Life Updates

I have a lot of updates on life. I got married!!! We went on a honeymoon!! I left my job at Google for the second time! I joined another company. I did a lot of weightlifting! Rather than talk about any of these things directly, I’m instead going to focus on another cross-section of my life and these changes will become apparent.

Bike rides

I got a bike sometime in 2023. It is a big part of the physical activity that Dora and I do together. Dora has always enjoyed biking and San Francisco bike routes have gotten better over time. Kinda. There was a massive change to Valencia street to make a center bike lane, but it feels both like too much and not enough.

I was reluctant at first to ride my bike a lot - safety was my biggest concern. I slowly became more comfortable on the bike and even began riding it to the gym three times a week.

Audiobooks

I’ve been riding the bike to the CalTrain and then from the CalTrain to my new office - a factory in Burlingame. There’s a lot of pause time in between. I have been filling that with books from Audible. Two in particular have been sitting really well with me - The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’d love to write longer reviews for both of them, but for now, all I have to say is…go read them! Listen to them! They’re so good!!

Escaping

I escape into anime and manga a lot. Sometimes it’s really cheesy stuff - an isekai where the main character is a hero with an infinite grocery store taht he can order from, so he just cooks strange beasts for mythical monsters in a fantasy land. Other times it is really deep and brutal stuff like Psycho-Pass and Attack on Titan. Some of it is very layered, very clever and tackles a lot of themes from an unusual angle that Hollywood wouldn’t take. A lot of it is complete garbage. There are a few standouts that I’d love to mention to give credit to the creators, but the only ones I’d really recommend other people watch/read are Attack on Titan, Psycho-Pass and Berserk. They are all, as Pablo calls it, “Asian Torture Porn”. It’s not a category I intentionally picked, but there is something about the brutality as employed in these series that I find hard to detach from.

Cards in the afternoon

Friends have been a really big part of this phase of my life. I spend my weekends in the way that I imagine an old Mediterranean man might. I get coffee with my friends at a local cafe. We stroll and take in the sights of Dolores Park. We play cards and talk about the week. It’s incredibly restorative. It’s one, very telling aspect of how different my social life is now compared to a few years ago. I myself am a lot more open with the people around me than the me from ten years ago could have ever imagined. So much so that the people around me now comment on how open and sincere a person I am. This seems almost strange to me, because I have engaged in some form of self-deception for most of my life. Especially around the answer to the question “is this what I want?”.

Writing for myself

I journal a lot. I’ve written about this before here, but it has taken on a new flavor recently as most of my emotional baggage and pent-up resentments have started to disappear. I find myself writing about ambitions, dreams, fantasies and if I stay in that mode for long enough, I begin to feel the real pain of my mortality. It feels like journaling started as a place for me to feel safe and let out the things I was too afraid to say to other people. It has since become a place for me to feel that which is too scary to feel even within myself. All the dreams and ambitions seem to stem from that same desire to leave a legacy, they come from a place of knowing that one day this blog won’t be updated any more.