMW M2 is due for renewal. (That’s right: pay to park in front of your own house.) And what the French? The price has jumped from $148 annually of last year, to now $170. I understand inflation is inevitable (Thanos style), but this is just plain greed. The city of San Francisco is collecting more money from us for parking simply because it can. You can’t possibly tell me that administrative costs for the program have risen 15%. They don’t even print out stickers anymore because license plates are scanned.

I’m still going to pay the new price like a chump, of course. Where else am I going to park my car?

The start of the new year also means increased traffic at your local gym. I wish all the New Year's resolutioners the very best. Consistent exercise is the most beneficial thing for the body and its longevity. I hope your gym visits also reach decent longevity. My advice? (Because, you know, as a person who works out three times a week every week, I am ultra qualified to give.) Don’t try to do a lot - or change a lot - at once. Stick with a certain program or routine for at least six weeks.

More importantly: embrace the suck. The days when you do go for that run - despite everything enticing you to not (warm bed, everything that’s in the iPhone) - are the true winning days. The freshness of New Year’s resolution wears off really quickly. That enthusiasm for change will only sustain you initially. If you don’t find another motive force to keep going - be it the carrot or the stick - then that is when people quit. I’ve certainly quit on things started on January 1st before.

Anything that is worthwhile takes time. A long time.

He’s sick of seeing. Yeah, that’s what it means.

Rejected too few

Getting rejected sucks. Even when the situation is one where I fully expect to get rejected. My particular human psychology just isn’t built-up to deal with this kind of failure. It’s as if each successive rejection is a direct reflection of my personhood, a character flaw. How can rejection affect me so adversely even with the proper amounts of anticipation? Perhaps I’m indeed too invested in what others think of me.

Yesterday I made an offer on a car at a local dealership. It was soundly rejected, obviously, which put me in a sort of funk the rest of the day. I can’t really explain it. It was textbook negotiation: two parties can only agree to move on from the table. But then why do I feel so bad? I don’t think I put undue anticipation, hopes and dreams, towards my offer being accepted. It was just taking a shot: the answer is always no if I don’t ask.

Thinking back, I’ve always had this neuroticism. Back in my schooling days, I would dread getting English papers back from the teachers. Invariably their remarks and criticism would hurt me to the core. I was rather happy to be done with English classes after freshman year of college. Instead, I do my writing here in this blog. Where it’s safe from criticism (readership is minuscule, no one comments!), and I can commit all the subject-verb tense error I am wont to do.

Moving forward I think it’s helpful to get rejected. It’s good practice, and unless I plan to stay in my hole for the rest of time, it’s going to happen anyways. I need to learn to handle the afterwards better, to be able to move on quickly. It’s a part of what I’m trying to do in 2023: live authentically, and not care about what other people think.

Starting off correctly

It was a glorious New Year’s Eve watching the annual fireworks show with friends. Naturally that meant I did not get to bed until well into New Year’s Day. No big deal, right? What better way to celebrate switching out the calendars than sleeping in on a Sunday morning. Well-earned rest after some appropriate revels (read: no alcohol involved).

Sadly my mom called me right at 9:00 AM - waking me up unceremoniously - asking why I have not come home for my weekly visit. This, after confirming with her a week ago that I will not be arriving in the usual morning - for the obvious aforementioned reasons. There goes my plan of sleeping well into the morning. A few minutes later after the uninvited wake-up call, a friend’s text came in asking if I would like to run the lake in about two hours’ time.

Since I was not about to go back to sleep - because I likely could not fall asleep again - I agreed to some exercising. Seems applicable, being that January 1st is de-facto national sign up for a gym membership day. I join my fellow citizens on their newfound rigor in hopes of a better and fitter body. Only difference is I’ve been on a fitness bend since my early 20s. I wish the newcomers, fresh from their New Year’s resolution, can sustain their new habit for the very long term.

My own wish for 2023 is one simple thing: live authentically. I endeavor to stop worrying about what others think, and to stop tailoring my actions towards the whims of others. Because 99% of the time, people aren't thinking about me at all. Therefore the problem is only in my head, and highly irrational. I’m going to make mistakes, sure, but whatever I do and whatever I say will be absolutely as I want it to be. I rather hurt your feelings then apologize later, than censoring myself to begin with.

Good luck to us all in 2023.

I don't know about you

Hello there! It sure is wonderful to see the dawn of another day and a new year. The COVID pandemic rages on, but I’m rather optimistic about 2022. I really wish to be able to travel to my beloved Asia again - sans the need to quarantine. We shall see. For now, the cold and rain of winter is the reality, and the routine of every day life.

It was nice to not have a routine from Christmas Eve onwards until New Year’s Day. Working in higher education grants me the privilege of having that week off every single year. My last day of work in 2021 was the 22nd of December, which is something to be smug about, honestly. I don’t have to work in tech-bro land to have this perk! Granted, I don’t get paid like I would be if I worked in tech.

So it was a splendid week of rest and relaxation. I slept about 10 hours every day, and then went about my business as slowly as possible. I spent an hour just to eat dinner! It’s incredibly nice to not have to rush through things or treat the mundane stuff as mere obstacles to get onto the fun stuff. Taking my sweet time to perform my morning grooming because I don’t have to rush to get to work on time is a small joy.

The Hawaiians and their “island time” are kind of geniuses.

Anyways, I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions because any changes I want to do, I don’t wait until the calendar flips to a new one. However, I did make one tiny but significant change to start 2022: I deleted twitter off my iPhone. I now have zero social media apps. No longer will I waste half an hour (at least) each morning and each night browsing through the feed in bed. It’s not a good use of time, and it’s not healthy towards my quality of sleep.

