Last year in order to beat down existential dread, I got the bright idea of going on a birthday trip. Something to remind me how exciting life can be, and how being old is AWESOME. My birthday is around Thanksgiving, so the only cheap flights that I could find were to Canada. Anyways, I had a blast in Vancouver, so I thought that I ought to make this an annual thing.
This year I chose New Orleans, and bought the ticket oh… back in June? July? Ages ago. I was a bit out of sorts after returning from my Tokyo trip, but New Orleans was just what I needed. Great food, good music and friendly people. We stayed in a beautiful old house that a couple had converted into a home/AirBNB. From the moment I saw the ridiculous color scheme, I knew that we had to stay there.
Honestly, we were in and out with 2 full days in the city, and the entire time I was pretty much like :
There was just so much that I was excited about (voodoo, jazz, food, cemeteries, chicory coffee, swamps, cocktails…). Basically I was on a mission to soak up as much liquor and history as possible. This is a long and picture heavy post, so… just warning you.
Recently two television shows that I watch ended their seasons with a major character deciding to move to Tokyo. In Girls, after months of professional rejection, Shoshanna finally landed a job, but there was a catch- Â the position was in Tokyo. She ended a budding relationship and went for it. Â In Master of None, the Aziz Ansari Netflix show, the main character’s girlfriend breaks up with him and moves to Tokyo, because it had always been her dream to live there. Tokyo!
So what is it about Tokyo? What does it represent? The future? The furthest thing possible from American culture?
I’m embarrassed to admit that when I was in middle school, I wished that I was Japanese*. I was super obsessed with manga of course, but to me many aspects of the culture seemed  preferable to my own.
Japanese food? Clean, expensive and suitable for a first date. Chinese food? Greasy take-out for when the thrill of the relationship is gone.
Japanese technology? Crazy cool tech. Chinese tech? Human rights / labor violations, bound to break, cheap.
Japanese language? OMG they have an alphabet! Chinese language? I’ll never truly master Mandarin at this point…
Japanese toilets? I have never felt a clean like this before! Chinese toilets? No freaking toilet paper for the hole in the floor!
And so on and so on…
I got back from my trip more than a week ago, but am still trying to process everything I experienced. Tokyo was overwhelming, but in a different way from any of the other Asian cities I’ve visited.
The city had a great energy, but at times I felt so out of the loop, lost and anonymous. Sometimes it was rather lonely. For example, in Thailand or Burma, I felt like I could have a meaningful interaction with locals encountered in day to day travel, and hopefully learn a bit about them (and the other way around). In Japan it was pretty obvious that that kind of a connection wasn’t going to happen casually.
The extreme automation (ramen vending machines for example) was delightful, Â but it didn’t help this outsider feeling. It was tricky communicating when we got a chance to, so that added a little stress every time we had to find a meal. A couple of times there were no English menus or picture menus, so we had to concede defeat and try to find another restaurant.
It was rainy all week, so we spent our last couple of days at a slower pace. I managed to get a lot of my bootcamp work done, and check out a few cool things:
All the food was amazing (and so cheap!), but Japanese breakfast in particular was a delight. Congee is still better, tho 🙂
I took my first rush hour train in order to visit the Meguro Parasitological Museum. Now that I’ve seen rush hour firsthand, I understand how the groping situation happens. They really stuff people in there, if somebody groped you, you could not move away from their hands. You also probably wouldn’t be able to figure out who touched you! It was just that crowded.
Anyways, I had high hopes for the museum, but it ended up being a bust. It was TINY and all of the explanations were in Japanese 🙁 . Still, I got to see the main attraction- the world’s longest tapeworm (29 feet), and a poor mouse who got taken over by a tumor. So cool.Â
OMG
Ryan and I visited a Japanese brewery, which was pretty much like every other brewery I’ve ever been to – Â bustling, slick and delicious.
Coffee culture isn’t huge in Tokyo, but there were quite a few cute little coffee corners that offered artisanal joe.Â
I also dropped by a couple of Ryan’s work events, so it was nice to finally get a real chance to chat with locals. Too bad these events were at the end of our trip!
Once I got to the Shanghai airport, I was greeted by these bad boys! Nom nom.
After a week of walking around in the rain, I unsurprisingly caught a nasty cold. So I didn’t mind when it was time to go home. As if to drill home the differences between Japan/China, the trip back was a trial.
Tokyo -> Shanghai was quiet and uneventful. On my flight from Shanghai to SF, I got shoved out of the aisle by an impatient passenger, and my very loud seatmate spent the ~12 hour flight invading my personal space. First she got cozy by taking off her socks, and putting up her feet on the armrests in front of her, making it look like she was squatting horizontally. Then she pulled out about 7 sandwiches from her ginormous bag and distributed them to her friends on the plane.
Another funny thing that I thought was totally Chinese: during turbulence and landing, the flight attendants asked people to please sit down and no, please don’t open the bins and get into your luggage… The passengers completely ignored the poor flight attendants, who eventually gave up yelling at them.
Did I mention that it’s good to be home?
