Rafael was patient with me as I picked the right blue. Landed on Benjamin Moore Athens Blue 797.
On June 1, I got a new house on a whim. It has a giant deck out back, a gorgeous master bedroom retreat upstairs with 30-foot high ceilings of natural wood. The whole house is flooded with LA sunshine. The back house used to be an artist studio, and is large enough to be renovated into a two bedroom guest house.
My little audio booth (still needs more sides and a top) in my master bedroom
It was a miracle to even win a bidding war for the place BUUUUUUTTTT it needed new plumbing, electrical, roofing, floors, central HVAC installed, a total kitchen renovation, a new master bath, a complete exterior paint, lots of interior paint jobs and deck staining, termite fumigation with a three-day tenting, and window coverings for its many, many windows.
All of this needed to happen inside of one month, because my former home, the townhouse on Maytime Lane, sold in one day. So I wouldn’t have had a place to live unless the contractors moved fast.
The master bath demolition
Rutilio, who used to just be my electrician back when we lived in the last place, also turned out to be a plumber. Then it turned out he could be a general contractor, too. So he somehow enlisted a team of people to solve the plumbing, electrical, assorted issues plus other dudes to demolish and retile my master bath and install central AC from scratch.
Then, my friends with renovations under their belt introduced me to Jairo the cabinet maker, who built kitchen cabinets inside of a week, and Jorge the counter stone cutter, who was able to cut stone and install inside three days. Rafael my painter came in and worked for a couple weeks straight with his son Ronaldo. They were sometimes managed by my partner Rob because I was away in Seattle for some of this chaos. Rob tried to speak Spanish with Rafael since he’s pretty proud of his Espanol skills but then while I was out of town, Rafael texted me going, “Hey you know he can just use English with me, right?” BURN.
In the frenzy of getting everything done in a month, Rutilio and I ultimately ended up going through the rollercoaster of an intimate relationship — I actually wound up writing him a text one time saying, “Sorry I yelled,” and he got exasperated with me after my uncertainty about how I wanted my shower doors ended up costing him extra money to the glass guy.
But, we made it! Friend Justin came in from Austin for moving weekend to caulk tubs and bolt children’s furniture to the wall and help me move, while Hot Rob brought us food and put together my new furniture. Our family’s longtime helper Yani was the clutch nucleus of the whole operation, making sure everything was packed, and unpacked, and even now she knows where every random thing is (today I needed very particular lightbulbs, for instance, and she remembered the ones we brought back from Korea). It was a gallant team effort. I’m so grateful for every single contribution, every human, who put their sweat into making this place liveable by the moment we moved in, like we were on some episode of an HGTV show, but with a dysfunctional band of misfits.
Justin at work on the deck
Rob on moving day
The glass guy as the master bath was near finishing
Isa and Luna’s wall
Jairo’s cabinets and Mario’s floors
By the time I sent off Justin at the airport, after a weekend of nonstop fixing and installing things for me, he said, “I want to say it was a fun time,” and then got out of the car. We did it, though! We did it!
Sitting under the outdoor simulcast tent with my chin diaper on is basically how I spent most of the TED sessions. Credit: Gilberto Tadday, TED
TED hired me to be the voice of its daily podcasts at the start of the pandemic, so that means this year’s in-person conference was my first chance to attend a non-virtual TED conference. To be fair, I’d been to TED Women in 2013, but this was the flagship co-ed TED. It was held in Monterey for many years until it moved to Vancouver and the organization started inviting 2,000 attendees, up from its much smaller origins.
Because of the pandemic’s continued foothold and worrying trends, this year TED’s main stage returned to its roots with a 500-person event in Monterey, California, a seaside hamlet where the skies are royal blue, the ocean water is crystal clear and the centuries-old cypress trees look like they jumped out from the pages of a children’s book. All attendees were required to show proof of vaccination upon check-in and immediately led to rapid testing. Once we had proof of both vaccinations and a negative test, we could participate.
Assorted notes and thoughts:
Idea Worth Spreading: I can’t stop thinking about a Canadian-woman named Isha’s talk about how we can raise meat CELLS in a lab instead of full-on chickens or livestock for protein consumption. That this would be so much smarter and sustainable and less cruel to animals, and the earth. Can’t wait for her talk to go up online, because as she says, “We are all philosophically vegetarians. We just don’t want to give up the tastiness of actual meat.” She has a solution for this.
