nANIMOv

This is kinda an addendum on something I touched on in my last post. I mentioned how me changing my food habits won’t change culture/ the world/ etc. But few things change overnight. That’s why education, and seeking to understand, and awareness are important. Those are things that inspire and inform change. A seed is planted and if we as individuals are convinced by sufficient evidence one way or another we decide to seek change or not.

Today someone told me how they have been buying only fair-trade clothes for about a year and a half. This is never something I’ve thought much about in the past, much less considered, but it got me thinking, obviously enough to write about. I probably won’t all of a sudden join in on this movement, but that’s how it starts and spreads; people talk. Then slowly over time the culture shifts, much like biological evolution. Some ideas take hold and survive and others die out. Who know what the cultural habits of our future selves and the future generations will be, but hopefully we in the present can push things in the right direction.

I love food and I love eating. I feel like most people do. However, I think my relationship with food is different than others. It seems like there’s a cultural thing going on that says loving food means eating a lot of it. People are obsessed with all you can eat, with giant portions, and eating massive amounts of food in general. Some people love the challenge aspect of it. For others it’s a bang-for-your-buck kinda thing. Personally I prefer just to eat good tasting food until im satisfied.

There also seem to be an implication that eating tons of food equates to “manliness” or strength. To me it’s just wasteful, here’s my two main why’s:

Economics: I may get a lot of flak for this especially among my friends, but I will use Korean Barbeque as an example, which hurts cause I do love KBBQ. I can spend $16+ at a KBBQ place and eat as much as my body will allow, or I can spend $10-12 somewhere else and eat to a comfortable level. Sure $4 can get me a shit-ton more food, but I don’t need that excess to be happy and healthy. In fact, me consuming that excess pushes me away from happiness and healthiness post-meal.

Environmental: We waste a lot of food. Last year $218 billion worth of food went to waste last year. Think about how many resources went into producing that; water, land, energy, etc. I’m not naive enough to think though that me opting for reasonably portioned food is going to solve our food waste problem. There needs to be a culture shift, but that begins with educating ourselves and owning up to facts.

I’m not trying to shame anyone through this post or to sound self-righteous, I’ve just gotten tired of eating to the point where I’m uncomfortable to fulfill some arbitrary culture standard. This is not meant to get anyone to change habits or diets, this is about my own relationship with food. Though I do hope this makes you at least think about your relationship with food. Whether your make a change is up to you, but I do think anytime people can align their own happiness and health with that of the planet, that’s a step towards a better future.

I tutored someone in Calculus today for the first time since college. Not gonna lie, I was pretty nervous, ’cause I wasn’t sure if I still had it. I won’t say I’m a good tutor because I have no idea and can’t judge my own performance, but I do enjoy doing it.

I like showing cool relationships or applications of the material to whoever it is I’m working with because they are interesting and exciting to me and I think it helps integrate (no pun intended) the material into something more tangible. But when I present those types of things, sometimes I feel like my student (not specifically the one worked with today) just wants to get on with the lesson or wants me to give them the answer, which I can’t fault them for.

That’s the struggle, getting someone to care. Not just as a tutor, but in education in general, in my work a MOXI, and even in my work with Doctors Without Walls. You can’t force someone to be interested in what you are saying no matter how much logic you are using. I recently was at a talk on motivational interviewing. It’s a way of being with someone that can help them find there own way through a situation. This specific talk was in the context of working with individuals suffering from substance addiction, mental health disorders, chronic homelessness, or a combination of two or all three, but the concepts really apply to anything. One of the big tenants of the motivational interviewing process, is recognizing that no matter how much education, power, resources, etc. one has, the other person is the expert on themselves, and they are the only person who can ultimately choose to move in one direction or another.

In the case of tutoring, it’s hard to make progress in that regard. How the heck do you get someone to care about math. Math bears a huge cultural stigma, as do the people who fraternize with it, and it can be conceptually difficult. People want to do stuff that makes them look good and are easy.

But anyways, yea I still like tutoring, so if you know anyone looking for some, lmk.

One of my favorite smells is the smell of ironing starch. Smell, as I understand it, is a powerful thing and is a physical sense that is closely related to emotion. The smell of starch always reminds me of my childhood. We’d all get our clothes ironed out in the morning for a wedding, a party, or some other important event. But I don’t just like the memories associated with starch, I genuine love the smell, I just don’t know if that is due to the strong emotions attached to it. Is the smell the same for me as it is for others; does another person experience the olfactory sensation completely differently than me? Someone’s probably done a study on this or something.

