Note: this is unedited copy that came straight from my brain, local organic brain-to-table writing, and likely riddled with grammar and syntax errors. Proceed at your own risk. Things that started happening inexplicably to me since I turned 40: Seeing the wobbly erratic spotlight of a phone flashlight, being like “what idiot has their phone flashlight on and doesn’t know it?”, and then…
Today is July 1. Actually, it’s July 2, but I was thinking about this yesterday and just couldn’t make time to write it down until today. So I’m going to say it’s July 1. Exactly ten years ago was July 1, 2016, and it was the last day of the life that I decided to leave behind – my last day of general surgery residency. But this note isn’t about July 1. (Then…
On day 3 of a nine-day nature trip, I rolled my ankle on a tree root on a hike with my partner and sustained what I strongly suspect is a grade 1 ATFL (anterior talofibular ligament) tear. No need to use its government name, though!: I sprained my ankle. I felt/heard a loud pop and assumed the worst, but luckily I was able to bear weight on it immediately after, so we started heading back to the…
Hello and welcome to the latest chapter of my midlife crisis, where I’ve done something somewhat impulsive, which is to sign a commercial lease on a (very modest) studio space in Brooklyn. I have felt creatively stuck for a while, and also just generally disconnected and ungrounded from the immediate physical world around me. So I’m hoping that having a dedicated space to make stuff will…
Honestly, 2025 has been a doozy and I’ll be glad to have it in the rearview. My year was personally very eventful, and that’s excluding everything that happened in the world. I’m still processing a lot of it, but here’s a summary in roughly chronological order, using Roman numerals for added drama: I. Cancer scare #1 (fake) In early Feb I had my first screening mammogram…
A little while back (six months ago) I wrote about how I made a random page featuring my dad’s hats and how I want to make more evergreen content and share more photos and visual things here. For some things in my life I have become very decisive but this website is not one of them. Lol. Maybe it’s because it’s one of my few creative practices that I do purely for fun and so I…
It’s fall here in the northern hemisphere. Feels like the fall of my life, too. Somehow midlife feels both like slowing down and also starting new things. I haven’t been in school for years now but fall still feels like back to school. Yesterday I just missed the subway on my way to a 5 pm appointment in the city. The display sign above ground indicated that the train was coming in 0…
I know it looks like not a lot is happening here; my last update was in April of this year. What can I say — life has been life-ing. It’s a hot hot summer in New York. My family has been going through health challenges. A few weeks ago I got into a car accident on Highway 1 while visiting my parents in California which is the scariest thing that has happened to me in my adult life. Overall I…
I made a page for my dad’s collection of hats. It’s an idea I had back in 2023 and as is my nature, it took me way too long and too much overthinking to get it to a shareable state. It’s not finished, nor do I know what finished even means most of the time, and there are things I don’t like about it that need to be fixed, but if there’s one thing I know about myself,…
Last month I had the chance to travel to two places I previously lived. In early March, I went to London for a work trip, and a couple of weekends ago I went to Chicago for a friend’s milestone birthday. It was a strange feeling to revisit these two cities where I’d lived and existed before but in the distant past, long enough ago that it felt like I was a different person. Quick…
What’s in a name? Lots of things. Primary name Most people call me Rachel. A certain subset of friends from a certain time in my life call me Kwon. I’ll respond to either. Professional name My coworkers call me Rachel. From 2010-2016, a lot of people called me Dr. Kwon. Infrequently these days, some people in certain contexts still try to call me Dr. Kwon, or ask me if I want to be…
Two of my favorite people on the internet, Naz and Katherine , tagged me in this challenge, so here I am filling it in. (By the way, [hikes up grandpa pants] , we used to call these “blog memes,” and because we didn’t I didn’t have many IRL friends who were also internet culture, at least not that I knew of, I’d never heard the word out loud and definitely thought it…
Everyone loves summer. If you have to name a favorite season (which you absolutely don’t!! Who says you do?), summer is a non-controversial option. Bright sun, long days, beach time, et cetera. And spring is a close runner-up, with its warmer weather, greenery and flowers, and of course the anticipation of summer. If you want to be alternative and edgy (i.e., me in early adulthood lol),…
