https://kwon.nyc/notes/ Recent content in Notes on Kwon.nyc Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Fri, 24 Sep 2021 08:46:45 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/things-i-dont-have-to-do/ Mon, 11 Dec 2023 22:14:03 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/things-i-dont-have-to-do/ I spent a lot of time and energy in my life worrying about things I felt like I had to do for one reason or another. Either everyone else was doing the thing, or specific people were pressuring me to do the thing, or I never saw real examples or models of people who didn’t do the thing, etc. At some point I started to realize that, if I really challenged myself, I didn’t have to do some of the things I believed I had to in order to win at life (and I would include the idea of having to “win at life” on this list). https://kwon.nyc/notes/my-lil-midlife-crisis/ Sat, 02 Dec 2023 13:49:35 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/my-lil-midlife-crisis/ For the last several months I have been experiencing something, first in the background and now very much in the foreground, and that thing is what many people would describe as a midlife crisis, although it doesn’t feel so much like a crisis mode and is in fact both exciting and exhausting, and fun and terrifying, and lots of other things. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, because I sort of thought I had already had my midlife crisis when I dramatically quit my career in my early 30s to TAKE A PRINCIPLED STAND and CHANGE THE WORLD and that from then on I would be sailing off into the sunset. https://kwon.nyc/notes/seven-sandwiches/ Sat, 28 Oct 2023 09:52:57 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/seven-sandwiches/ I love sandwiches. Below are some of my favorites and why. First, a few constraints I will impose to keep it to a reasonable number of sandwiches: these are limited to New York (not that I haven’t had amazing sandwiches elsewhere), sandwiches I’ve had at least 3 times, excluding burgers (are burgers sandwiches?), excluding falafel sandwiches (not that I don’t love them but I can’t pick a favorite spot and also then we get into wrap territory which is going to introduce too much scope creep), and excluding chain restaurants (not that I won’t crush a Subway or Potbelly sandwich if the mood strikes me). https://kwon.nyc/notes/internet-is-fun/ Sun, 17 Sep 2023 21:02:50 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/internet-is-fun/ I made this: The internet used to be fun I feel like more people these days are starting to reject the notion that the internet is made up of Big Websites that represent Big Companies that are trying to take either the attention or the money of their visitors while adding minimal value to the lives and well-being of those visitors. Because a lot of us remember when the internet was mostly just fun, and the good parts of the old internet were by and large created by real individual humans who had no motives other than to explore the internet and just put stuff out there that was interesting and fun and random. https://kwon.nyc/notes/comfort-food/ Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:05:25 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/comfort-food/ One of the main reasons why I would find it hard to leave New York is that I have grown accustomed to having what feels like infinite food options and over the years have cultivated my list of good food spots in the city down to a tee. “Good” is a super subjective designation, especially for food. It can also be a sensitive and sometimes classist thing to talk about good food, so I would start by saying that I do not consider myself a foodie (even though objectively speaking I do think about food a lot and talk about it a lot and probably definitely spend an embarrassingly disproportionate amount of my disposable income on food because I genuinely enjoy eating so much). https://kwon.nyc/notes/pushing-pixels/ Fri, 21 Jul 2023 07:46:59 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/pushing-pixels/ I made some minor CSS tweaks on mostly spacing here that have bothered me since the beginning (though not enough to get me to fix them until now, hehe). This is extreme minutiae and probably doesn’t even warrant a note here but I did spend over an hour working on this so I feel like I have to document it. (I woke up at 5 am and couldn’t sleep so I journaled and internetted for a while before deciding to fire up the old cascading stylesheet. https://kwon.nyc/notes/artificially-intelligent-thoughts/ Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:07:23 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/artificially-intelligent-thoughts/ I am reading and hearing a lot of discourse about AI, machine learning, and more specifically, ChatGPT. It seems like a lot of people have a lot of opinions and things to say, and, like ChatGPT itself, they seem to be often wrong but never in doubt1. From what I can tell it seems like a lot of it is noise (generally when people make blanket statements about AI being