I love superhero movies. I love being able to, for a time, suspend disbelief and be present in a world where anything can happen. That being said I do appreciate when they make an effort to make things seem at plausible based on real-world physics, and tKhere are somethings that happen in these types of movies that bother me. I still enjoy them, and these are not movie-ruining, I’m just nitpicking.

**Potential Shazam spoilers below**

For example I watched Shazam today with the family. There’s one of those classic scenes where some form of public transportation, in this case a bus, is in peril and our hero needs to save it and everyone on it. The bus is falling off of a bridge and Shazam is on the ground below and stops the fall with his body. Yay! But how is him catching the bus any different than it hitting the ground. Even if he was doing some special technique to act like a shock absorber (which it doesn’t seem like he was even trying to do), he still would be stopping this freefalling bus in a matter of seconds over 5.5-6 feet. If that fall was going to kill the people on the bus without him there it should have at the very least injured them with the “catch” but they all walked off the bus virtually unharmed. Then again it has been a while since I have taken physics and perhaps this specific peeve is completely baseless, which I would be happy to hear.

I am not as annoyed or upset with this as my tone may seem to suggest. And some say thinking about such things in a superhero movie is stupid and pointless because there’s a bajillion other things that defy physics/ science/ explanation. But what I love about these movies is the idea that it could be possible, but without some of consistency with the basics of our reality, it becomes detached from it. Rather than supernatural characters and events occuring in a natural world, we simply would have supernatural characters and events occuring in a supernatural world, which can also be a lot of fun (Looney Tunes comes to mind), but it’s just different.

You know when things get so crazy it gets your thoughts all trapped like in a bottle.

– Chazz Michael Michaels

I’ve always felt like I’m the type of person who is pretty good about dealing with their thoughts and emotions internally. My strategy is usually to handle less-than-optimal situations with patience and optimism. Just keep smiling and moving forward.

I gotta say though April has been a doozy. It’s not just because of the stress and emotional toll of med school applications, which I talked about a lot in some of my recent posts, but also because of other personal goings-ons. And while I kept doing my day jobs, and kept up with some of my most baseline routines, my personal time was spent less productively and I would retreat to low-stakes hobbies like video games.

That being said my hiatus has another layer to it in that these past few weeks have also been among the happiest I’ve had. I got to spend a lot of time with someone I love more than I could ever describe properly in words. But even so, that never prevented me from writing and I would never use that as an excuse for me not doing the things I love to do (because it’s actually the opposite).

Ultimately what it comes down to is me second guessing myself, and not having confidence in some of the things I’m doing. That, perhaps hidden behind me telling myself I am too busy, which was never the case.

So I would like to apologize to myself and more importantly to you dear readers (the few of you who are out there) for letting you down these past few weeks. You are important to me, more than you could ever know, and I am grateful for you taking a small part of your day to read my ramblings.

See you all tomorrow.

Much love,

NV

It’s all over

the place. Some under the bed and

behind the desk. Some if it will just have to stay

where is it for now.

I have to focus

on the ones that matter

so that no one

gets hurt.

I’ll do my best to contain it all

but I’m sorry if I miss

some pieces.

There is a comment that is famous in the reddit community and beyond that is in response to a user’s post that simply states “I just don’t care about myself.” The comment describes four rules for life:

1. No zero days, do something everyday that brings you closer to your goals
2. Give gratitude to and do favors for your past, present, and future self
3. Forgive yourself
4. Exercise and read books

I haven’t thought about this post in a while, but reflecting back I can definitely include this among things that have helped me get through tough times and shaped my perspective. Don’t have much commentary on it at the moment, just thought I’d share.

Today I went to my great-aunt’s 75th birthday party. I always know what to expect when going to family gatherings. The first 10 minutes are spent greeting all the relatives and a few strangers. We eat food (today’s menu consisted of short ribs, regular ribs, tacos, palabok, a giant burrito, lumpia, a salad, dinuguan, shrimp, and of course, rice [probably leaving some stuff out]). I get asked multiple times about the application process/ the future. I play with the kids. I rest and eat more food. Say hi to any late people coming from their game, rehearsal, audition, etc. My cousin Sam is jamming out on his guitar (follow him on Instagram), my other cousin’s are playing catch. Dad and my uncles are taking turns massaging each other on whatever soft flat surface they can find. One of my aunts is organizing party games and all the older titas eagerly gather to participate. And when the time comes my other aunt rallies everyone to start cleaning up.

It’s all very predictable and there’s other smaller details that I’ve kept out. Those details are just observations that I think add to the overall picture, but would take a long time to explain and give context too, and to abbreviate them would be both ineffectual or confusing. That predictability is not necessarily a bad thing though, I find comfort in it. It’s nice knowing that no matter what is going in my life some things never change. I can always depend on my family to be there like they always have, doing their thing.