I recently got contact lenses, for the first time in 34 years, as someone who has required corrective eyewear since the age of 6. I have attributed the decision mostly to my ongoing midlife/existential crisis — as a way to prove to myself that I’m NOT set in my ways and I CAN do new things — and for whatever reason I had increasingly been thinking that my eyeglasses are my whole personality…
I get frustrated when things don’t work. Increasingly I have been getting especially frustrated when things that are fancy don’t work, because I feel bamboozled. The other day, I went to wash my hands in the bathroom at work, and the automated soap dispenser/foamer didn’t work. I was awkwardly placing and retracting my hands under the sensor repeatedly like please sir……
I never had a regular “lunch break” until recently. Early in my career it was not by choice — in surgery training there’s really no such thing as a break, only a stolen minute or two here and there to pee or wolf down whatever food you can scrounge or nap in a chair if it’s the middle of the night and you’re on call. We did get a $5 meal coupon for the hospital…
An interesting blog post. I liked this note about trees in Johannesburg by Herman. In our last apartment, the bedroom faced a quiet tree-filled backyard despite the apartment itself being on a major two-way avenue, so I woke up to birds chirping and almost non-existent street noise, and a view of lush greenery. In our current apartment, the bedroom faces a brick wall and a one-way side street…
Since transitioning to a more or less Monday-thru-Friday, 9-to-5 work week, I often feel my brain is pretty fried on Fridays (fried-days?), as well as a general depletion of energy for socializing, so for the last several years I have kept Friday evenings open for myself. I try to spend that time doing something chill, by myself, and mostly screen-free, and then I go to bed at a reasonable hour.…
This is a half-baked thought I’ve been preheating for a bit. Technology has changed the way we consume and create media, and considering all the benefits against the drawbacks, sometimes it doesn’t feel like a net improvement to me. Or maybe it’s just that things evolved too quickly, we got excited about all the upside and didn’t think enough about second and third order…
I’ve been a little less online lately, but not to worry, I have just been living my life :) Several weeks ago, I gave notice at work and left. Some people in my life were surprised, because it was a good job at a good company, I generally enjoyed it, I got to work with wonderful people, and I was paid money to do it. The younger version of me who hadn’t yet figured out a career…
Last month Katherine called out the tension inherent in a “personal” website which is that it is both public and personal, and one’s public (or professional) persona is often different from that of their personal life. Robin Rendle riffed on the concept and said that it’s totally fine for personal websites to be messy or imperfect or weird (i.e., not necessarily how…
I spent a lot of time and energy in my life worrying about things I felt like I had to do for one reason or another. Either everyone else was doing the thing, or specific people were pressuring me to do the thing, or I never saw real examples or models of people who didn’t do the thing, etc. At some point I started to realize that, if I really challenged myself, I didn’t have to do…
For the last several months I have been experiencing something, first in the background and now very much in the foreground, and that thing is what many people would describe as a midlife crisis, although it doesn’t feel so much like a crisis mode and is in fact both exciting and exhausting, and fun and terrifying, and lots of other things. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, because I…
I love sandwiches. Below are some of my favorites and why. First, a few constraints I will impose to keep it to a reasonable number of sandwiches: these are limited to New York (not that I haven’t had amazing sandwiches elsewhere), sandwiches I’ve had at least 3 times, excluding burgers (are burgers sandwiches?), excluding falafel sandwiches (not that I don’t love them but I…
I made this: The internet used to be fun I feel like more people these days are starting to reject the notion that the internet is made up of Big Websites that represent Big Companies that are trying to take either the attention or the money of their visitors while adding minimal value to the lives and well-being of those visitors. Because a lot of us remember when the internet was mostly just…