Talk That Made Me Cry: Hrishikesh Hirway, the composer and musician who hosts Song Exploder. His podcast has musicians on to take apart their songs layer by layer and talk about them so that the final product gives us greater meaning and we can understand it more at the musician’s level. He did this for one of his own songs, on stage, and damn we all had chills.
Most Common Refrain: Some variation of “Oh wow, you are way taller than I realized,” which is what happens after I have only met so many people on Zoom over the past 18 months.
Snooty Snacks: Would it have killed them to have a snack station with just Wonder Bread and a bunch of Cheez-Its? Every snack was made of cauliflower or otherwise grain-free, and the drinks were all infused with gut-healthy tumeric or this or that.
Snack selection
Biggest Celebrity Sighting: Lizzo. I mean, obviously. She gave a talk about the history and the cultural importance of twerking and then got a bunch of boomers in the front row to try and shake their asses, which was really a thing to behold.
Most Meaningful Meeting: Illustrator Wendy MacNaughton. Maybe I had four tequilas in me, but I started crying when I got to meet “Wendy Mac” in person. She leads “Draw Together” art classes for kids, which I think she started rather impromptu as a way to give parents and kids something to do in the early weeks of the quarantine. I and our girls found it so meaningful and I’m so inspired by her energy, pluck and her brain. To meet her meant so much because I could thank her in person and she was every bit as gracious and fun as you would expect.
With Wendy Mac!
By the end, I was volun-told by the TED senior leadership to take part in the town hall, summarizing our takeaways from the conference. So I got to take the TED stage while super hungover and unshowered and stand inside the famous red dot on the stage, where speakers must stand in order to have the cameras capture them just right.
My Meta Takeaway, Shared From Stage: In one of the final sessions, the thinker and author Steven Johnson recounted how there was a fifty year(!) gap between Louis Pasteur’s breakthrough, lifesaving discovery of milk pasteurization and the wide adoption of it. That’s because it took fifty years of journalists, lawmakers and activists working to PERSUADE the public to buy into this. “Science on its own won’t produce meaningful change,” he said. “You need persuasion.” And if there’s a theme that emerged from many of the talks, it’s that the way we contextualize and explain information, the way we try and bridge individual differences or collaborate as a group to communicate, all of that is really important to cultural, societal solutions to problems.
The other metanarrative I am feeling is this: We should never take for granted the serendipity, surprise and connection that come from gathering in person. I met so many people in elevators, sitting under the simulcast tent and in the coffee line (I never drink coffee but made an exception at TED because the pour overs were so damn good). These connections will end up being longtime friends, in many cases. That’s so nourishing.
And so was the nature. We made time to go on a big group bike ride outdoors and see the host town. Felt like riding around in a postcard.
A small group bike ride was one of the off campus events offered for attendees in Monterey.
Thank you to everyone who pulled off the event this year and the science — testing and mRNA-powered vaccines — that made it possible for us to gather, together.
With my TED 2021 squad minus Harper, who took the photo. Xiaowei Wang, Tony Conrad, and moi.
Jenn (not pictured) and Drew (left) hosted one of two small, distanced birthday gatherings. Sam Sanders hosted night two, on a crazy windy night.
Hopefully this will be the only pandemic birthday. Seriously. But damn, I feel so overwhelmed by the birthday love.
I have made no secret of my despair and how excruciating I’ve found the past year to be. Knowing this, despite the distance, my dearest loved ones showed up in ways they could. My friends proved how well they know me by making sure my door didn’t stop ringing with food deliveries and found ways to socialize, within limits. Thank you for this haul:
An Olive Garden(!) gift certificate
A whale watching tour (where we saw two whales and HUNDREDS of dolphins when our boat came upon their pod)
A pineapple lychee boba from the San Gabriel Valley
Cupcakes and the best banana pudding, from Magnolia Bakery, delivered to my door
Two mini-cakes from my fave bakery, Angel Maid
A giant box of snacks, also delivered to the door
An outdoor, distanced get together hosted by Jenn and Drew
A second outdoor, distanced bday soiree hosted by Sam Sanders
A sushi dinner on my actual birthday, in Janet’s backyard
A giant strawberry cake from my daughters
A surprise Doordash delivery of seven(!) different boba teas and a shaved ice delivered straight to my door
A book about how to unleash my creativity using the tricks of advertising
Assorted cannabis gummies and chocolate
“Zhong Sauce,” which is apparently some amazing hot sauce you can put on anything
A “morning hangover cure” bottled beverage
To sum up: Enough sugar to plunge me straight into diabetes
Spent much of this year with some sort of brain booster zapping my head, for journalism!
