Post Category → Writing

I am thinking that April 30 is a beautiful, sad day.

Today was a beautiful, sunny day in San Francisco – a respite from the torrents of rain that have defined this past winter in the Bay Area. I took a glorious walk in a sleeveless shirt and went through the motions of peaceful day: laundry, dish washing, reading.

Nearly 2,000 miles southeast of San Francisco, it was also a sunny day. In Houston, my father commenced his daily post-employment routine of exercising, sitting at the library, and going to temple. He made it to temple, but uncharacteristically left early to call my sister. He was sad, he told her. He was sad because 42 years ago today was the Fall of Saigon – forever changing the course of his life and, to some extent, mine.

I was not surprised to hear this. 42 years is a long time. Although time is supposedly an antidote to pain, I don’t find much truth in the idea that time heals. I think time obfuscates our memories and morphs them into happier or more anguished iterations. Worst of all, time seems to repeat itself. Another April 30 will come and go.  My father will feel sad.  I will feel reflective and write again about our loss. Years will pass and our collective political memory of Vietnam will fade, but will repeat itself in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Syria.

On April 30th’s of the past, I’ve often written long pieces about the implications of this day on the Vietnamese American community – the permanent feeling of being a tourist in our homeland; my broken ability to speak the language that connects me to Vietnam; the obstacles that my family had to overcome to acquire stability and normality on this land. Now, at the age of 30 on this April 30th, I’m most concerned about the normality of this day. My father and mother are the last connections I have to “authentic” Vietnamese culture. As I think about the family I would like to start one day, I worry that my children will think of Vietnamese history as foreign history and that they’ll never have the memory of hearing the stuttered, syncopated rhythm of the Southern Vietnamese anthem that haunted my childhood. April 30 will be a normal day of intellectual importance for them, not personal importance.

It’s a sunny, yet sad day for all of us.

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Please see below for an excerpt from Rory Kennedy’s excellent documentary, Last Days in Vietnam. Although the entire film is well made, the 3 minutes below features a poignant story of reflagging ships flying Southern Vietnamese flags with American flags.

 

 

 

 

I am answering the question, “What can I do?”

I want to begin this entry by stating that I am not the biggest fan of “self-help” or the Oprah-esque motto that we should always be living our best lives. I think life is recursive and akin to writing – constantly in a state of revision, never devoid of imperfection, always in drafting mode and never final.

That being said, this blog post is going to be the closest thing I write to a self-help, life-hack, live your best life, how to fucking YOLO! piece of writing. Over the last few months, I have found myself in social situations where friends have expressed their concern about the state of national dialogue and the questionable decisions made by our newly elected administration.

The discussion, without fail, always pivots to an on-going question of what can I do? Should I send my leftover NSYNC Christmas cards from 2003 and hand write shit like “Don’t say Bye, Bye, Bye to the Affordable Care Act”? Should I plan another gay dance party in front of Mike Pence’s house? Should I make another protest sign? Most of all, is this sustainable?

I’ve thought a lot about the question and have made a few adjustments to my personal life over the past few months. In my own search to the what can I do question, I’ve come up with my answer that I’ll be sharing in this piece – that through reflection, we should foster and harness our individual talents to contribute for the betterment of our world. Oprah probably said this first, but whatever.

A what can I do answer in three parts – developing a life philosophy, removing obstacles, and getting your shit together.

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Life Philosophy – the Why?

A few months ago, I had a chance to get an advanced copy of Angela Duckworth’s Grit, which has become the latest popularized social psychology idea (and thus the concept everyone likes to shit on these days). Although I would highly recommend reading the entire book and theory in full, she has a six-minute TED Talk that has become wildly viral, summarizes the concept well, and prevents you from having to engage in the perishing, near extinct practice of reading words on paper.

Duckworth’s main analysis is that passion, intentional practice, and long-term perseverance are the drivers of the success – not innate genius. I see a lot of credence with the criticism.  However, what interested me the most is that grit can also be synonymous with focus and vision. Having a definitive life philosophy is, according to Duckworth, a guiding principle to organizing our goals, excluding projects that don’t add anything to our life philosophy and bringing focus to our decisions on a day-to-day basis.

An example – like most people, I devoted my 20’s putzing around and spending a lot of time in dive bars loudly and drunkenly discussing that I was going to fucking do everything all the god damn time! I wanted to experience and accomplish everything. Accordingly, I created giant lists of goals with no particular theme except that I needed to cross everything off lest I become a cat-lady living an obscure, indistinguishable life.