One of the main reasons why I would find it hard to leave New York is that I have grown accustomed to having what feels like infinite food options and over the years have cultivated my list of good food spots in the city down to a tee. “Good” is a super subjective designation, especially for food. It can also be a sensitive and sometimes classist thing to talk about good food, so I…
I made some minor CSS tweaks on mostly spacing here that have bothered me since the beginning (though not enough to get me to fix them until now, hehe). This is extreme minutiae and probably doesn’t even warrant a note here but I did spend over an hour working on this so I feel like I have to document it. (I woke up at 5 am and couldn’t sleep so I journaled and internetted for a while…
I am reading and hearing a lot of discourse about AI, machine learning, and more specifically, ChatGPT. It seems like a lot of people have a lot of opinions and things to say, and, like ChatGPT itself, they seem to be often wrong but never in doubt 1 . From what I can tell it seems like a lot of it is noise (generally when people make blanket statements about AI being bad and dangerous) but there…
After I quit medicine and went corporate (as corporate as tech startups can be, which I guess depends on your vantage point; for me it was and is extremely corporate coming from doctoring), I got really into it and became particularly fascinated to learn how business leaders operate and spend their time (at work and in life) in order to be the most efficient and effective they can be. I guess a…
In addition to my attention span , another pandemic-related loss not immediately obvious to me (probably because I was too worried about all the other losses, like the human lives, and the general erosion of mental health, and the ability to pretend that the institutions holding up our society would be able to take care of our most vulnerable), which I am only now realizing, has been the…
When we lived in Tribeca, I could walk to Chinatown for breakfast. In general I am a morning person who avoids crowds and noise where possible 1 , so I especially enjoyed being in the usually crowded and noisy neighborhood when it was on the quieter side with mostly just the residents of the neighborhood out and about, getting ready to open shops and stands and whatnot. You can get a great…
I made a changelog . This was a fun little morning project for me. I’ve seen others do a thing where the changelog is simply a list of all commit messages in reverse chronological order, so I decided to try it. With any “small” coding project, I find that I generally grossly underestimate the time it will take to accomplish a seemingly simple thing, but I learn a lot and also…
One of the many open tabs in the browser of my mind is to find an effective way to track the television shows I watch. Unlike tracking books read or movies watched or music listened to, for which there are several good options for products to use 1 , I haven’t been able to find a good product for it. When I was on the internet in what could be considered my first act (a.k.a. the early…
when visiting my parents a few weeks ago, i picked up one of the books on my mom’s bookshelf, the first of barack obama’s presidential memoirs. i started reading it, but it was kind of hefty and i was only going to be there for a week and didn’t want to start a book i couldn’t finish, so i put it down and picked up another one instead (which, turns out i couldn’t finish that one, either, so maybe…
Sometimes I walk around and do other things while brushing my teeth (which I know I’m probably not supposed to do but I do it anyway, like using Q-tips to clean my ears) and the other night I was winding down for the evening, brushing my teeth and zoning out while walking around the apartment and I noticed someone 1 had left the light on in my home office and it kinda looked like a liminal…
During the darkest parts of pandemic lockdown there was not a lot to do or look forward to so I put a lot of time and energy into making elaborate meals entirely from scratch. (It’s on my neverending to-do list for this website to make some sort of photo gallery of all those meals for posterity, but for now here we are.) Now that I have settled into a new(ish) normal(ish), where thankfully…
As promised , here’s the second part of my year in review. To recap: I audited where I spent my time (loosely) and where I spent my money (incredibly precisely) this past year, in an effort to understand what I really value and to be more mindful and aware of where I’m spending these limited resources. First, the nondiscretionary chunks of my income go towards taxes, student loan…
Note: if you have published a similar 2022 in review on your site, I would love to see it! You can email me a link at kwon(at)fastmail(dot)com. How did 2022 go? All things told, it was… a year. In reflecting on how to reflect on this past year (I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I am an overthinker, particularly when it comes to writing things here), I had trouble relying on…