What a time to be alive. The House just impeached the US president. Brexit really is going to happen. Big Tech has finally revealed itself to be far more nefarious than nice; and some of its darling companies (cough WeWork cough) laid bare as just giant Ponzi schemes that fuel capitalism’s excesses while promising “community.”
I am still living in the sunshine and swimming in the sea — spending my first full year back in America in the freaky paradise that is Southern California, where there’s no real winter or hot summer. Reality interrupts sometimes — we felt the long, rolling earthquake on July 4 and much of California’s brush and forests caught fire in the fall. A reminder that this state, like the rest of Planet Earth, is increasingly unsustainable.
This year felt like my real re-entry, a transitional period in which I had to learn how to live a more quotidian and (literally) domestic life after all the nonstop absurdity and madness of living abroad. My intention at the outset of 2019 was to be still and look inward, and I’m one for two — lots of looking inward, but not so much stillness.
I learned constantly, mainly in the service of my central creative project and raison d’etre at NPR for the past year — Future You. It explored how emerging technologies are changing what it means to be human. We asked philosophical questions but packaged them in lightweight videos, playing with the long game in mind. In all, I had some 124 electrodes gelled to my head in all this year, plus an untold amount of wattage sent to my brain to show a future of mind-machine melding. I also learned how to extend my life, thanks to the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, one of the world’s leading experts on aging. We became fast friends.
External circumstances interrupted during the back half of 2019 to force me to think more deeply and weigh what matters most. I’m reflecting now after an autumn of tumult. Everything felt triumphant and purpose-driven the first half of the year, then my shoulder dislocated at the end of June and I was down an arm, homebound and feeling crippled and useless. Then, to all of our surprise, my team got laid off in August. This meant the cancelation of the show, without consultation. I struggled for a few months with what I wanted to make — and be — next.
I’m finally out of my malaise, though. New things abound! Can’t wait for 2020, a chance for a buoyant new beginning.
Culture That Made 2019 Bearable:Fleabag, Lizzo, Parasite, Succession, the cringeworthy L to the O-G rap on Succession, Deadwood: The Movie, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the writing of Rebecca Traister, The Cut on Tuesdays, the newsletter Ask Molly
New Practices: Epictetus said, “Progress is not achieved by luck or accident, but by working on yourself daily.” So to lean into my 2019 goal of looking inward, I kept a daily, hand-drawn checklist to make sure I did (or tried to do) the following — meditate, journal, take a vitamin and exercise. The visual representation really shows consistency and lack thereof. Sometimes I just ran out of vitamins, okay? I do most things last minute.
I just colored in a square if I did the thing and over time, I had my own handmade data viz.
The Year’s Firsts: A night at the Magic Castle. Giving a commencement speech at the Missouri School of Journalism, my alma mater. Shoulder dislocation. Irish hospital treatment. Opioids. Drag racing with a professional stunt driver. Brain stimulation. Being monitored in a sleep lab while getting brain stimulation. Getting all three daughters to introduce one of my podcast episodes. The tedious experience of lice removal for my older girls.
New Places: Albuquerque, NM. A few Hawaiian islands I’d never visited before — Kauai and the Big Island. Ireland, where folks kept telling my fair-skinned baby Luna, “Welcome Home” and whose National Ambulance Service I am eternally grateful for. Never did get to visit the Blasket, though.
MVP New Friend: David Sinclair, aforementioned
MVP Old Friend: Harper Reed, who, while helping me through my doldrums randomly introduced me to his friend Michael, with whom he was developing a TV pilot. Serendipitously, Michael goes, “Oh hey do you have a reel?” A week later, I was on a set, shooting a real life commercial, the first since I was a teenager and appeared in commercials for places like Sonic Drive-Ins. This entire sentence just sounded ridiculous when I read it back.