I wish us all a great 2022. Let’s get after it.

First

Hello, friends. Welcome to this side of 2021. Consider yourself lucky - as I do - if you’ve made it through the pandemic 2020 with your health and job intact. The onus is on us to give those that have lost plenty a helping hand. For example: those in a position to not really need the $600 stimulus check should donate it to a charity. Consider a local food bank, or the Barstool Fund.

Because I work in education, I got the week and a half between Christmas Eve and New Years Day off. The white-collar winter break, if you will. While it sucked that I couldn’t travel back home to China as it’s my usual during this time, it was still nice to have some solitude at home. The weather was rainy for the most part as well, which is just about the perfect backdrop for some quiet contemplation.

Of course, it seems to be impossible for me to do absolute nothing, even when I’m on vacation. I feel best when I’m productive, so over the winter break I kept on reading books and studying Korean for a few hours per day. I also wrote a personal reflection piece on 2020, and a December update to owning my BMW M2 Competition. Please kindly give those a read.

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions anymore, preferring consistent processes and habits. Sometimes the end goal can overwhelm the brain into failed submission. A small daily habit is much more palatable. Read 100 books for the year seems like climbing Everest; read for a half hour every day is infinitely more doable. Let your daily habits compound, and by the end the year you might as well end up reading 100 books.

I have no new habits to make for 2021; not yet, anyways. One mental goal I am working on this year is to truly ignore the opinion of others, to not give a crap what other people think. Too often I’ve let how I think others will react dictate my actions. This doesn’t mean I’m going to be a narcissistic asshole to people; the point is to be completely myself. I’m not going to restrict who am I and what I do just because I’m afraid what people will say.

First of the year

Hello, friends, and welcome to the first blog post of 2020. As it is per usual, I’ve been away on holiday back home in China to start the year, therefore it’s not really until the middle of January that the new year officially begins for me. That’s not a complaint; I quite like having the two weeks’ time to decompress and meditate over the game plan for 2020, and I’m incredibly lucky to be afforded such leisurely opportunities to do so. Most people only get Christmas Day and New Year’s Day off, and that’s it.

Indeed, heading home to Guangzhou allows me plenty of time to think things over because being back at a familiar place meant I’m not busy doing the typical touristy stuff when I travel to other countries. The pace is decidedly slower, and the primary goal actually is to see family and eat lots of Cantonese food that I can’t get back in the States. Plus, thanks to the Great Firewall of China, the Internet as I personally know it is largely blocked off when I’m inside the country. Due to the protest in Hong Kong, the Chinese government have even targeted VPN services, meaning my usual route of bypassing the censors was mostly ineffective.

I barely got my end of 2019 reflection piece in, with the photographs taking forever to upload under VPN speeds. Yes, Squarespace and any website hosted on the platform is blocked in China.

All of that is to say, I had a lot of time to ruminate on what I want out of 2020, and I’ve narrowed it down into a key few items. First and foremost is to be kind, both to myself and others. My bouts with anxiety in much of 2019 stem from the inability to take the positive perspective to the things that are happening to me, and that corrupted how I see the outside world as well. It’s not a very nice mental place to be, always thinking the worse of situations, especially when they are outside my sphere of control.

The second item is to do only the things I’m passionate about. Life isn’t about ticking as much boxes as possible, but rather it’s ticking just the boxes that are truly important. If something no longer holds my eager interest, I will drop it immediately. This goes for books, podcasts; any activity, really. The point is to have experiences and tasks that are meaningful and matter to me on a personal level, and not something to do for the sake of doing - I’m not here to collect accomplishment trophies. In 2020 I want to read only good books, and not finish the most books.

The third item is to constantly keep focus to the absolute present, and try not to worry (too much) about what has happened in the past and what’s to come in the future. Detach. Easier said than done, obviously; it’s one of those daily practices that remains a work in progress for possibly a lifetime.

One foot in front of the other. Let’s go.

How long you've had a credit card matters

One of my major New Year's resolutions this year was to implement austerity. The past few years I’ve been highly cavalier with my money, mostly towards doing an immense amount of traveling. I don’t regret any of it as it’s been some of the best times in my life, but what with me turning 30 I figured time was right to store up some cash for headier times.

Midway through the year however I decided I was going to purchase a Porsche 911 in the near future, so austerity could not have come at a more perfect time. Slavishly save money just to then squander it all? That’s just how life works. To paraphrase Ludacris’ character in the Fast and Furious franchise: what’s the good of making money if you don’t spend any of it?

Nevertheless I’m still keeping to my resolution, and it’s been going great. With less expenditure I’ve whittled down the number of credits cards I use to only a few (the Chase line of Freedom and Sapphire cards are awesome). With no activity on the spare cards, I was content to let the credit card company close on them, thinking that it won’t do much damage to my credit score.

Well I was wrong. A few weeks ago I did my periodic routine check of my score on Credit Karma, and a particular item serendipitously caught my eye: the age of credit history. Turns out the length of time a credit card is open bears a positive attribution to the credit score, with it signifying trustworthiness and whatnot. Unfortunately for me, the cards I haven’t been using are the one’s I’ve had the longest.

I can’t let those cards expire now and risk damaging my credit score, not with the need to get financing for the Porsche next year. So in the past few weeks I’ve put tiny purchases on each formerly disused card to restart the closure clock, so to speak. My score is currently in the low 800s, and I aim to keep it that way.

Pro tip: don’t let your old credit cards expire unless you’ve got an equally old credit card you plan to keep using, because it will impact your credit score greatly.