I went to Korea. My cat passed suddenly. I got a job offer. This was a wild month, to say the least!

Making appointments is almost as good as any SSRI.

There once was an anglerfish who lived in the deepest depths of the ocean, as anglerfish often do. She lived a happy life in the darkness, her only source of light dangling in a tiny bulb from her head. Occasionally, a surface fish would accidentally wander into her home and mistake her light for friendliness. The fish would swim towards the light, happy to find another soul in the eternal night.

My cat is the only reason why I get out of bed in the morning.

Please tell me, oh search engine overlord, because I am incapable of figuring it out myself.

R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War, published in 2018, is a gritty fantasy retelling of 20th century Chinese history. Specifically, it retells the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 - 1945) in which the Japanese Empire attempted to conquer the Republic of China. While the book blurb advertises the historical inspiration1, readers may not realize that R.F. Kuang incorporated many cultural influences as well.

I caught up with a group of college friends this past weekend, and the conversation was less catching up with them and more catching up to them.

As I become 30, I wonder: what happened to all of the quirks in my 20s that made me interesting?

Writing prompt: Write a scene in the style of Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses) where two men are arguing over who is going to open the door for you, but you were actually just walking by and weren't going into the store. I was starving. I must have been starving since I was born.

It's really easy to say, "I'll be a success." It's even easier, at times, to believe it. After all, you are intelligent and hard-working. You are talented - provably so - with quantifiable and searchable data. You see the same five job postings on LinkedIn, the same three content creators across YouTube and Instagram and Tik Tok, and the same friend of a friend who made their fortune at every party you ever go to, so the world can't be…

It's Asian Heritage Month, and Hulu is offering us some Asian goodies in a section on its own. It organized them into nine categories: Asian American Stories, Asian Leads, Asian Heritage, Asian Representation, Asian Creators, Travelling through Asia, Episodic Highlights, Asian Dramas, and Anime Favorites. The Windows App offers a blurb only for Anime Favorites, and none for the other categories:

This notebook comes in a pack of three. The plastic crinkles as I unwrap it, filling the air with the hope of productivity. I judge its thinness, thinking that I surely will fill all three notebooks within a few months. I google "how to start a bullet journal" and begin filling its pages with tasks and straight lines. I save a page for my 2025 resolutions, but I only write three lines:

I live in a house I have lived in all my life. My mom wakes up with the dawn, then leaves. She comes back in the night, but I don't talk to her. My dad is like me. He sleeps in. He has no job. I have no job. I lie in bed as he makes his lunch. We don't talk.

Below are the lyrics to my parody of Non-Stop, from the 2015 hit Broadway musical Hamilton from Lin-Manuel Miranda. In this version of Non-Stop, Alexander Hamilton is not a founding father, but instead an insatiable fan of all-you-can-eat Korean barbeque.