Happy Thanksgiving!

This is what out dinner table looks like tonight:


At this point, our tradition is to substitute hotpot for turkey.


I hope you all have a wonderful holiday, with family and friends and much to be thankful for!

'Tis the Season... for Jack-o-Lanterns!

Earlier this month, a couple of my childhood friends and I made jack-o-lanterns! I hadn't carved a pumpkin in years and years, so I was a bit out of practice. Here are the finished products:

The first and second ones on the left are mine. I'm especially pleased with this one:

If you can't tell, it's a mini-Totoro! He's starting to wilt by now, but as you can see, he was cute when I first made him. :-)

Any Hallowe'en crafts in your homes?

"Borges and I" by Jorge Luis Borges

I was just rereading one of my favorite short stories, and I wanted to share it with all of you. It's a very short piece called "Borges and I" by Jorges Luis Borges, and may be found here:
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/borg&i.htm

It's not precisely a story, and it's so short that it might qualify more as flash fiction or microfiction -- or perhaps not any sort of fiction at all. I first encountered it, that I can remember, in a philosophy of literature course at university. Even then, I was awed by the way the piece conveys all the meaning of an essay in just a few paragraphs. It's stayed with me, the idea of the human being as a vessel for the creative spirit, much like Athena in the skull of Zeus.

In particular, there's the line "I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me." I find that over the past few years, I've appropriated that term, "justify," for my own use when thinking about creative output, human identity, and self-worth. It's a particularly powerful word in that it demands an answer. A person spends a lifetime striving for that answer -- especially artists, philosophers, creators, and others who feel the need to pursue goals greater than themselves.

It also introduces, in just a few turns of phrase, the dichotomy of solitary creation and human experience. Art is usually a form of commentary and a crystallization of ideas -- even if the artwork and the artist espouse no agenda nor any overt message. Good art requires some understanding of the themes and cadences of human existence, of living our lives on this planet. And yet so often, when an artist in the act is not experiencing anything new of the outside world; rather, he experiences himself in the act of creation. So, in one flesh and one mind, there must be some rub between the human being who lives and learns, and the artist who creates. Is it, then, the artist's fate to oscillate forever?

Just some food for thought, going into the new year. (The lunar New Year was this weekend.)

Cover-a-Week #35: "Seasons of Love" from Rent

It's 2014, and I haven't posted fifty-two covers yet... so I figured I'd just keep making these videos! This one's belatedly holiday-themed...


http://youtu.be/eHQxDfC39BY

Also, given the previous post, I thought it rather appropriate. :-)

BuzzFeed: The Strand Proves That Bookstores Are Not Dead

The Strand is one of my favorite New York bookstores, so I was especially pleased to see it featured in this holiday piece:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/the-86-year-old-strand-bookstore-just-proved-that-bookstores

There's been so much media buzz about "the death of the bookstore" in the wake of e-commerce gaining marketshare, but I think there's something to be said for a well-stocked, well-curated neighborhood bookstore with a friendly and helpful staff. Also, their Twitter is fun and their rare books room is wonderful. (I'm guessing that the Christmas shoppers weren't there for the rare books room, but nonetheless...)

Just a bit of holiday cheer for bibliophiles. :-)

Christmas Tree!

Today we decorated our Christmas tree! It looks like this:

And here it is in the dark, with all of its multicolored, flashing lights:

It never quite feels like the holidays are upon us until we've put up our tree. Every year, my sister and I petition for a larger one, and every year, my mother insists that we buy a smaller one. This year, we compromised at "just a little taller than my father."

Even though I'm a "real adult" now, having a Christmas tree with some presents underneath never fails to make me feel like a little kid again. It's good to be home for the holidays. 