MVP New Sandwich: Popeyes lives up to the hype
Disappointments: The short-sightedness of the newsroom “reorganization” this August and the way it happened. The current era at NPR. Not keeping up with my newsletter. My poor posture, in general — Dr. Raj, my PT, says I had shoulder impingement a long time before my injury.
Also this year, in no particular order, and an admittedly incomplete list:
Talked about my Dad’s epic freedom swim in public
Took the OJ Simpson tour
Lost the door to the minivan after my husband nearly got hit by the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus
Hired a garage organizer and got organized
Received a message from another person’s brain with computer-assisted telepathy Moved a robot with my mind
Increased my vertical jump by 11 percent
Went under the care of a celebrity longevity doctor; he told me to stop eating so much orange dust
Lowered by biological age by five years
Got my long term memory boosted in a sleep lab
Appeared on The Today Show as B-roll
Shot a commercial
Saw Idris Elba in real life
Partied at Lawrence Welk’s former house
Inadvertently became a Flonase “influencer”
Saw Adam Driver on Broadway, he was riveting
Saw an otter feeding at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Stayed at an entirely wolf-themed lodge
Breathed the same air as Beyonce
Ate breakfast back-to-Harrison Ford’s back, and no one told me for most of this time
Became an Annenberg Innovation Lab fellow
Potty-trained Luna, my last baby
Spent more time with mom and dad, who moved to Orange County for part of the year
Reunited our fellow Asia expat travel squad when the Wan Yau‘s returned to the states
Went to Palm Springs, twice
Went back to Seoul, twice
Went to DC 4X
Went to San Francisco 4X
Went to New York 4X
Wrote and hosted a bunchof podcast episodeson howto travel better
Nearly went broke after having to cough up a bunch in capital gains taxes (thanks, selling the Austin house)
Took a morphined-out Irish ambulance ride with medics named Owen and Paddy, natch
Spent a month in a sling
Spent a month without eating sugar
Spent six months in physical therapy
Watched members of my team get laid off in a parking lot while on the job, and on vacation
Decided to leave NPR after that happened
Took part in a little non-violent resistance
Celebrated my parents 40th anniversary in Hawaii on an epic trip with 20 other family members
Started a new small business with my girlfriends
Fit in reading 52 books, barely
Flew 180,846 miles to 28 cities, three countries and spent 99 days away from home. Next year I’m getting carbon offsets and undertaking an effort to cut this down significantly, because it’s so terrible for the planet to fly this much. Like everything else about my 2019, it’s been a year of reckoning.
Trying not to fall off what’s left of the Jinguashi Gold Mine on the Northern coast of Taiwan, July 2018.
You know how when Wile E. Coyote is chasing the roadrunner off the cliff and there are a few moments when he’s just running on air before dropping precipitously to the ground? That’s how 2018 feels, for America and the existing world order, anyway. This year was such a trash heap that the thing I most look forward to every Christmas, the Hater’s Guide To the Williams Sonoma Catalog, couldn’t happen because the author nearly died.
Despite the persistent ennui about global issues, this year was jam-packed personally and I avoided calamity (a heightened concern due to it being the Year of the Dog). Started the year in Sydney, then February away from home covering the Olympics, springtime was all nuclear rapprochement, got in a last gasp of Asia livin’ before a big repatriation at the end of the summer and filled the fall with hellos, reunions, and settling into being a Californian for the first time. All the while, there was drama at work I eventually learned to navigate, and many dumb dramas at home.
I feel so grateful to be in Southern California and to live on LA’s west side, where you can feel that cool sea breeze and are never more than a 16-minute ride to LAX. I love the multicultural, pluralistic, chilled-out populace. Every time I’m at a school assembly for one of the girls, I look at the faces of the kids performing and they are almost all brown or biracial. It makes me feel so hopeful about the future.
Most LA Thing To Happen: I was chatting up Gary Busey in my work lobby because hello, Gary Busey was just sitting in the lobby, when Tom Hanks walks by. Tom double-takes and says in his TOM HANKS voice, “Gary Busey? My god, how you doin’ man?” And he stops to chat with Gary Busey, introduces himself to me by going, “Hi, I’m Tom,” and then suddenly I’m sitting there talking with Tom Hanks and Gary Busey.