*No, I don’t feel this way anymore, although it took me a long time to fully appreciate who I am and where my family came from.
Note: This post is rather long and photo heavy. Sorry!
View from our hotel room
So, I quit my job a few weeks ago. It was a good job with good people, Â but I found myself wanting to spend more time on my data-sciencey coding stuff, and less time actually doing the day-to-day duties of an analyst. I know that if I had continued on, I could have done a few pretty cool projects, but it seemed like a good time to go. I had been doing work all day, school all night for almost a year. I was burnt out. So I saved up enough money and quit. I’m doing a web development bootcamp, and hope to start looking for a job in 4 months or so. But all of that is for another post. 🙂
Anyways, Ryan was going to a conference in Tokyo about a week after my last day at work, and he joked that I should tag along. Just for fun, I looked at tickets to see how bad it would be. Surprisingly, I found tickets at ~$500 and under! These were flights on a terrible airline with terrible layovers, but hey, it seemed like fate. I couldn’t NOT go.
So the cheap tickets were worth it, but man I had to work for it. Getting to Tokyo took 30+ hours, and included a rainy layover in Shanghai. The food on China Eastern was terrible even for airline food, and gave me some weird stomach ish.
Even though I was feeling tired, I pushed myself to go into the city, had some fun, and then I got stranded! It took a couple tries and several hours, but in the end I was able to get back to the airport via black cab. Of course that is not safe, so don’t do that. Once I made it back, Â I barely slept on an airport bench, with my head on my luggage, avoiding the airport’s bright fluorescent lights, wondering what I was doing with my life.
Shanghai in the rain
Given that the China leg of my trip was so unpleasant, being in Tokyo has been a dream. The food has been divine, and the dollar is strong here.
It seems that Tokyo is similar to San Francisco in that it can be a totally different city depending on who you are and what you’re interested in. I am interested in food, robots, culture, and kitsch, so that’s what we did.
It was finally time to head up to Portland and run the damn thing. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t even nervous. I was just ready to get it over with. Unfortunately Ryan had to drop out due to an emergency that took him to New York. I felt a bit guilty going ahead with my “fun” weekend without him, but sometimes life is like that.
Michelle and I had joked months earlier that we ought to use this trip as an opportunity to force each other to do the other’s favorite cult workout. For me, it was Bikram yoga. For her, Crossfit. Both patented exercise regimes, mind you. Both a bit misunderstood and militant. Both costing about $20 bucks a pop. Still cheaper than SoulCycle!
Anyways, considering how grueling the half would be, I’d given no thought to working out the DAY BEFORE AND THE DAY AFTER the run. In fact, I packed only one set of workout clothes. How wrong I was. I was going to be wearing those nasty Lululemons all weekend. The moment I hopped in Michelle’s car she asked me to look up a Bikram studio. Shit.
Anyways, we did end up doing Bikram. And a half. And Crossfit. And we survived. But this post is about the half, so let me get back to the point.
We woke up a little early because there was an hour drive to the run site. Oh, and I also wanted to get Burgerville for breakfast. Yum! Getting to Hood River was a little nerve wracking because Google Maps sucks. We ended up driving over a nondescript toll bridge, paying a dollar, and then paying another dollar to get back across once we realized our mistake had taken us to Washington!! We told the toll booth operator about our amateur mistake, but there was no sympathy for the two lost out-of-towners. She was a true toll bridge troll.
The instructions on the marathon website were utter trash, and we found ourselves in a long line of lost cars. The blind leading the blind, as there was no signage mentioning the race anywhere. A gas station attendant pointed us in the right direction, and we were on our way. Parking was a bit of a frustration, and we almost had an altercation with a self-important soccer mom and teenage volunteer who were being a bit unreasonable about our car. The difficulty of just getting to this stupid race was starting to become comical.
By the time we got to the disorganized start line, we were not excited. Michelle was a bit grumpy. Maybe she would have liked a bagel from the food tent, but it was too late for bagels.
But hey! There was a rainbow! That’s a good sign, right?
Rocking my commemorative pullover. Minor gripe: there were no free t-shirts at this $80 race >:(
I’d had some hesitations about this run because the course was pretty much ALL hills. But hey, I live in SF, so I “trained” for it.
For the first mile or so it rained. Then it was just a long wet slog up the hill. At one beautiful overlook I tried to take a photo while running, fell and skinned my knee.
Beautiful, right? Worth the bruises.
By mile 4 my mind drifted. I was slow. I was dying. Why was I doing this again? I focused on the cute dogs that raced by in the “dog half marathon.” Then I realized that the dogs were trotting the half marathon happily, and I was struggling. That was depressing.
Around Mile 6 things started to come together (aka my Gu chomps kicked in). I passed Michelle as she was returning and felt a good surge of energy. This was really happening! What to say? I kept running up and down the fucking hills. I spent time checking out my fellow runners and making up elaborate background stories for each of them.
Mile 9? I felt a little queasy. I tried to throw up.
Around Mile 10 I did throw up. It was awesome. Then I kept running. I made up for lost time by speeding down the 2 miles of hills.
