Happy St Patrick’s day! Yay to all the wonderful stereotypical holiday trappings. Yay Guinness! Yay colcannon! Yay green!
It’s also me and Ryan’s 6 year anniversary, so a great excuse to post this cute picture from a friend’s wedding last winter.
Happy anniversary Ryan! I look forward to six more years of being unmarried and child free with you-LOL. 🙂
So, it’s March. I’m feeling kind of strange, to be honest.
In November I had the excitement of quitting my job, starting my bootcamp and traveling to Japan. In December I went to New Orleans and celebrated the holidays. During January I freelanced, effectively buying myself more time to study and job hunt. I also spent a little of that money sprucing up my apartment.
February. Oh dear February. The great grey ghost of February. After working full time the month before, I felt “behind” in my bootcamp, whatever the hell that means for a mostly self-paced program. Behind the other people in my cohort, behind my targeted end date, and worst of all, behind in my knowledge.
I started the month determined to make up for lost time. Most of this was psychological, but numbers don’t lie: I studied more during the first week of February than I did the entire month of January. And this was with my mom visiting!  Quite a few days were wasted with review just to get back into the groove.
So last month I barreled right on through, putting myself on a stricter schedule, working day in and day out, glued to the chair, skipping lunch like a regular 9-5 job. I’m feeling okay about my progress, but looking into March and knowing that it’s probably going to be like this until the very end… I’m starting to feel a little nuts, honestly. The end is not in sight! When does it end???
All of the usual self-care suggestions are helping me to not go off the rails (insert ruby joke here): eat well, sleep enough, drink in moderation, see friends, exercise. However, what’s really holding me together is making more connections with the programming community.
Anyways, there’s no great resolution to this post. All I can say is that if we’re friends, please reach out and try to schedule coffee/bowling/a drink/a movie/dear god something with me. I’m going a little crazy over here.
Happy new year! Here we go again…
Normally when I reflect on the past year, I have so many feelings. This new year’s eve I wasn’t feeling particularly reflective, wistful or nostalgic. I wasn’t feeling much of anything, to be honest. 2015 was a pretty good year, but I don’t mind its passing. Still, I can easily point to the bright spots.
Relationships
Despite being majorly stressed out and heads down in my studies nearly all year, it was a good year for my relationships. I made new friends from the programming classes I took, rekindled old friendships, and deepened my existing relationships. I am really thankful for growth in this area in 2015.
Health
I gave up on wanting to do a chinup, but through the magic of running and strength training, I actually got kinda buff/thin in 2015, getting down to high school weight, which was a bit of a shock. Emotionally I was doing well, and had found a bit of stability and happiness in the pursuit of a goal. The Wellbutrin didn’t hurt either, not gonna lie. Oh, and I also finally got my wisdom teeth out. It was my first surgery!
Work
In the spring I pushed even harder to incorporate coding into my job, and that opened a few doors for me. Eventually I walked out one of those doors and on to another adventure (okay that was cheesey but I had to). I saved up enough money to quit my job and enroll in a coding bootcamp. Where that goes, well we’ll see. I’m trying to stay optimistic.
Travel
In 2015 I visited Burma, Austin, Shanghai, Tokyo, New Orleans, along with a few short trips in the Bay Area.  Embarrassingly, I did not make my resolution of seeing my family 4-5x in 2015. I did not see them at all. But you know what, my family can come and visit me too! I’m choosing not to feel guilty about that.
2016
So, what do you do for resolutions when you aren’t feeling inspired, guilty or fat?
Okay, that was really long. 2016, let’s do this!
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.
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. 
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. 
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!
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.