This Year’s Firsts: Moving to California. Going on Anderson Cooper. A real Hollywood movie premiere. Speaking to an arena. Being in the same room as Kim Jong Un’s sister. Being on the same street as Kim Jong Un. Olympics. Curling match. Gracie Award. Japanese robot hotel, where the receptionist was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Controlling robot legs with my MIND! Hosting Here and Now. Hosting It’s Been A Minute.
Products I Now Swear By:Posie Tint lip tint (I really embraced the Korean “barely there” makeup look), hay straws, reusable straws, SmartWool socks.
Most Relied-Upon Services: Reggie, the guy who washes our cars while parked in the NPR lot, and Drybar. I almost completely stopped doing my hair this year and farmed it out. Combine that with having three daughters who all need bang trims or cuts on a regular basis and I feel like I’m always in one salon or another. This is less about vanity and more about laziness.
Service I Miss the Most: KakaoTalk. One day I needed to access my Kakao from a desktop, which meant wiping all my previous conversations tied to my now defunct Korea phone number. I mourned for an entire afternoon. So much animated sticker-laden banter, GONE, GONE. I love Kakao so much that our goodbye party from Korea was Kakao-themed, as in, people came dressed up as Kakao emojis.
Best Live Sports Experience: The gold medal women’s hockey came between the US and Canada at the Winter Games. Women’s curling — the journey of the ‘Garlic Girls/Team Kim’ — is a close, close second.
The world famous North Korean singing/cheering troupe. Their minders were closely minding this moment.
Favorite Selfie: The one with all the North Korean cheerleaders in town for the Olympics
New Places: Danang/Hoi An, Vietnam. Mount Hood, Oregon. Sydney, Australia. Singapore.
Most Valuable New Friend: Tiffany, our realtor, who instantly made me feel at home (and went above and beyond in helping find us a home). Or Janet, the mom friend I made in the dropoff line at kindergarten. We learned our younger kids go to the same preschool and our older kids are obviously in the same kindergarten, so she’s my go-to for emergency “HEY CAN YOU WATCH OR PICK UP MY KID?!” calls.
Regrets: Not getting to go to Japan all the time anymore. Not talking to effing Bradley Cooper while he was just sitting there in the lobby of my office for 15 minutes, with no one to talk to. Friend Tim quipped, “You should just say to him, ‘Hey’ and when he turns around go, ‘I just wanted to take another look at you.” LOL.
Favorite Stories/Interviews:Steven Yeun, for sure. Amy Westervelt. The Singapore Summit, which was a blur but a memorable blur. The summit before that — the inter-Korean one, which we covered from the most giant press file I have ever seen.
Life Theme: 50/50! We are all becoming more woke, as a society, and for me it’s given me a deeper appreciation of how equitable my marriage has been, and how frustratingly unusual it is, STILL, for women to get to live the lives of this brilliant Garfunkel and Oates feminist love song:
I’m gonna make your dreams come true As long as they don’t interfere with mine I’ll always be here for you For methodically allotted amounts of time I’ll be there to hold your hand If I happen to be in town And any time you need me There’s a 50/50 chance I’ll be around
Stiles and I saw them together and cheered obnoxiously because IT ME. Guiiiiiiilllty!
Also this year, in no particular order….