bad and dangerous) but there is some real signal (generally when people use more precise verbiage, detailed use cases, and less sensationalized/more nuanced thoughts and conclusions such as potential for bias at a large scale with large language models and generative AI causing harm2). https://kwon.nyc/notes/optimize/ Fri, 30 Jun 2023 23:06:33 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/optimize/ After I quit medicine and went corporate (as corporate as tech startups can be, which I guess depends on your vantage point; for me it was and is extremely corporate coming from doctoring), I got really into it and became particularly fascinated to learn how business leaders operate and spend their time (at work and in life) in order to be the most efficient and effective they can be. I guess a lot of people who came up in corporate work (and maybe the culture at large which is often dictated by creatives who may pooh-pooh the corporate life) think MASSIVE EYEROLL when they hear what the latest tech bro thinkboi has to say about optimizing their life and their time, but I actually found it pretty refreshing that in business a spade is called a spade and that spade is a dollar and nobody pretends that we aren’t trying to make money. https://kwon.nyc/notes/in-between-moments/ Tue, 23 May 2023 08:35:29 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/in-between-moments/ In addition to my attention span, another pandemic-related loss not immediately obvious to me (probably because I was too worried about all the other losses, like the human lives, and the general erosion of mental health, and the ability to pretend that the institutions holding up our society would be able to take care of our most vulnerable), which I am only now realizing, has been the in-between moments. The 30 minutes between leaving work and meeting up with a friend for drinks is an in-between moment. https://kwon.nyc/notes/chinatown-breakfast/ Tue, 16 May 2023 07:50:55 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/chinatown-breakfast/ When we lived in Tribeca, I could walk to Chinatown for breakfast. In general I am a morning person who avoids crowds and noise where possible1, so I especially enjoyed being in the usually crowded and noisy neighborhood when it was on the quieter side with mostly just the residents of the neighborhood out and about, getting ready to open shops and stands and whatnot. You can get a great breakfast—you can get great food at any meal or snacktime—which is too often classified as “cheap eats” just because the prices are generally very reasonable (which feels pretty reductive, and dismissive of the skill required to consistently make a perfect soup dumpling or pumpkin bun or hand-pulled noodles or what have you). https://kwon.nyc/notes/lo-fi-changelog/ Thu, 27 Apr 2023 07:38:45 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/lo-fi-changelog/ I made a changelog. This was a fun little morning project for me. I’ve seen others do a thing where the changelog is simply a list of all commit messages in reverse chronological order, so I decided to try it. With any “small” coding project, I find that I generally grossly underestimate the time it will take to accomplish a seemingly simple thing, but I learn a lot and also have fun with all the side quests. https://kwon.nyc/notes/logging-tv/ Sat, 22 Apr 2023 07:54:17 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/logging-tv/ One of the many open tabs in the browser of my mind is to find an effective way to track the television shows I watch. Unlike tracking books read or movies watched or music listened to, for which there are several good options for products to use1, I haven’t been able to find a good product for it. When I was on the internet in what could be considered my first act (a. https://kwon.nyc/notes/unpolished/ Sat, 18 Mar 2023 10:36:58 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/unpolished/ when visiting my parents a few weeks ago, i picked up one of the books on my mom’s bookshelf, the first of barack obama’s presidential memoirs. i started reading it, but it was kind of hefty and i was only going to be there for a week and didn’t want to start a book i couldn’t finish, so i put it down and picked up another one instead (which, turns out i couldn’t finish that one, either, so maybe i didn’t have to abandon the obama book). https://kwon.nyc/notes/liminal/ Tue, 14 Mar 2023 21:14:39 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/liminal/ Sometimes I walk around and do other things while brushing my teeth (which I know I’m probably not supposed to do but I do it anyway, like using Q-tips to clean my ears) and the other night I was winding down for the evening, brushing my teeth and zoning out while walking around the apartment and I noticed someone1 had left the light on in my home office and it kinda looked like a liminal space: https://kwon.nyc/notes/chili-oil/ Thu, 09 Feb 2023 08:25:29 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/chili-oil/ During the darkest parts of pandemic lockdown there was not a lot to do or