Upgo.info, a Parody

Upgo is a project I did with some friends while in California last week. It was a Christmas present for a friend of ours who founded a startup, is an impressive Go player, and has an affinity for all things Japanese. The premise basically arose from someone's attempt to give me the quick-and-dirty description of this friend's startup -- I thought it sounded like The Hunger Games for software engineers. Ergo, we decided to film a parody startup video:


http://youtu.be/v_1Cj0jQ9IQ

We did it over the course of one night in Lucas's living room. The jokes are from all three of us, the video editing was Brett and Lucas, the bones of the script (and the Hunger Games references) was mostly me, the logo and font were Brett, and the website was Lucas.

We even made fake business cards as the physical souvenir (note: the friend for whom we were making the website/video is also named Lucas):

Definitely one of the most fun projects I've done in a while!

A Turkey-less Asian Thanksgiving

I read in the news that the President pardoned a pair of turkeys who would otherwise have landed on the White House dinner table tonight. Well, in an Asian household, we don't really eat turkey to begin with (my mom doesn't like the taste, and neither do all the other Chinese moms). Instead, this is what our Thanksgiving feast looked like:

Hotpot! It was delicious. Here's a picture of the pot itself:

The things floating in the soup are fishballs (the white ones), meatballs (the brown ones) and tofu cubes. The submerged orange things are pumpkin cubes.

I never quite appreciated being home for the holidays until I found myself eating dining hall turkey in college over Thanksgiving. It wasn't too bad, especially since I had friends whose folks lived too far away for them to celebrate Thanksgiving at home, but there's nothing quite like being home with the family. And having tasty hotpot.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Carl Sagan Day

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Carl Sagan was one of the first and most well-known American populist scientists. That is, he championed the worthy cause of bringing science (especially astronomy) to the non-scientist public. (For comparison's sake, he was a contemporary of Freeman Dyson, another such luminary, and the forefather of scientists like Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson.) Sagan is perhaps best known for his novel Contact, subsequently made into an eponymous film, and for the television series Cosmos. It's fitting that he should have his own day of celebration (he would have been 79 today), wherein people contemplate the great beyond.

In addition to popularizing science, Sagan was also one of the great advocates for SETI in his day, as well as a proponent of nuclear disarmament. He was, as were many great scientists, a profound humanist. He was the originator of the saying "We are all stardust," one of my all-time favorites. (If I were ever to get a quotation tattooed somewhere on my body, this would be a top contender. It helps that it's short.) In another life, I might have gone into astrophysics -- largely because I grew up reading books by people like him.

Addendum: the Library of Congress recently acquired Carl Sagan's papers, which include his reading lists. This is facinating stuff!

It's the Season for NaNoWriMo

It's that time of year again... NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, begins today. The challenge, in a nutshell, is to write 50,000 words of fiction -- roughly the length of a very short novel -- in one month. (It sounds mad, but this will be my sixth time doing NaNoWriMo, and hopefully my fifth time "winning.") You can track my progress via the little wordcount bar on the right.

Towards the end of November, my life might look something like this (which I consider a fine use of the Thanksgiving holiday, for the record):

So, friends (Romans, countrymen), forgive me for being a little antisocial and non-responsive for the next thirty days. I haven't fallen off a cliff, I promise.

Cover-a-Week #33: "Creepy Doll" by Jonathan Coulton

It's Hallowe'en! Ergo, today's the day for a spooky song:


http://youtu.be/f1hddcJiGZ8

This was such a fun piece to cover! (Jonathan Coulton is an evil genius.)

I was tempted to make Coraline-style button eyes out of construction paper to really get in the spirit of "Creepy Doll," but I realized that I couldn't see very well out of the tiny buttonholes...

Cover-a-Week #32: "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1" by The Flaming Lips

Because it was recently Ada Lovelace Day:


http://youtu.be/K0Y8pf009yo

I have a lot of friends from college who were female computer scientists and engineers. I'm very proud of them -- of what they do, what they represent, and the hard work and extraordinary talent I know it took (I was there, after all). They might not be fighting pink robots, but they are, every day, combating the societal forces that created this unequal world. They're "destroying the status quo, because the status is not quo" -- and I love them for it. This one's for you, ladies.

