How to live in 2012 (better late than never)

Pack your bags. You’ve done this so many times before that it almost feels like trite repetition; somehow, experience appeases the emotions, and this time you shout your goodbyes and pull out of your driveway with such an air of knowing anticipation that it catches you by surprise.

Camp out in your friend’s living room for two months. Develop a fondness for the squeaky futon you’ve grown to recognize as the first bed you’ll ever sleep in in San Francisco. 

Get schooled in humility. Spend hours scouring job postings, sending your resume to any position with the words “entry level” in its description. Flash an embarrassed grin when your friend comes home from work to find you in the same position (her living room couch) and outfit (your pajamas) she left you in in the morning.

Give yourself to San Francisco and its rolling hills, perpetual fog-and-rain, and three-storied flats. The city is intoxicating; sometimes you lose yourself in it.

Be cold—all the time. Be genuinely surprised when it’s 60 degrees out and your coworker insists on climbing to the rooftop of your building during lunch to enjoy the “great weather today!” Southern California’s mild temperatures and annual sunny skies have ruined you for life. 

Do the long distance thing again. Your friends will shake their heads and tell you you’re crazy. By now, you’ve grown accustomed to hearing your name used in conjunction with “crazy” and all its relatives (“insane,” “nuts”), and the words simply roll off your back. 

Cry every Sunday morning at church for a good two months. At first you won’t understand why your face is covered in snot and tears after every worship set, sermon, and prayer session. Then you’ll encounter God again and again in a powerful, awesome way, and everything will fall into place. It always does. It always does.

Land your first paid job. After performing three months of unpaid labor (“internships,” as they call them), you feel like a million bucks. Order a round of mimosas for your friends the following Saturday morning at brunch, feel exceptionally extravagant, and toast to gainful employment. 

Turn 24. Repeat the number to yourself slowly, but don’t be surprised when it doesn’t quite add up in your head. When people ask for your age from here on out, always manage to conveniently forget (“Last I checked, I was 22…”)

Get laid off (“internal restructuring,” as they say). Buy a pack of bacon, fry it, and consume it in its entirety. Repeat whenever necessary. 

Swear off driving. Rely solely on the public transit, rides from friends, and your own two feet to get you through the city for a smug six months. It’s not long before you realize that the muni isn’t exactly efficient, and even your most patient friends can tire of your incessant suggestions to “carpool together” to social gatherings. Fly back home one weekend in September and come back to San Francisco, car in tow. 

Get your first parking ticket… and your second. Spend thirty minutes searching for a parking spot near your apartment on a rainy Wednesday evening. Curse and love this city at the same time. Even with its imperfections, there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.

Count your blessings come December. Pack your bags once more and drive home for the holidays, because all great endings culminate there. 2012 has been good to you, and you can’t help but pinch yourself in disbelief sometimes. But you know what? 2013 is creeping up, and—

it

only gets

better. 

 

This was written on December 28, 2012, dug up on March 22, 2013, and published immediately thereafter. It was composed as a continuation of a similar post a couple years before. Well, here’s to broken new year’s resolutions (resolution #3: blog regularly). 

at last.

This special guy in my life has joined me in San Francisco; and while it still boggles my mind that I get to see him at my convenience (on a weeknight? What?!), everything just feels right and good, like all the pieces were just waiting to fit together all along.

commutes & changes

When I first moved to San Francisco, the public transit system—collectively known as the muni—enamored me. My hometown is notorious for its congested freeways and disproportionately high number of personal automobiles, so the idea of dropping a few quarters into a dispenser in exchange for a ride across the city was somewhat of a novelty. Freed from the shackles of searching for parking, grappling with road rage, enduring traffic jams, and sorting through all the added responsibilities and costs of operating a personal vehicle, I hopped onto the J train each day, book in hand and a skip to my step, excited and invigorated by the idea of joining the collective working force of San Francisco on its morning commute. 

It wasn’t long, however, before the honeymoon began to fade. Frankly, the muni took a leisurely 45 minutes just to transport me 3.6 miles across the same city to my office. It made frequent stops, which provoked fits of motion sickness, but also ran slowly along its tracks and frequently broke down, which proved downright irritating. Hearing that dreaded announcement—“We are currently facing a long delay”—while sandwiched uncomfortably between other aggravated passengers as sweat marks begin to form at the underarms of my new work blouse was always the cherry on top of a particularly long day. 

In short, it only took four months and three sweat-stained shirts for me to develop a sort of weary contempt for the same transit system I had once gazed upon with adoration and wonder.

Last week, however, I received a job offer in the South Bay. For better or worse, the muni doesn’t graze the peninsula’s roads. I’ll soon be trading my Clipper card for a pair of car keys, studying traffic conditions on the freeways, and seeking out the cheapest gas stations. I’ll (reluctantly, at first) learn which podcasts and radio channels I can listen to without feeling the urge to doze off or tune out, and let out a sigh of exasperation when it’s time to take my car in for maintenance (“Again?! Didn’t I just take care of that last month?”)

Last but not least, I’ll look back on the days when I sat on the muni, making a concerted effort to drown out all external nuisances with a good novel and loud music, and feel a peculiar longing for its hard, plastic seats, unidentifiable odors, and comfortable familiarness. Because, at the end of the day, don’t we all desire a bit of familiarity to fall back on?

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Flowers at the Farmer’s Market, circa May 2012

Sometimes, the sun shows up in San Francisco.

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I write copiously and tirelessly about where I’ve been and where I dream of going; but all too often, home falls to the wayside. What is it about the familiar that goes so easily ignored? 