look forward to so I put a lot of time and energy into making elaborate meals entirely from scratch. (It’s on my neverending to-do list for this website to make some sort of photo gallery of all those meals for posterity, but for now here we are.) Now that I have settled into a new(ish) normal(ish), where thankfully there are other things with which to occupy my time than food prep, I have become a bit more of a utilitarian eater, in that I am less concerned with ✨ thoughtful complex flavorful meals that are time-consuming to prepare ✨ and instead more concerned with 🤜 getting sustenance into my gastrointestinal system 🤛. https://kwon.nyc/notes/2022-part-2/ Sat, 31 Dec 2022 09:40:41 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/2022-part-2/ As promised, here’s the second part of my year in review. To recap: I audited where I spent my time (loosely) and where I spent my money (incredibly precisely) this past year, in an effort to understand what I really value and to be more mindful and aware of where I’m spending these limited resources. First, the nondiscretionary chunks of my income go towards taxes, student loan payments, and rent (in descending order of relative amounts). https://kwon.nyc/notes/2022/ Fri, 30 Dec 2022 14:55:39 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/2022/ Note: if you have published a similar 2022 in review on your site, I would love to see it! You can email me a link at kwon(at)fastmail(dot)com. How did 2022 go? All things told, it was… a year. In reflecting on how to reflect on this past year (I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I am an overthinker, particularly when it comes to writing things here), I had trouble relying on recall for notable events and accomplishments. https://kwon.nyc/notes/re-re-reading/ Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:21:08 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/re-re-reading/ Lately I feel that more often I’d rather re-read a book I’ve already read before (and enjoyed) than pick up a new one. Maybe it’s a form of risk aversion (I don’t know if I’m going to like a new book, so I’d rather read an old one). Maybe it’s something that comes with aging. I’ve always loved reading books, since I was a kid and my parents would take me to the library and every single time I would check out the maximum number of books (thirty)1, read them all, return them within the two-week checkout period, and check out another 30. https://kwon.nyc/notes/outdoors/ Sun, 27 Nov 2022 22:31:46 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/outdoors/ I spent some time in the Bay Area this past week and did a vigorous hike (among other things). I was made to believe it would be more of a “nature walk” but this one, Mission Peak, had a steep grade and full exposure to the elements, and ended up being about 3.5 hours and close to 30,000 steps. I haven’t challenged myself physically like that in a long time so I was pleasantly surprised that I survived. https://kwon.nyc/notes/covid-the-sequel/ Sun, 30 Oct 2022 12:21:13 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/covid-the-sequel/ Well, Covid got me again. I’m recovering from a second bout after having had it in April 2020. That feels like a different era of fear and confusion—testing was nonexistent, we were running out of toilet paper and Tylenol, and the general guidance was to isolate but go to the emergency room if you were really sick but to call ahead and wear a mask and also if you were sick but not sick sick you should call your doctor (and you better know the difference between sick sick and sick and you better have a pulse oximeter at home, what do you mean you don’t have a pulse oximeter at home? https://kwon.nyc/notes/noise/ Sun, 04 Sep 2022 09:30:41 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/noise/ I’m getting worn down by all the digital noise. By digital noise I mean the constant barrage of alerts, notifications, pings, email subscriptions I didn’t sign up for, email subscriptions I DID sign up for but regret doing so, all the inputs that come through my connected devices. Sometimes I secretly wish I could be one of those people who moves off the grid, abandons the smartphone, deletes all social media, and lives a quiet minimalist life in the woods. https://kwon.nyc/notes/language/ Mon, 15 Aug 2022 08:30:29 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/language/ Several years ago, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City made a major change that affected every subway and bus ride overnight, but not many people noticed. What happened? Announcers were trained to avoid using gendered language, such as “Ladies and gentlemen,” and instead use greetings like “Attention passengers” or “Good morning everyone” prior to making an announcement. Okay, so it wasn’t earth-shattering. But I thought it was a great example of a small, easy, tangible way to be more inclusive, without being overly fussy or political about it. https://kwon.nyc/notes/grey-matters/ Fri, 22 Jul 2022 07:55:22 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/grey-matters/ I read that Noah Grey, the creator of the blogging software Greymatter, recently resurfaced on the internet because he was losing his home to foreclosure and had set up a GoFundMe. I went into a little bit of a rabbit hole reading about Noah and what he had been up to, and it made me quite nostalgic. My first blog, circa 2001, was built with Greymatter. The internet was different back then (she says, rocking gently in her rocking chair on the porch, occasionally pausing to yell at children to get off her lawn). https://kwon.nyc/notes/intelligent-art/ Sun, 10 Jul 2022 10:33:34 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/intelligent-art/ I signed up as a beta user for an AI art generator that uses keywords (text) to create images. The first image I asked it to make was one using the keywords korean queer mermaid liminal space and these are the four options it generated: Four queer Korean mermaids, drawn by a machine (generated by Midjourney) It’s pretty amazing that a computer made these images, and that is obviously a marvel and an incredible feat of technology, although if you look closely you can see where it still needs a little bit of work (for example, in the bottom right panel the face is fairly well done, but I’m not sure what’s happening with the body or why the tail is detached, and the bottom left very much seems like the generator phoned it in). https://kwon.nyc/notes/cooperate/ Thu, 07 Jul 2022 09:19:00 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/cooperate/ We joined the food co-op. I worked my first shift the other night (after work work). You choose from available shifts and sign up for the kind of work you might want to do. I chose cleaning. I had been somewhat apprehensive about working the shift, not because it was work, or even that it was work I wasn’t willing to do or anything, but moreso that it was a New Thing to do and it had been a while since I had done a New Thing. https://kwon.nyc/notes/coffee/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:20:35 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/coffee/ Coffee is so good. In addition to being physiologically and emotionally dependent on caffeine, I genuinely enjoy coffee. I have accumulated too many coffeemaking implements over the years, including but not limited to a French press, burr grinder, espresso machine, pourover cone, cold brew system, and probably others I’m forgetting that I use less frequently and are collecting dust in a cabinet. I started drinking coffee in college, mainly out of curiosity—I had a friend who said they couldn’t function without coffee, though I perceived them as a very functional person, and I thought, “hey, college is the time when you experiment with drugs, right? https://kwon.nyc/notes/summer-ride/ Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:51:55 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/summer-ride/ It’s the good part of summer right now, the part where it’s warm and sunny and the days are long but it hasn’t gotten too humid out. I went on a nice bike ride yesterday morning along a route I used to take years ago when I first moved to Brooklyn that I haven’t done since. Truthfully I have not been riding my bike as much as I used to (and I used to ride it EVERYWHERE). https://kwon.nyc/notes/early-bird/ Wed, 01 Jun 2022 07:01:53 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/early-bird/ I have been doing a Thing™ lately where I let the morning light wake me up instead of an alarm. Currently I am on an approximately two week streak of waking up at sunrise, and because the bedroom faces east, this means I have been waking up around 5:30 am. (Voluntarily!) I wish I were one of those people who could function on 5 or 6 hours of sleep, but alas, somewhat embarrassingly I need a full 8 to 9 in order to really feel rested. https://kwon.nyc/notes/brussels-sprouts/ Fri, 20 May 2022 08:09:03 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/brussels-sprouts/ As an adult I still sometimes have to trick myself into eating my vegetables. I made these roasted 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts yesterday that really did do the trick: 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts Here’s my incredibly imprecise recipe. 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts Brussels sprouts (you could probably do this with carrots also or any vegetable that is good for roasting) Honey (or any kind of sweet nectar—I used maple syrup this time) Lemon (or any kind of citrus/acid) Garlic powder Gochujang Wash your sprouts, cut off the stems, and slice in half the long way (if the bulbous part is a head and the stem is a neck, cut it in a coronal or midline sagittal plane). https://kwon.nyc/notes/flashback/ Wed, 18 May 2022 06:51:54 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/flashback/ This past weekend I met up with a few of my former colleagues from residency for dinner and drinks. It felt a little bit like a meetup with high school friends might feel, if you spent high school removing gallbladders and incising