To the me that will wake up tomorrow, and for the me that will exist in ten years:

I hope you remember that there is no right or wrong in this world.  The world isn’t a printed book with black and white typography.  As you face each and every single problem, you’re probably going to see that you will know what’s right one day, and lose the understanding the next.  And just like that, you’re standing in a large land mass with people all around you with no idea of who is doing the right thing, and who is doing the wrong.

Remember that sometimes, the absurd things that your mom says, you will eventually find to be true.  And then you’ll sit there and wonder: “Why hadn’t I listened to her when she told me to?”

Remember that there will be times when someone will call you a liar/thief/savage, even when you know that you did nothing wrong.

Remember that sometimes you will get what you want, but not what you need.

Remember never to underestimate the abilities of a tamed wolf.

Remember that the person you love isn’t obligated to love you back.  And along the same note, remember that not every person you will meet will love you.

Remember that losing is alright.

Remember that what you spend your entire life building, may be blown away overnight.

Remember to never open your heart to someone who cannot forgive your shameful past.

Remember to learn from the mistakes that you dislike so much, you wish to forget.

Remember to love unconditionally.  Even the unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered ones.

Remember to put a smile on your face when you know that you are being lied to.

Remember to be happy for the person that you love, even if they are not sharing their love with you.

Remember what your physics teacher taught you about entropy and the world in physics class: the world is on a downward spiral toward gradual disorder that can never be reversed around to arrangement again.

Remember to seek simplicity without sacrificing completeness.

Remember that tides will turn.

Remember that the person who loves you today, may not love you tomorrow.

Remember that the good you do today, may be forgotten tomorrow.

Remember to set aside time for your family and friends.  When you lose them, you will have nothing.

Remember to wake up every morning for yourself, and no one else.

Remember that time does not heal.  Time heals only the problems that time brought upon itself.

Remember that each meal you have with someone is precious.

Remember that you’re not the only one in the universe.  You’re not the only one crying yourself to sleep.  You’re not the only one that lost your best friend in a battle.  You’re not the only one.  Someone on the other side of the world is facing the same thing and is handling it better.  You’re not alone.

But even after all this, what you need to remember the most is that the precious memories that roll in your little brain’s projector onto your tears that roll down your face, shall always stay as memories, and never as expectations for the future and the people in them.

San Francisco wasn’t generous enough to offer me some sunny rays, so my day pretty much consisted of climbing gloomy hills up to Coit Tower, and acting absolutely happy and insane simultaneously.

The view of San Francisco from Coit Tower.

Notice Alcatraz Island.

Marking my Asian attributes on Lombard Street.

So, I already admitted to the fact that the weather in San Francisco was dull.  But here is the truth of the matter: spring is the time to be in the Bay Area.  Each flower blooms, and each tree blossoms with the welcoming of the season.

Bread Pudding and Asparagus and Shiitake Mushroom Croque Monsieur from Tartine Bakery.

SF, I’ll be back soon enough.

I want to go back to when I had this great image of you. I just want to go back to when you were here. I just want to go back to when I knew you were safe and breathing.

Sporting: 1) Zara leggings | 2) UO corduroy jacket with faux fur lining | 3) Lucky Band knitted scarf | 4) Blue tie-dye dress from a flea market in Brazil [not shown] | 5) Vintage Gucci satchel | 6) Ellus cowboy boots

If you’re rummaging for a filling meal in San Francisco, head to Chinatown.  Not only do they not discriminate vegetarians, but their food is incredibly cheap.  Frankly, who can resist cheap and delicious food?

Stay tuned for part II!

The best thing that I have ever learned in school is from my old English teacher from four years ago. He told me to read. Read until our heart is content. Find the writing that you admire and simply copy it. I didn’t understand this at the time, as I only thought it useful for the papers that I would write. Of course, if I simply immolated the style and structure of successful writers, I couldn’t go too far wrong.
Looking back on it now, and being a lover of writing, I realize that it is the foundation for my writing today.
Time and time again, I say: writing saved me. Writing saved me from the haunting thoughts inside of me. And the only reason that writing saved me was because I had read enough from other writers to know exactly how to express my anchoring feelings.
People get this erroneous notion that I have been writing my entire life. More recently than before, I have been receiving feedback on my writing and people think that I have come to where I am with my writing out of pure luck. Believe me when I tell you this: I remember the exact and specific time that I really decided to write. And that was when I was at the lowest point of my life. Realize this: no one knows you better than God himself and yourself. No one. No matter the handful of us that say we have a best friend, they still are a separate entity that is also just trying to get by. Of course, having friends makes getting by life much more enjoyable, but you still know yourself better than they know you. The exact moment that I really began to ‘write’ was when I realized I didn’t have anyone else but myself. I wrote to organize my thoughts this way.
God told us that we must be honest with ourselves, and therein be honest with him. And I guess this is my way of being honest with myself. God told us that when the time comes where we are finally honest with ourselves, we would be freed. That’s exactly what’s happened to me. Writing set me free.
But for some, writing is not enough. And even sometimes for me, writing and words are not enough to describe the complexities. The human cognitive process is an abstract and complex idea to grasp; meta thinking is even more complicated. Thinking about your own thoughts… It almost sounds like a separate field of study. Almost.