Woo! Downhill!
The last mile was miserable. We did zigzags through the muddy parking lot to the grassy area where the finish line beckoned. I started to cry. It was very overwhelming to have come to the end of such a long and in my mind unattainable goal. I was so proud of my  body for hanging in there.
My time: 2:26! Faster than I’d estimated in training. And with hills too!
When I finished, I didn’t even want to get my rightfully earned free BURRITOÂ AND BEER from the food tent. I was just empty. Â We got the hell out of there with our ceramic tile Georgia O’Keefe medals. It was back to Portland, where we could pass out in peace.
So, that was that. What should my next fitness goal be? Please don’t say a full marathon.
I can’t quite believe it, but summer is here (Happy Summer Solstice y’all :p). Or rather, the Bay Area version of summer. Cold, windy, moist… it makes you want to get out of town to somewhere where you can have “real summer.” In May I went to Tahoe with friends and saw my mom in LA for Mother’s Day, but that wasn’t enough. Soon after I was itching for another trip.
There had been some plans to go camping for a friend of a friend’s birthday party earlier in the month, but truth be told spending my entire weekend with complete strangers celebrating a birthday just sounds fucking terrible to me. Please tell me that I’m not the only one? I get a little grumpy after 24/7 with close friends, let alone new friends. Luckily I was able to bow out gracefully from the camping trip. I literally breathed a sigh of relief.
Of course only a few weeks later, and another birthday camping trip with strangers came up! This one sounded even more extreme. A 5+ hour drive away on a regular weekend, with even more guests, and a whole lot of love for the birthday boy. I immediately freaked out, because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get out of it. There’s a variety of reasons why I couldn’t get out of it, but basically it came down to Ryan wanting to go, and the event itself being too unique to miss. It was a “glamping†birthday party (fancy camping). I knew it was irrational, but I couldn’t shake my stressed out feeling around the trip. My breathing was heavy for a day before the trip. I had troubled sleep. I read this LifeHacker guide to spending a weekend with strangers several times. I asked my therapist why my head was making such a big deal out of this. I was basically this cat.
Anyways, it was a go, so there wasn’t much to do besides be stressed, and pack.
While getting down to Santa Barbara on a Friday night during rush hour was a complete pain in the ass, I had little to worry about from the social standpoint. Everybody was quite lovely, friendly and chill. The camp was gorgeous, and the food delicious. I felt like I’d been invited to a Kinfolk wedding… er.. birthday party. I mean, look at this beautiful campsite:
Real beds, leather chairs, Pendeton blankets, an orange! They thought of everything.
All the beauty and celebratory feelings aside, I still found myself getting stressed out at certain points. Once I felt like if I had to keep smiling and making chitchat I would snap, so I took a hike. Literally.
 Necessary sweaty hiking selfie
 Not quite babbling brook.
The ocean
QT with the Economist
Alone time pretty much made it all better.
When I was younger I used to give myself an incredibly hard time about how I “should†want to go to certain social events, usually really big and ridiculous parties with hundreds of strangers (smaller gatherings never gave me pause). I felt like something was really wrong with me, or that I was missing out on life, or perhaps not socially capable (I know, so dramatic). By now I’ve been to enough of these events to know that usually, I’m not missing much, and I shouldn’t feel guilty if my natural inclination to stay home and tinker comes first. I mean, there are so many projects and things that I want to work on in my spare time that sometimes going out just for the sake of it feels like a waste of time. I’m sitting at the bar thinking “I could be knitting a stuffed animal” or “I need to get my stupid Google Analytics certification.” Still I can’t get away with never going to social events that don’t suit me. That’s just life.
Things that helped:
Get away for a breather when possible. ( Alerting loved ones about how you may ghost alleviates stress).
Plan alone time ahead of time. In my case, I knew I wanted to take a few hikes alone, just to get away.
Make new friends- can’t always do this, but it’s great when it happens.
Have a few relevant chitchat topics on hand for when you meet someone new. I spent a lot of time talking about the drive…
Even better, get involved in an activity with your new friends. Card games? Drinking? Pushing kids on a swing?
I avoided looking at my phone when I felt uncomfortable. It felt good just owning being that person who is just chilling by themselves taking in the scene. Having a drink in hand somehow makes this less creepy.
Remembering that I was quite fortunate to be invited to this crazy and fun event, even if I did feel a little stressed from time to time. #soblessed
Perhaps the most important tip: Holding on to the positive/otherworldly/beautiful moments when they happen. Take them in. Let them sustain you through the endless crappy small talk!
This all sounds a bit grim, so let’s end with some positive moments! Here is proof that I did have fun, somewhere in that anxiety ball.
Danger around every corner…
Group hike = photobombs
Top of the Outlaw Trail! The camp guides said it was a hard trail, we said LET’S DO IT.
Margaritas in mason jars. The key to a great summer.
Wildlife abounds. Kind of weak of them to include mice. Who cares about mice?
 Berry meringues. Gluten free, wouldn’t you know.