and draining abscesses. (Maybe you did. I don’t know your life.) Having a chance to confront and reflect on my former self in a controlled environment—in this case, a contemporary Mexican restaurant—was not a bad exercise. https://kwon.nyc/notes/tuesday/ Wed, 11 May 2022 07:40:55 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/tuesday/ The cadence of life is a little different now that I live in Brooklyn and work from home. In my 12 years in New York City, I have: lived in Brooklyn and worked in Brooklyn lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan (the worst overall) lived in Manhattan and worked in Manhattan lived in Manhattan and worked from home lived in Brooklyn and worked from home and the one that feels most like not working at all is living in Brooklyn and working from home. https://kwon.nyc/notes/socks/ Thu, 24 Mar 2022 08:58:02 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/socks/ I keep an eye on the news through peripheral vision mostly but I noticed something about the confirmation hearings of the honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson that required my focus: Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s husband No, not the husband. The SOCK: Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s husband’s sock I’m not quite sure what the design is (looks like some kind of illustration of a face), but what I do know is that it is a funky sock. https://kwon.nyc/notes/distracted/ Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:30:24 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/distracted/ RIP to my attention span. The world seems to be opening back up now that we are no longer surging (or are just between surges?), but I wouldn’t say that I feel normal again. Lack of focus has been one of the most pronounced negative effects. For example, I sat down with a cup of coffee and opened up a text editor to write this note about an hour ago and have since abandoned the window no fewer than seven times (see Appendix). https://kwon.nyc/notes/setup/ Sun, 13 Feb 2022 09:07:52 -0500 https://kwon.nyc/notes/setup/ One of the top priorities when moving to Brooklyn was to have more space, particularly to have dedicated workspace. In our previous apartment, my office was a corner of the bedroom, which I was grateful to have, but also over time resentful. I love my work and my job (probably a litle too much), but seeing my workspace as the first thing upon waking and the last before sleep made it hard for my brain to rest. https://kwon.nyc/notes/bike-story/ Mon, 11 Oct 2021 09:23:09 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/bike-story/ TL;DR I made a new page: kwon.nyc/bike In January 2010 I was in my final year of medical school and had some rare free time for several weeks on a light rotation. My Local Bike Shop™ was offering classes on how to build a bike, so I enrolled and learned a lot about bike parts and bike maintenance. (Oddly enough, we didn’t actually build bikes.) Over the next few years I started building up a track bike, slowly amassing parts from my travels, getting the naked frame painted and framesaved, et cetera. https://kwon.nyc/notes/power-moves/ Tue, 13 Jul 2021 11:28:34 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/power-moves/ Yesterday one of my colleagues in a (virtual) meeting reportedly picked up a canister of coarse sea salt, announced “I’m just snacking,” and proceeded to eat the salt, which confused and maybe frightened the other meeting attendees. It reminded me of the time I was rounding with my interns and medical students in the recovery room after scrubbing out of a long case and I was hungry so I pulled an apple out of my white coat pocket, ate most of it, noticed that there weren’t any trash cans close by, and so I ate the core and seeds as well and then deposited the stem in the breast pocket of my white coat to discard later. https://kwon.nyc/notes/newyorkiversary/ Wed, 23 Jun 2021 17:06:37 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/newyorkiversary/ June 2021 marks my eleventh year in New York City. I wasn’t supposed to be here this long. The Plan™ was never to stay in New York for this long. The Plan™ was to come here for five years to learn how to be a surgeon, then go back to Chicago and be a surgeon and live happily ever after. When I was younger, I didn’t think that carefully about my future, which is kind of terrifying to think about now, how I made decisions about my life without really thinking about them. https://kwon.nyc/notes/why-i-quit-medicine/ Tue, 26 Apr 2016 22:02:56 -0400 https://kwon.nyc/notes/why-i-quit-medicine/ As some of you have heard, I recently resigned from surgical residency, and am leaving clinical medicine. Ten years ago, I decided to be a doctor. It was a decision that made perfect sense at the time: I wanted to help people who were suffering, and I was fortunate to have the ability and resources to gain entry into medical school. I wasn’t sure which specialty would be my calling, but shortly after starting my clinical rotations I fell in love with surgery.