A few things. Mumbo jumbo.

Driving

I’m driving a tiny cobalt blue Accent on the numerous highways in the Falls Church/Tysons Corner/Fairfax area, tapping my fingers at the wheel while the sun sets in front of me. This is a moment that I didn’t think I’d ever reach, where I’m at peace behind the wheel and I don’t hear my dad telling me that I’m going to crash or mess up or kill anyone. It’s smooth. It feels empowering. I have finally acquired my agency on the road, and the calmness is such a relief. For a long time, I’ve joked with people that I’m a bad driver, but I’m not really — I had a psychological fear instilled in me that I’m starting to finally overcome with experience. Very cool.

Feel Good Songs

Along the way to the client office, Andy Grammer’s song, “Back Home” came on the radio station that plays nearly 100% good music in the morning and nearly 100% very depressing advertisements aimed at aging people in the afternoon (“Are you losing your hair? Do your pants not fit the way it used to?”). The song is nearly formulaically programmed to make you feel good. We all thought that we’d get rich fast, hop the plane out for greener grass. Found out the greenest cash don’t compare to the friends that last. See we won’t forget where we came from, the city won’t change us… No matter where we go, we always find our way back home. Cue some na-na-nas and a slightly twangy country-pop vocal and it hits like… right here (I’m thumping my heart). I suffer from an incurable case of cheesy nostalgia, and when I hear songs like this, the silver screen of my mind is going through a flashback of life highlights, like the opposite of the night terrors that used to wrack my mind late at night. It’s only the good scenes – the last days of college, the feeling of visiting friends I haven’t seen for months or years, of reconnecting with people I lost touch with a decade ago and finding they have blossomed gloriously — the film is all highlights to sunset drives. Good stuff.

A Dream Interview

I haven’t told anyone besides Dean this, but I interviewed today for IDEO’s Fortnight program in Chicago. It’s only a two-week stint at minimum wage, but on the call, they told me they interviewed ten people. And planned to accept six. Hold on, back the truck up.

60% chance. My mind is reeling. I don’t even know how to begin portraying this to people, so I’m not going to unless I hear that I’ve been accepted. But IDEO is more or less the dream I’ve latched onto since I’ve been disillusioned by Google (and the fact that I don’t know what I’d want to do there), and I can’t even believe that my app went through. I gushed through the whole interview, talking 500 words a minute, but everything about it was something I loved so much, it was all I could do to keep myself from barrel-rolling out of the office. Tell me about how you create, what inspires you, how you envision a future world. My mind is always living in this hypothetical future, and to be asked to explain how I see it felt like I finally got the opportunity to gush about something I’ve thought about more or less my whole life. Awesome. We’ll see how this goes.

20/20 Project and the resulting hypocrisy/concern for social issues

I’m getting close to wrapping up my 20/20 interviews. As I progress with these, I notice I’m being more biased about who I talk to. I am skewing very strongly to optimists, idealists, and inspirational thinkers. I’m purposely seeking out people who I know are similar to me in life view. On one hand, it makes every conversation with them very thrilling, as our idealism, optimism, and more or less rational/reserved approach towards the world can kick off a very lively conversation. But I do recognize that I’m choosing to purposely mute the more cynical, material, and present-oriented people I know. It comes up now in conversations with friends in finance, people whose disposition is more negative or at least more cynical/reserved/guarded. I recognize this as a dangerous trend for me, as I am very interested in keeping my mind open to multiple views. But I’m starting to recognize my own optimism and positivism more strongly than ever. I have some mixed thoughts about it… I started this project because I wanted to hear from people with all different points of view. But I can’t help but be grateful for my optimism, even as an objective trait. Even as I failed in four months of interviews and started doubting myself as a designer, there was this strong sense of, “It’s fine; life is a long narrative and I’m still grateful for everything that is going well.” I’ve always been comfortable and in a position to feel this way, almost to the point of feeling guilty for being lucky or having good things come to me. I’m toying with this tension — the sincere joy I feel for what’s going well, and the burden of guilt I feel for what I do have going well right now.

That’s a thought that’s been following me around a lot, especially with regards to social activism. In watching the news, there are all these problems that get a rise out of me, but I feel very frustrated that I’m powerless to do anything. So far, the strongest it’s manifested is in my disgust at people who don’t care, or assume a contradictory/counterproductive/dismissing stance as a “doesn’t matter to me”/”doesn’t affect me” view, but then I get caught up in the guilt of my hypocrisy. I’ve written about this a few times this summer, but I think something has changed in my mentality to really have a register on these things. For example…

- The idea of invisible people appalls me. I think I was trained from birth to avoid the homeless, that they somehow did something to deserve where they are. But a few things, like HONY, seeing the same person a few times, or a random news article about some guy in SF who taught a homeless guy to code (ok reserve your judgement for 10 seconds) jarred me out of the mentality that they were somehow not the same as the people I see in the workplace, in my friends. I don’t know what to do to help them or how I think of them (besides give food), but the #1 thing coming out of this summer is that they aren’t invisible to me anymore.