Below is a list I literally wrote and published in 2010 at the age of 23. Although my goals may have changed over time, my penchant to write with only fine-tipped pens on card stock with intentional color-coding has not changed:

 

2010 Jens Life Goals

Seven years later, I can attest that there are some good goals here (that I accomplished!), but it’s in a terrible list-like structure. Everything felt scattered, which made it difficult to intentionally work towards something.

Enter Angela Duckworth, who suggests having one single life philosophy and a tiered set of no more than five goals that align with that philosophy. Any project or task that doesn’t lead back to that philosophy is considered miscellaneous and should be placed on the back burner.

A month after the most recent election cycle, my head was filled with so many ideas and so many ambitions – learn to knit to make a pussy hat! Register more Mexicans to vote in Texas! Bake a lot of sassy cupcakes! – that it was difficult to focus my energy on tasks that felt collectively productive. So, I asked myself what my role is in our movement towards a better future (my life philosophy) and then set up 5 focused goals leading back to my vision. For reference, mine are below, which I post to keep myself accountable:

Life Philosophy: Practice and cultivate empathy by (1) writing to tell my story and the stories that best reflect how my experiences shaped my worldview and (2) supporting others to help them realize their own stories.

Goals:

  1. Write (1) long form pieces for a wider audience (2) weekly blog pieces for my community to get into the practice of writing regularly
  2. Work (1) with students in helping them cultivate their own stories and self-expression and (2) manage my team (currently all-female) in a way that practices empathy, fairness and compassion, countering some of the negative stereotypes of what female leaders and managers are perceived to be
  3. Foster relationships with family because (1) it’s the right thing to do and they paid for everything, God damn it and (2) to preserve their stories and their language
  4. Financial freedom so that (1) I can take breaks to write, develop stories without concern or worry and (2) so that I can help my parents and build a life with my partner
  5. Foster relationships with friends and my partner (1) because they’re good people, (2) they keep you accountable to your bullshit, and (3) they’re rejuvenating to your life

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Self-Reflection – Removing Obstacles

The other important concept I’ve integrated in my life is one I have learned by regularly seeing a therapist who specializes in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Let me begin by stating that I am not ashamed of seeing a therapist and anyone who is thinks that its a shameful, stupid experience should probably see a therapist (let’s talk!).

As someone who feels anxiety about not living up to my life philosophy, ACT has been exceptionally helpful in practicing ways to cope with and accept that anxiety. The most important concept I have learned is breaking the procrastination cycle, which has been key to helping me focus on my goals.

You’ve probably experienced it before, but here’s a visual depiction of the procrastination cycle, which has been the biggest obstacle to life philosophy work and actually creates more anxiety:

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  • “I need to do this awesome thing or else my life will suck, bigly.”
  • “I don’t feel like doing this awesome thing. Oh!  There’s a new season of The Great British Bake Off on Netflix!”
  • “God, I suck.  I haven’t done awesome thing.  At least I know to use star anise when I bake.”
  • “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK.”
  • “[YouTube Dog Video.]”

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Getting Your Shit Together – The How

Thoughts, goals, and resolve are nothing without action. My therapist likes to use the refrain that admitting something is always the hardest part in personal change. I would argue that doing the actual shit to change is the hardest part.

For this section, I’m going to write the word “shit” a lot and I’ll be deferring to two books that have been helpful to me: David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Charles Duhigg’s The Habit Loop. For those of you who prefer not reading and like learning things in meme, a summary below:

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Taking into account my life philosophy and to help me break out of the procrastination cycle, here are some of my habits and organizational structure that have been tremendously helpful, although I’m still a work in progress about following through:

  • Creating an office space so that I can immediately go to a creative place whenever I need to
  • Carving out at least 2 hours of writing time each on Saturdays and Sundays
  • Waking up at the same time and sleep at more or less the same time, so that I can maximize my energy
  • Exercising regularly to increase my energy for writing, work, and people
  • Being efficient at work so that I don’t take work home and can focus on writing in the evening
  • Writing weekly and post it on my website every Monday.*

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*Editor’s Note: Sike! Except next Monday.  I’ll be taking a break because I’ll out of town and focusing on a long-form piece.  Yes, longer than this piece.

I am listening to pop music.

I love pop music.

I understand that the genre lacks almost all of the elements of so-called music – decent vocals, interesting musicality, lyricism intersecting with poetry, tact. But, the best thing about pop music is its ubiquity.

You heard it on the car radio driving to school, or droning through the Macy’s speaker system while sifting through the discount prom dress rack, or blaring at the middle school dance when you gave up on gyration and settled for melodic swaying, or whirring from a laptop in the adjacent dorm room as you tried to fight through school work and homesickness.