Cover-a-Week #28: "Half Moon" by Blind Pilot

In celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival:


http://youtu.be/91_ZVMVB-QM

It's such a wistful and oddly uplifting song. It reminds me of Thoreau and Emerson (in both the philosophy and the New England aspects), but also of cranes and kingfishers.

In related news, I notice that one of my Cover-a-Week videos, "Take Me Home, Country Roads," recently exceeded a thousand views!

Cover-a-Week #21: "Summersong" by The Decemberists

In the spirit of the holiday weekend -- after which it feels like summer is really underway -- here's a somewhat dark and incongruously cheerful piece about the season, by (who else?) The Decemberists...


http://youtu.be/Ckrwx_AyL1A

I had, for the record, a much more pleasant Fourth than the song would suggest; I spent a few days in Philadelphia with my family.

U.S. History, Minus the Dead White Men

Happy Independence Day -- which, in the United States, means that we celebrate the Founding Fathers and the revolutionaries of the 1770s -- all of them dead white men. In studying Western history, it's easy to assume that anyone of interest or significance was male and white (and Christian), because those were the voices which were heard. (History is written by the winners, the saying goes.)

I happened upon this blog, which showcases the overlooked, ordinary American women and people of color who made history in ways large and small:
http://ushistoryminuswhiteguys.tumblr.com

It's inspiring, to be sure. It's also fascinating, in that members of such minorities often achieved what they did in unorthodox ways, because the establishment wasn't built to -- or in many cases, refused to -- support their aspirations. And of course, these lives often make the best stories (click through, above).

Today

was wonderful and quintessentially New York -- the sort of day that makes me enormously thankful to live in such a vibrant, diverse city full of old friends and affable strangers. I don't mean to turn this blog into a series of diary entries -- that would seem rather self-indulgent -- but today was full of sights and sounds and people that I want to remember.

It began with brunch with a dear friend who is returning to the city after college, a relocation for which I'm grateful because I've missed her these few years. We go back a long time; we played together as children, went to the same elementary school and Chinese school, and have seen each other through our best and worst moments ever after.

We ate at a Greek place in our neighborhood in Queens; we've been coming here once or twice a year since high school. I had an excellent crêpe and we caught up on each other's lives -- we talked about work and friends and our grand ambitions in life. She's one of the few people with whom I discuss the latter topic; despite pursuing radically different fields, we have similarly coherent and somewhat lofty visions of the future. Kindred spirits, I'd say.

After brunch, I met up with a college friend in Manhattan. On the way there, I spotted a group of people in 1920s garb:

There seem to be a number of Jazz Age-themed events going on this summer, even more so than usual (likely prompted by the recent The Great Gatsby film). I was reminded of the Gatsby party I attended in May -- exactly a month ago, as it happens -- which was an industry event hosted by Fitzgerald's publisher and included a costume contest. (I dressed up but didn't win; there were some truly spectacular costumes!)

So I got bubble tea in Chinatown with my friend (it seems like I have quite a few moments that involve bubble tea...). He's a Californian who moved to New York a few months ago, whom I didn't realize was in town until I bumped into him at an alumni event on Monday! He was a few years ahead of me in school and we'd lost touch for a while after he graduated, but he's now working at a start-up in Silicon Alley and lives downtown. 

We met up with one of his friends in Central Park, who was hanging out on the lawn with a few other people we didn't know. It was a gathering of, at least from my perspective, friends and strangers connected to each other by a few tenuous degrees of separation. Though it seems unlikely that I'll encounter these people again -- and in a few months I would be hard-pressed to even recognize them on the street -- for an hour or so, we shared a blanket, a conversation, a patch of sunlight in the Park -- a tiny slice of New York.