Photo by me.

When you try your best but you don’t succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep
Stuck in reverse

And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can’t replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

- Coldplay

Photo by me.

I’m going to go ahead and proceed with attacking this cliché topic and the three sinful words:  I love you.

This ventures out to all platforms of relationships.  Whether you have a relationship with your parents, your friends, your family members, or your romantic partner, “I love you” shouldn’t be the main factor that initiates your moving from nonintimacy into intimacy.  Intimacy is initiated when you begin to interact with someone.  The decision to get to know someone already is a notion of willingness to enter intimacy.  Intimacy on all levels: intimacy in formality, intimacy in relational conversations, and the most important intimacy of all when you eat a meal with someone.  I never quite understood when people would wonder why their partner hadn’t told them that he or she loved her or him.  What’s even more beyond me is that the person in the relationship wouldn’t consider telling their partner that he or she loved him or her until the other person said it.  Is there any point in investing your time in someone only to be waiting around for the other to explicitly tell you: “I love you?”  If that’s what you find someone doing, do the world a favor and tell them to love themself before they wait around for love to come to them.  Odds are that that person doesn’t deserve it anyway.  And vice versa: if you love someone that won’t tell you that they love you, surround yourself with the people that do.  You deserve it.

Love does not come from fear.  Love comes from having the courageous audacity to embrace the soul of someone else into yours and therein overcome vulnerability.

And if you know you love someone, tell them.  People say that it’s a factor of vulnerability.  But it really isn’t.  What you call vulnerability is actually a euphemism for you wanting to protect your ego and pride.  We can see right through that.  So, stop trying to expand your ego, and consider broadening your heart.  After all, will you and I be here tomorrow?  People like reassurance.  And if we don’t have the reassurance that we’ll still be here tomorrow, then we can still have the reassurance that someone loves us.

“Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.” – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Reciprocate love and appreciate love, even if others don’t do the same.  Love will bring you happiness.  We are people.  Our love shouldn’t ever run out or deplete.  If you declare that your love ran out, you lost yourself as a part of humanity at that very moment.

One love, y’all.

Photo by me.

A tribute to President’s Day with red, white, and bleu colours along with American flag knitted shirts.  To top it all off, blue bow ties and jean shorts with American flag pocket linings were added to the picture as lemon zest.

Also, make sure you check out JoJo’s Cosmic Barbies!  It’s a fashion forward blog run by the fashionista herself, Joanne Kim.  For tips and inspiration, scoot yourself on over to the blog!

Happy President’s Day everyone!  I hope everyone celebrated it with as much spirit as these people and myself did.

Photos by me and some other people too.

Dear Stranger:

After only have lived twenty years, and half of those years as a complete and utterly insane idiot, I think that I’ve come to a comfortable level where I know what is important and what is not. Priorities is a key theme in my life right now, and I think that’s why I’ve finally settled at a moderate happiness. But it is also why I think I accused you of not seeing yours.

Forgetting priorities, having expectations, and finding yourself in miscommunication. This is what ruins relationships with your family, your friends, and with that romantic partner. This is the essential core to the issue. How do you know that it is the core? ’Cause if you were to disintegrate all those negative aspects from the relationship, there wouldn’t be anything less than that of contentness.

Think about it like this. Imagine a world in which we all lived like dogs: a little bit naïve, a little too hungry, but most of all, happy and full of grace. We are dogs now. We love everyone without expecting it in return. We know nothing about another dog emotionally hurting us. We only know to give grace: good things (like love) you didn’t earn or deserve, but you’re getting them anyway. We’re back to being human beings right now. Suddenly, we don’t know love or grace.

I think what I learned most after having spent time with you was love and grace. And it’s weird to think that you can learn love without actually loving someone. Maybe I’m just a little older, or maybe I have an old soul, but for me, the only things that I will make time for is God, my family, a few of my very dear friends, and the person that I am in a relationship with, respectively. I didn’t know how to do this before I met you. But maybe it’s because of the way that I saw that I gave so much grace to a person that didn’t reciprocate it, made me realize what grace really is. There was a time with you when my pride didn’t get in the way. There was a time with you when I gave my affection as if there was love planned for the future. There was a time when I gave a lot of me as if I wouldn’t be losing anything. I thought of it as an investment. But when you keep giving and giving, you’re going to look for things in return. Because we are human. The only One that will not expect anything in return for His unconditional grace is God. Though I live each and every day following Him, I still don’t fail to be human in forgetting to love and give grace without expectations. I sought for things in return.  Not big things. Just small things like you thinking about me throughout your day.

And through all this, for some strange reason, I found myself caring more than you did.  And I thought this was normal.

I tried.  You tried.  I do believe we did.  We all try.

During this entire time when I forgot what pride was, your pride prevailed. Your pride got in the way. Of us. Only proving to me that first impressions really are the best judgments you will ever make.  And the try that we did, fell into the gutter as fast as we saw each other come together.

But, we came together for a reason and fell apart for a reason too.  So, no regrets nor hate rest here.

Photo by me.