My favorite musical experiences consist of playing an old song – particularly songs rife with associations from my childhood – while walking through an unexplored part of a city or en route to meet new people or occasions. There’s a temporal blending of old and new – old memories converging with newly created ones, melding into a single track. I don’t see pop songs as just songs. They’re layered experiences – the times and landscapes of my memory.

Lately, I’ve been tuning into a lot of nostalgic music as a scientifically-backed source of joy, especially in these politically contentious times. Here are two songs that have been especially potent in memory:

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Love Fool by the Cardigans

(From the Original Sound Track of Romeo + Juliet)

It’s the summer of 1996 in Houston, Texas. If you’re poor and don’t possess a vehicle with a functioning air conditioner, there’s only a few things you can do in the city: Watch a Real World: San Francisco marathon for the fifth time; schlep through the near-impenetrable wall of heat between your house and the local library; or convince your parents to drop you off at the dollar movie theater, where all the movies are as old as the theater is derelict.

It’s 1996 and today’s PG-13 movie – brought to you by a sister who is 5 years older – is Romeo + Juliet. You’re expecting another boring romantic “comedy” starring Marisa Tomei, only to witness a movie that feels like a visual aneurism – as if the entire script composed solely of exclamation points. You leave the movie theater convinced that everyone in southern California drives around in unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts of neon color palettes and that white people only make out in exceeding weird situations, like behind fish tanks or underwater in a pool or as they’re dying of poorly timed poisoned suicide.

From its opening disco infused chords of this Cardigans song, you think of Romeo’s first appearance in the film. He’s perched atop a rock along a shoreline. Someone in the move theater let’s out a loud whistle because it’s young, unblemished Leonardo DiCaprio. This is pre-mauled-by-a-bear Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s got the most beautiful, side-swept lesbian hair you’ve ever seen. He inhales the last drags of a cigarette while an awkward, pubescent voiceover reveals his first lines:

“Why then, O bawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create. Heavy lightness. Serious vanity. Misshapen chaos of well seeming form.”

Years and hundreds of miles later, it’s the perfect kind of song to play as you’re driving 75 miles per hour on the I-80, going east to west – Oakland to San Francisco – on the Bay Bridge. It’s the kind of song that mixes perfectly with a late night drive, crescendos with the first appearance of the San Francisco skyline. The buildings rise above the ocean like a vertical flip book, framed almost perfectly by the steel beams and rivets of the bridge.

It’s that kind of song.

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Clocks by Coldplay

You can’t tell if you love or hate Coldplay, similar to how you can’t tell if Chris Martin is rugged attractive or scraggly ugly or if lyrics like “I discover that my castles stand/upon pillars of salt/pillars of sand” are illuminating or fucking stupid.

Perhaps the thing that hate most is that you never know the names of Coldplay songs, so you never know what to type into Napster or BearShare to steal whatever it is you’re looking for. A few of their early pop songs are lyrically chorus-less and named after the most obscure noun that appears once in the song (i.e. “Clocks”) or words that don’t even appear in the song at all (i.e. “The Scientist” or “Viva La Vida”). It’s conceivable that the moniker of the Coldplay hit you’re looking for is some preposition that appears in the song – “On,” “In,” “In Addition To,” “Regarding.”

But, you love Coldplay because every time that melodic piano rift from Clocks launches from your speaker system – those simple eighth notes saturating your surroundings until it explodes into a wall of synth 20 seconds in – it reminds you of a hopeful period of listening and driving. Driving to the Starbucks after school to indulge in conversations with friends about who you’ll be someday – a doctor for them, a journalist for you. Driving to postmark college applications, unsure if the precariously sealed packages will make it to Palo Alto, Providence, or Washington, DC in time. Driving to your high school graduation.

You also remember, in the Spring of 2009, a few weeks shy of your college graduation, taking a road trip with two friends to Hershey, Pennsylvania. The trip aligns with Coldplay’s Viva La Vida world tour and though you don’t have the money to attend, you and your two friends lie on a hill outside of HersheyPark Stadium. The grass is slightly damp, the air is fairly warm, everything sounds muffled, but it doesn’t matter because you’re about to graduate and you’re with your friends. The crowd noise and prelude music resonates like an undefined hum until Chris Martin – ugly, pretty Chris Martin – hits the first 8 notes of Clocks on his piano. The crowd noise and music rises to a fever pitch well above HersheyPark Stadium, escaping and dissolving into the night sky. For a moment, everything sounds clear and feels possible.