At one point, there was a moment of silence -- a completely natural, contented lull in the conversation. We watched a group of small children chase each other around on the lawn, and soon observed that they were all following one small boy who held aloft some sort of styrofoam disc. I was distinctly reminded of The Lord of the Flies -- it was an uncanny analogue of the conch! I said as much to the others, and we had an entertaining few minutes trying to spot the Piggy of the group.

Our group splintered apart in twos and threes. My friend and I wandered through Central Park conversing and taking in the sights and sounds of summer. We stumbled upon a guitarist/vocalist duo performing in front of the lake (with a very professional sound system) and sat in the grass for a few songs. We found a large, fenced-off section of road where people were rollerskating in circles around a rock band which had set up in the middle of the walkway. There was a chalked-off section next to the band where people were dancing, and so we ended up swing-dancing to live music in the middle of a roller derby! (My friend is, incidentally, an excellent dancer; it's a shame we didn't overlap at school for longer.) We also happened upon trio of busking musicians consisting of two drummers and a bagpiper:

The snare drum (obscured in this photo by the man in black), the djembe, the bongos, and the bagpipes seem like a highly unlikely combination (especially the bagpipes!) but they work surprisingly well together. It was a perfect microcosm of the diversity and cooperative spirit of this extraordinary city. (My friend got their card, afterwards; apparently they have a website.)

We then got coffee with a third friend, another Stanford alumnus making his way in New York. We only had an hour, but it was an hour well-spent: a potent reminder that even in this bustling, hectic place, we make time for each other because it's the small moments as much as the grand gestures that comprise any human understanding.

We had dinner near his apartment in Greenwich Village with his roommate. We tried an American restaurant she suggested, and passed a merry hour or two getting to know each other. She's an architect from Hawai'i, so naturally I broached the question of whether she can play the ukulele! (Passably, was the answer.) My friend plays the guitar and also, to a lesser extent, the ukulele, so we're going to play for each other sometime. (I didn't know this about him until today.)

And then we went our separate ways, the two of them to catch a film in the Village, and I to the F train headed into Queens. I spent a quiet hour reading on the subway, with the rumble of the train and a dozen indistinct conversations in the background. In Queens, I stopped by my favorite neighborhood bakery to buy a cake for Father's Day tomorrow.

All in all, it was a lovely day in the City. Here's to more such days in the future.

Cover-a-Week #16: "Lullaby for a Stormy Night" by Vienna Teng

This one's for Mother's Day.


http://youtu.be/w9AL7-pdOCA

I can imagine playing this for a small child on a dark and stormy night...

Cover-a-Week #15: "Scarborough Fair" (traditional)

For May Day (a week ago, yes), I thought I'd dial a few centuries back in time and play a seasonally appropriate song from 1600s England:


http://youtu.be/O8BnL41eN08

It was originally written as a duet, consisting of two lovers making impossible demands of each other (in the true spirit of courtly love!). Since it would probably sound a bit schizophrenic with a single vocalist -- not to mention, that version is twice as long -- I've cut a few verses.

This would be a great song to waltz to, I think.

Cover-a-Week #11: "Kilkelly, Ireland" by Steven and Peter Jones

Since I seem to be posting holiday-themed covers, here's one for St. Patrick's Day:


http://youtu.be/GLesdkguTWk

It's a wonderful sliver of history wrapped in a beautiful melody. Enjoy -- I did!

Cover-a-Week #10: "Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)" by Klein Four

For Pi Day (slightly belated), I decided to cover a math-themed song, by the extremely nerdy a cappella group Klein Four...


http://youtu.be/d1TzNJhrM98

The shirt was one of the more useful nerdy gifts I've received. The armwarmers are my own handiwork; they have separate little sleeve-like protrusions for the thumbs. One trick for knitting armwarmers: if you don't want to decrease and increase the circumference (as the wrist is thinner than the elbow and the hand), knit vertical ribs, which naturally scrunch up.