H-Mart

I live right next to an H-Mart, an Asian food supermarket. I could walk there, I live so close. I have ordered boba tea from this place with co-workers, but for the longest time I have not set foot inside, until this past weekend.

H-Mart is wild inside. Maybe it was all the labels with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. Maybe it was the distinctive odor of live seafood inside of display aquariums. I saw strange fruit and produce. I saw immense bags of uncooked rice (brown, white, jasmine, medium grain). These last items transported me to a scene growing up: emptying out a large bag of rice into an even larger container, the rice making a distinctive sound as it poured out of the bag.

As expected, I saw plenty of Asians walking around, their faces familiar to me, yet also unfamiliar. I thought about my own identity a bit. I am Asian, but that always felt too broad to me. I remember a co-worker telling me that India is a part of Asia (the Indian subcontinent), and I remember being surprised. I should have known this, and felt chagrined that I didn't.

I saw random Caucasians during my visit. Most looked completely at ease with all the options. A few looked like me: dazed with wonder. I thought about my own upbringing, and my own assimilation. Born in the Philippines, but raised entirely in the United States from the age of three. For my parents, their old home is an island nation in Southeast Asia. For me, my old home is Jersey City, New Jersey.

Walking around the H-Mart reminded me of this bit: if you're American, you cannot go to China and become Chinese, but if you're Chinese, you can come to America and become an American. I know this is true. 

Around the circumference of H-Mart were food stalls. I commit to revisiting these more closely, as there could be takeout options here. After all, I live so close!

Planking

A year ago I started doing planks. This is a back exercise in which you position yourself face-forward on the floor, lifting your entire body by your toes and elbows. When done right your back and legs are as straight as a plank. After a minute or two your abdomen and back will feel the strain from holding this pose.

Various people have talked to me about this exercise when I mention my occasional back spasms. Planks are easy to perform, but it took a long time to build up endurance. At first I could only hold the pose for 20 or 30 seconds. I eventually reached a minute. Today, I can hold the pose for a minute and a half. I try to plank at least once in the morning and once in the evening.

About six or seven months into this new routine I realized that my back spasms stopped happening. My spasms tend to be a sharp pain that immediately subsides into a tightened back. I have exercises that reduce the tightness, but my back is wrenched for days at a time. Sitting or getting up with a wrenched back can be painful. However, since planking, these have stopped.

I can only conclude that planking has been the difference in my back and core health. The core of your body governs the back but also your torso (abdominal muscles) and your hips. In other words: posture and mobility. I've stopped regularly doing push ups because I'd rather be rid of my back aches than to have well-defined triceps. I suppose I could do both. Maybe I will.

Bottom line: I recommend a planking routine for those with back aches.

Italian Phrases I'm Memorizing

Ho una moglie e una figlia. Li amo molto ❤️

Sono americano ma sono nato nelle Filippine 🇵🇭

Caffè macchiato, per favore ☕️

Mi piace leggere 📚 e scrivere ✍🏼

È un Michelangelo 👨🏼‍🎨 o un Raffaello? 🎨

photo by tigerorchid

Put First Things First

I saw the Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in a used bookstore, and it made me smile. I read this book in the mid-90s and it certainly influenced how I thought about life and work. As time progressed, I have forgotten the seven habits but the one that stuck with me: "Put first things first."

In the chapter on this habit, he buckets all the things we have to do into four quadrants: 1) Urgent and important, 2) Not urgent but important, 3) Urgent but not important, and 4) Not urgent and not important. In the book he shows these quadrants on a square which has importance on the Y-axis and urgency on the X-axis.

I have always loved this idea. So much of our day feels driven by the urgent, and you have to decide what is important and what can wait. So much of our off-time is made up of unurgent and unimportant things. What gets left behind is Quadrant II: not urgent but important. 

Quadrant II is the sweet spot of long-term development. This category of work is hardly urgent, but applied to your life's goals, it is often terribly important. It's usually a preparatory step. You are acquiring some building block to help you get just a little further towards that big outcome.

The habit is titled "Put first things first", and this emphasizes prioritization. What is the first thing? If you want to reach big but distant goal, you have to do "the first thing." And yet it's often the easiest thing to set aside for something urgent in your face. By prioritizing an important but unurgent task, you prioritize your goal.

This is why I'll always applaud people who run marathons, finish their thesis, produce a work of art,  give a performance, or achieve some meaningful long-term goal. These are outcomes that do not come from out of nowhere. These outcomes require sustained time and effort in Quadrant II, and everyone recognizes the satisfaction that comes from that.

By Davidjcmorris - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Same Age We Are Now

I digitized a box of old photographs a few years ago. There is one set of photos of me attending my wife Jenn's graduation from a masters program. She was my girlfriend in those 1993 pictures. I have a shock of dark hair and we look so young. We'd be engaged a year later.

I showed these digitized photos to Jenn. Her mother was in a few of the pictures, and Jenn said "She's probably the same age we are now." That statement really struck me. All of a sudden, I felt like I could see the cycle of life, the edges of the wheel of time. 

Jenn's statement changed my frame of reference. Those old pictures now present another kind of understanding for me. Our parents were "old" in these pictures, but we are now their age. It's an insight that should not have surprised me. Relative time goes in both directions, and it makes me grateful to properly see that now.

Bare Handed Fall

The cold weather and heavy snow made a slippery obstacle course in our parking lot earlier this month. On my way to the car in the morning, I saw a patch of snow that looked walkable. I stepped on it and my foot instantly slipped and I began falling backwards. 

It felt like slow motion. I wore a book bag, but it started moving off my shoulders as I fell backwards. "That was really ice," I remember thinking. My right foot was up in the air, and my left foot soon followed it. My arms and hands started reaching behind me, ready to brace for the fall when I realized: "I'm not wearing my gloves!"

My hands hit the ground first. I was on my back, my book bag next to me. I rolled to my left, slowly stood up and gingerly stepped off the snow/ice. As I brushed away the dirt and snow on my coat and pants, I felt a sharpness in my hands. I looked and my right hand had several small cuts! It hurt a bit too.

I decided to go back inside and get my hand properly treated. Jenn patched up my hand, applying some expired bacitracin and covering my two larger cuts with bandages. Three weeks later, my hand is all healed up. I'm lucky the fall didn't cause any more damage. I think my heavy winter coat helped with that.

From that day though, I made sure to wear my gloves on the way to the car. I also avoided cutting across those snow patches. Taking a fall when you're older can be a big deal so I will be watching my step a little better!

Small number (7) of cuts on my hand

My 2024 Books and Movies

In 2024, I read 24 books (LibraryThing) and watched 48 movies (Letterboxd) (11 were rewatches).

My favorite book: The Age of Innocence. I still have not rewatched the movie, which my memory holds in high esteem, but the book is so evocative of the time (the gilded age of the 1870s) and the feelings. The Countess Elena Olenska and gentleman lawyer Newland Archer are such memorable characters. The book also includes a brief stop in Jersey City, which amazed me to see. Other favorites from last year: The Tetris Effect and American Prometheus.

My favorite movie: Mars Express. Sci-fi animation from France. Robots. Mars. And a hard-nosed detective. It's emotional, complex, and dense. Everything I like in a movie. Highly recommend this beauty. Other notable watches from last year: Flow and All That Jazz.

Some movies I watched from 2024