Lately I feel that more often I’d rather re-read a book I’ve already read before (and enjoyed) than pick up a new one. Maybe it’s a form of risk aversion (I don’t know if I’m going to like a new book, so I’d rather read an old one). Maybe it’s something that comes with aging. I’ve always loved reading books, since I was a kid and my parents would…
I spent some time in the Bay Area this past week and did a vigorous hike (among other things). I was made to believe it would be more of a “nature walk” but this one, Mission Peak, had a steep grade and full exposure to the elements, and ended up being about 3.5 hours and close to 30,000 steps. I haven’t challenged myself physically like that in a long time so I was pleasantly…
Well, Covid got me again. I’m recovering from a second bout after having had it in April 2020. That feels like a different era of fear and confusion—testing was nonexistent, we were running out of toilet paper and Tylenol, and the general guidance was to isolate but go to the emergency room if you were really sick but to call ahead and wear a mask and also if you were sick but not sick sick you…
I’m getting worn down by all the digital noise. By digital noise I mean the constant barrage of alerts, notifications, pings, email subscriptions I didn’t sign up for, email subscriptions I DID sign up for but regret doing so, all the inputs that come through my connected devices. Sometimes I secretly wish I could be one of those people who moves off the grid, abandons the smartphone,…
Several years ago, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City made a major change that affected every subway and bus ride overnight, but not many people noticed. What happened? Announcers were trained to avoid using gendered language, such as “Ladies and gentlemen,” and instead use greetings like “Attention passengers” or “Good morning everyone” prior to making an announcement. Okay, so…
I read that Noah Grey, the creator of the blogging software Greymatter, recently resurfaced on the internet because he was losing his home to foreclosure and had set up a GoFundMe. I went into a little bit of a rabbit hole reading about Noah and what he had been up to, and it made me quite nostalgic. My first blog, circa 2001, was built with Greymatter. The internet was different back then (she…
I signed up as a beta user for an AI art generator that uses keywords (text) to create images. The first image I asked it to make was one using the keywords korean queer mermaid liminal space and these are the four options it generated: Four queer Korean mermaids, drawn by a machine (generated by Midjourney) It’s pretty amazing that a computer made these images, and that is obviously a…
We joined the food co-op. I worked my first shift the other night (after work work). You choose from available shifts and sign up for the kind of work you might want to do. I chose cleaning. I had been somewhat apprehensive about working the shift, not because it was work, or even that it was work I wasn’t willing to do or anything, but moreso that it was a New Thing to do and it had been a…
Coffee is so good. In addition to being physiologically and emotionally dependent on caffeine, I genuinely enjoy coffee. I have accumulated too many coffeemaking implements over the years, including but not limited to a French press, burr grinder, espresso machine, pourover cone, cold brew system, and probably others I’m forgetting that I use less frequently and are collecting dust in a…
It’s the good part of summer right now, the part where it’s warm and sunny and the days are long but it hasn’t gotten too humid out. I went on a nice bike ride yesterday morning along a route I used to take years ago when I first moved to Brooklyn that I haven’t done since. Truthfully I have not been riding my bike as much as I used to (and I used to ride it EVERYWHERE). I…
I have been doing a Thing™ lately where I let the morning light wake me up instead of an alarm. Currently I am on an approximately two week streak of waking up at sunrise, and because the bedroom faces east, this means I have been waking up around 5:30 am. (Voluntarily!) I wish I were one of those people who could function on 5 or 6 hours of sleep, but alas, somewhat embarrassingly I need a full 8…
As an adult I still sometimes have to trick myself into eating my vegetables. I made these roasted 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts yesterday that really did do the trick: 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts Here’s my incredibly imprecise recipe. 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts Brussels sprouts (you could probably do this with carrots also or any vegetable that is good for…