As a proclamation of sorts against ignorance, here are some things that will always signify home:

• 80-degree weather in early November
• the swish-swish of my father’s indoor slippers
• daily doses of bumper-to-bumper traffic
• my self-painted lime-green-and-baby-pink bedroom walls, which regrettably seemed like a good idea at age 15
• an uncanny urge to bake devilishly sugary concoctions (these matcha green tea cupcakes emerged from my oven yesterday!)

Home, home—how sweet it is!

O, Chicago

A few Sundays ago, I arrived in Chicago, wide-eyed, stirring with anticipation, and running on about four hours of sleep. As the cab driver rolled the windows down and made his descent into downtown, the city greeted me with sunny skies and a skyline stunning enough to stir me from my half-conscious, groggy stupor. A mild, chilly breeze whipped my hair from side to side, and I let out a sigh, because I knew before even stepping foot onto the pavement that it was love at first sight, once again. 

What is it about my fascination with towering buildings, crowded sidewalks, and the clank-clank-whoosh of trains and subways passing underground and overhead?

I must have a bad case of city lust, because it seems like every city I visit nowadays manages to steal a piece of my heart. 

Humans of New York →

Call it obsession; call it voyeurism; call it art: I am sickeningly in love with this blog.

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Williamsburg, Brooklyn

a salad a week: mad for mediterranean

A few months ago, I embarked on an ambitious endeavor: I set out to create, document, and blog a salad a week. Why? Frankly put, I had been unemployed for far too long and I desperately needed some consistency in my life, lest I get sucked into the dangerous, dark world of the stay-at-home, Lululemon-clad wives whom I regularly saw at the local gym’s 10 AM yoga class.

My salads a week and I enjoyed a good run… for about three weeks until I packed my belongings and drove up to San Francisco, leaving behind my (parents’) vast, well-stocked kitchen and all the time in the world to experiment and answer the wild, unruly culinary beckonings of my heart—and stomach.

These days, I share a modest-sized kitchen with three roommates, work a full-time schedule, and own about five percent of the cooking equipment in the apartment (personal tupperware included). With that said, my desire to whip up elaborate meals has waned as my personal commitments increase. (Though it should be noted that my idea of “elaborate” signifies anything that takes over 45 minutes to prepare.) 

Nowadays, meals are typically prepared on Sunday evenings in 30 minutes or less; consumed hastily, hungrily over the kitchen sink; and stored away in containers to be brought to work and reheated for the rest of the week. 

It’s a revelation that I mustered the motivation to put this dish together when my usual meal repertoire involves five ingredients or less. 

Yes, I’m embarrassed and ashamed by how poor this photo looks, too. But I promise this salad is a real pleaser—to both the taste buds and health! 

In the mix:

• tomatoes
• cucumber
• purple onion
• mixed lettuce
• lemon, lime, or both
• feta cheese
• pita bread, drizzled with olive oil and toasted in the oven (I used Whole Foods’ mini whole wheat pitas)
• salmon filets, seasoned with citrus butter*
• corn on the cob (not pictured, because I was too hungry and scarfed it down right out of the oven)

For the dressing(s):

Tahini dressing

• spoonful or two of tahini (warning: Tahini is very thick in texture and taste! Go light on the tahini if this is not a flavor you’re used to.)
• fresh lemon juice (I squeezed an entire lemon into it)
• two or more spoonfuls of water (to dilute the Tahini)
• drizzle of soy sauce and olive oil
• salt and cracked black pepper, to taste
• minced garlic (optional- I omitted this because I planned to pack it for work)

Yogurt dip

• individual container of Greek plain yogurt
• fresh lime juice (I squeezed half a lime into it- lemon can easily be substituted)
• salt and cracked black pepper, to taste
• finely chopped purple onion and cucumber (just because!)

Citrus butter* for the fish and/or corn on the cob:

• butter (I won’t specify the amount- use best judgment)
• fresh lime juice (half a lime)
• salt, cayenne pepper, and cracked black pepper, to taste

The process is simple: I washed and chopped my vegetables, drizzled the tahini dressing and some feta cheese on top, and ate with a side of baked salmon, corn, and pita bread. The yogurt dip was a refreshing side accompaniment to the pita!

A few things I love about Mediterranean food? Olive oil, tons of lemon flavor, and fresh vegetables. Yes, the Mediterraneans sure know how to grub—I only hope I’ve done them justice.

peace to the east

About six weeks ago, I skipped town and flew cross-country to the other coast, giggling and squealing the entire way with the excitement of a pubescent at her first Justin Bieber concert. After months of living on overdrive—recovering from a drawn-out lull of unemployment, moving entire continents away and back, snagging three internships, meeting new faces, adapting to the idiosyncracies of San Francisco, maintaining a long distance relationship, and enduring a handful of self-induced meltdowns in between—my one-week hiatus from life was just what I needed to recuperate from Where I’ve Come and reevaluate Where I’ve Yet to Go. 

As a twenty-something, I think it’s an unspoken truth that none of us really have it together: some are just better at faking the latter than others. Conversations with college friends-turned-east coast transplants were bittersweet reminders that I don’t have my five-year plan solidified and mapped out in neat grids on a spreadsheet. (Heck, do I even know what I’ll be doing in five days?)

At age 24, my life doesn’t look so much like the movies told me it would; and yet, there is immense freedom in the knowledge that each day is an opportunity to break conventions, brainstorm outloud, and harness new approaches. And that’s exactly what the sweet, sweet east coast did—teach me a thing or two about living with balance and a clear perspective.

In the tumult and noise of Washington, D.C. and New York City, I rested; and fresh life was breathed into me. And isn’t that exactly how it goes? We find what we need in the most unexpected places and realize, at last, that all our desperate searching, crying, clawing, planning, budgeting, prioritizing, doing, only leads us further and further away from the crux of what really matters—a life fulfilled by a purpose worth fighting for.