- I feel some pain at the state of global warming and environmental decay very deeply now. Visiting Shanghai and seeing the yellow smog skyline was shocking and distressing. My relatives treat it as something normal, but the sky shouldn’t be that yellow on a clear day. And in my hotel, I’m piling up empty water bottles, trying to reuse as much as possible and like, finding it comical how little my actions are making a difference here. I’m flying to DC every week, what kind of carbon footprint is that? And yet, I try to recycle as much as possible. How to reconcile this?

- There has been so much arms related violence that it is extremely frustrating to see all these mass shootings, armed attacks, terrorist threats, and domestic violence. I know a lot of people feel that they need 2nd amendment rights to protect themselves from armed threats, but that is a chicken-and-egg scenario. I can’t really fathom why gun control isn’t gaining more traction in the US, although I do know the answer — politics, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.

Honestly, the list goes on – Middle Eastern violence, ebola scares, protests in Hong Kong, Ferguson — I feel like I’m caught up in what some future singer is going to sing about in a nostalgic flashback sequence of events, like We Didn’t Start the Fire. Being a part of history is very jarring.

Work life comes to a cycle

I’m working with a cute little analyst, an Asian girl from NYU, and as I’m walking along with her and working through this customer journey project, I will sometimes have weird deja vu moments talking to my first boss, Young-Ji, and how I felt starting out. I was idealistic and had a huge sense of propriety and how I should behave in a “professional” setting, maybe because Wharton is good at producing people who are excellent soldiers in the finance army. But YJ was super chill, casual, competent, and some of her good and bad habits spilled over to both Kawin and me. Almost at the same time, we realized that comfort and casual competency in this industry (digital media, strategy consulting, marketing, design, etc) would get us farther than being stiff and formal ever would. I was being my usual casual, possibly blasphemous self to my analyst and I had this feeling of, “Oh my god, I can see the traits in myself that I saw in my first manager. And in this analyst’s idealism, enthusiasm, and quirkiness, that was totally me two years ago.” It felt oddly appropriate to come full circle, and to be honest, that was the final blow that made up my mind — I’m ready to go on to something new. I have fulfilled the circle of life. Let me raise Simba up to the valley now.

Freelancing

I feel like I am always struggling with this far more than my real job, and I don’t even consider freelancing a full on side-gig. Someone will approach me with a proposition and I will charge virtually nothing to attack a problem with all of my mental stress and worry for the following 20-some hours. It’s been so frustrating dealing with picky clients at times that I wanted to swear off freelancing altogether, but I’m starting to think that I never will. That’s okay with me. In recruiting, I’ve realized that I’ve learned just as much from freelancing as I have from my day job. I never really respected it as much as having a “real job” in a “real company”, but I have had to deal with more demanding clients, more challenging technical applications, and 100% of the administrative/business-side of the project (especially relationship management), while I’m relatively sheltered from that in my day job. I learned so much. I need to be more diligent about tracking hours worked to manage my input of effort/output of pay to figure out a better model for charging, but I guess I’ll be continuing this for a while longer.

Europe!

I’m about to embark on more or less a vacation I’ve dreamed about since I was little. Here comes to gushing. I’ve only been to London for a week with my family when I was 11 and petulant. I disliked everything about London, and that impression still nags on me now. But the places I’m going on this trip are more or less on my “dream list” – and I’m going with my boyfriend, too, which is a turn that I really didn’t think would happen this soon (haha). I’m almost hesitant to write about it… feels like I will jinx it? I’m looking forward to this a lot. Dean wants to do a small project while we’re traveling, in the style of 40 Days of Dating, to write about our impressions of the 14 days of our trip. I’m setting it up with StaceyCMS, which is super awesome and easy to use~ (going to switch my portfolio to this, maybe during Christmas).

Just going for it, rock it till the wheels off.

Thanks Dre/Hadi for the thought, but I feel like that right now. I’m rocking life until the wheels fall off. I don’t know how sustainable this lifestyle is, but I do feel like I’m behind the wheel, fumbling in fast moving traffic with bleary-eyed delirium. I’m exhausted all the time, but I’m moving through something really, really good. There are bad things, of course. There are four months of rejected job interviews, the sadness of seeing so many close friends move away, of nostalgia, of tormented redeye flights and a body that really can’t handle physical stress (drinking, all nighters, headaches, dehydration) with any grace anymore… there are people I’ve had feelings for in the past moving on with their lives without me, and the uncertainty of how I feel about it given that I’m very happy with my life now. But this path I’m on feels golden. Buzzfeed assured me through 22 and 23 that at some point in your twenties, a switch flips and you no longer give a shit about what other people think of you. When you stop thinking about what others think about your choices and plunge forward with conviction, if you think you’re right. When you finally get a conviction/sense of direction, and when you’re set back, you course-correct instead of give up. I feel like that now, largely because this path I’m on has been working in some ways (and adjustable in others), but it’s scary to be going at this velocity. Around September 2014, I felt like I was finally growing the fuck up, and I have no idea why. There are a few external things, like signing new job offers or building functional relationships or spending $300 changing my hair on a whim and destroying neither my conscience nor my bank account, but like… all this together is a very bizarre feeling. Just going to drive on this golden road till the wheels fall off.

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EDIT: I FORGOT TO MENTION, I CAN ALMOST DO A PULL UP NOW