Attended three weddings Lost my cat, Cheese
Mostly survived my ben ming nian
Got a 15-year-old car accident blemish lasered off my leg
Got a ‘local gal makes good’ piece in my hometown paper
Discovered the best discount kaiseki lunch in Tokyo (thank you Japanese diplomats)
Accidentally locked myself in my Olympic apartment
Survived an international move, in the other direction Won a Gracie Award
Keynoted the Journalism and Women Symposium confab
Visited the set of Barry
Stopped nursing Luna, celebrated her first birthday
Didn’t get pregnant again, whew
Saw Lauryn Hill live, finally
Had an authentic Hong Kong dim sum weekend
Talked a lotabout sexism Completed the cable news hat trick — Fox, CNN and MSNBC in a single day Didn’t work at the Washington Post, again
Took my girls to Disneyland
Sold my Austin house
Coached first daughter through losing her first teeth
Covered the worst wildfire in California history
Accidentally stumbled upon the Korean curling “garlic girls” on a hot streak and followed it through to their appearing at the gold medal game, ultimately winning a silver
Covered the Kim-Moon summit
And the surprise Kim-Moon summit
The Trump-Kim summit in Singapore
Saw Reese Witherspoon in the flesh
Spent three murder weekends in the woods
Had epic Kakao-themed goodbye party in Korea
Appeared in a documentary that is not the air sex one
Spent 15th Christmas with Stiles, in which we avoided murdering one another
Squeezed in 54 books
Met the famous foodcam of the MIT Media Lab
Flew 233,340 miles to 31 cities, eight countries and spent 113 days away from home. This was crazy in it of itself but especially given the small children and their assorted activities/needs. Next year I’m staying put more so I can be alone with my thoughts — FRIGHTENING. I’ve already said it but I’ll say it again: Thank you thank you to my misanthropic husband and our live-in helper, Yani.
The boxes finally arrived from Korea! All were accounted for.
Two shipments of hundreds of boxes were involved: one from DC, which was from the storage unit I hadn’t seen since early 2015, and another from the shipping container that came over from Korea. Now both are finally, finally here in Los Angeles.
(Have you noticed that Los Angeles is pronounced frighteningly incorrectly? How do native Spanish speakers deal with this? As a running joke my colleague at NPR West and I keep over-pronouncing it Lohs Anhuhlays just to amuse ourselves.)
The Korea stuff was packed in matching boxes but the boxes have a real stench to them and I want them out of my house but that would require me going through the remaining boxes that the movers didn’t unpack. And I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to write this post.
Some things that happened:
I went to DC to oversee the storage unit move but got lost inside the rows and rows of storage units. Things got so desperate I even picked up one of those emergency phones to alert someone for help but NO ONE WAS ON THE OTHER END. Eventually I figured things out but then I couldn’t unlock the combo lock I put on there so I had to get the lock axed off. Finally inside the unit, I found some pure gold, like the ad from that time I advertised juniors clothes for the PX circular (the equivalent of the Target or Walmart on American military bases around the world) wearing a DISCMAN, yes a discman.
Back in the day there were portable devices that played something called compact discs, which stored media on them.
Sitting around at bars in DC I overheard conversations about:
Oil exploration
How sound bites are rigged against the speaker because of the way their words are cut
Appropriations committees
Note: No one here in West LA seems to know what NPR is and I kind of like it.
My children are going through a lot of transition and I’m so proud of them. The oldest one and the middle one are both in school now, and both are awesome schools but they each have so many events and social activities that I feel it’s really cramping my social activity flexibility. Thank goodness I have ride-or-die pals here in the area for the following emergencies so far:
Low blood sugar, weepy and longing for a home-cooked Indian meal on my move day, which Raina brought over in the middle of her work day
Needing to drink and ponder life’s great mysteries on short notice
Last-minute tonkotsu ramen fixes
I didn’t notice these were all food/bev emergencies until I jotted them down just now.
My days are being dominated by school drop offs and pick ups that require driving, finding street parking, parking and then walking a child onto campus before being able to say goodbye (as opposed to our door-to-door bus service we had in Korea in which the girls were just carried off and dropped off from the high rise).
We can’t find anything. Half of my conversations with Matt Stiles are “Have you seen my X” and trying to maintain some semblance of civility with one another but really wanting to knife each other since there are box cutters everywhere but not really but kind of really because moving sucks.
Why does this guy have a star on the walk of fame, and other burning questions, coming up this week.
I’ve returned to California for the first time in a long time for the national Asian American Journalists Association convention. We Asians (and Stiles) will be convening here through Saturday, getting some quality training in and talking about the future of news, which is one of my all-time favorite topics besides chili cheese dogs, Mad Men and Harry Whittington. Come back for some #newsfuture posts and assorted photos. I’ve unintentionally engaged in a Twitter war to tweet the shizz out of this conference, so my blog will be an extension of the 140 character updates.
My fellow Texans also happen to be in California this week. Lawmakers are partying an hour south in San Diego, for a lawmaker convention (far fewer Asians, but rife with opportunity for drunk driving arrests!)
The master bath demolition
