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2025-06-02 17:32:44

You know what it is. That conversation you've been rehearsing in your head for three months but never having. The project that makes your chest tight when you think about starting it. The email sitting in your drafts folder, growing heavier with each day you leave it unsent.

Your body knows before your mind catches up. There's a particular quality of avoidance that feels different from regular procrastination — it's more like watching yourself walk around a hole in the ground, pretending it's not there while your entire route gets shaped by where you refuse to step.

We become very sophisticated about our resistance. We dress it up as "not the right time" or "waiting for clarity" or "needing more preparation". We build elaborate philosophical frameworks around why we shouldn't rush into things. We train as connoisseurs of perfect conditions that will never arrive.

But resistance isn't a wall to be knocked down or a problem to be solved. It's information. It's your psyche pointing directly at the place where you've decided you end and something else begins. It's the exact spot where you're most invested in staying who you think you are.

The invitation isn’t to become fearless — that’s another performance — it’s to get curious about what you’re protecting by staying afraid. What identity are you maintaining by not touching this thing? What story about yourself gets to stay intact as long as you keep circling?

Most of what we resist doing holds grief just beneath the surface. We're mourning the version of ourselves that gets to remain small and safe and uncomplicated. We're grieving the luxury of not knowing what we're capable of. That grief doesn’t mean stop — it just means something old in you is being asked to end.

Here's what's strange: the thing you're avoiding isn't usually as difficult as the elaborate system you've built around it. The email doesn't get longer the more you wait to write it. The conversation you've been dreading takes fifteen minutes. The project that feels impossible has a first step that takes an hour.

Your resistance has its own ecology. It feeds on distance and abstraction. It grows stronger when you think about it. In reality, it’s more like a shadow — one that only exists when you’re not looking directly at it.

So turn around the way you might approach a spooked animal — curious, present, not trying to fix or conquer anything.

What happens when you move one step closer? Not to the outcome, not to having it handled or completed or resolved, but to the actual sensation of being in proximity to this thing you've been avoiding? What happens when you let yourself feel the fear without immediately strategising your way out of it?

This isn't about forcing yourself through something or muscling past discomfort. This is about discovering that you can be afraid and still show up. You can be uncertain and still take a step. You can feel like you're about to fall apart and still send the email, have the conversation, start the thing.

The change isn't in the doing — it's in being willing to be transformed by it. It's in letting yourself discover that you're bigger than you thought, stranger than you imagined, more resilient than your protective mechanisms would have you believe.

Your resistance isn't your enemy. It’s the trembling before your next becoming. It's the guardian at the threshold, not there to keep you out but to make sure you're serious about crossing.

What you're avoiding isn't just a task or a conversation or a project. It’s the version of you that stops waiting to be more ready than this. It's the end of the story where you're too afraid to find out what happens next

2025-06-02 10:11:00

Went to go see The Queen of Spades this week and liked it more than I expected. Though I'm not sure why that's a surprise because of course seeing and hearing the people sing live with subtitles is better than listening to it on Spotify and following along with the libretto. I will say that (i) because the stage is so deep, if you sit off to the side, you'll miss out on a lot of the action, especially because there's a huge picture frame around the stage the entire time; and (ii) the play is unbelievably long. Three and a half hours plus a half hour intermission meant I got home later than V who went to an EDM concert the same night. By Act III Hermann was not the only person seeing things; the set swam around in my vision and I had to work hard to keep from nodding off.

All that said, it was my first time sitting in the orchestra at the Met, and my, what a treat it is to actually be able to see the performers' faces! The costume and set design was also incredibly detailed, a feast for the eyes.

A good number of people sitting around me chattered in Russian during the intermission. When I went to go see Nobuyuki Tsujii I also noticed that a good deal of my fellow concertgoers were Japanese too. The nationality of a performer has never been a draw to me, and the language of an opera even less so (at least, the language being one I can understand), but I guess you'd probably be able to appreciate it more if you spoke Russian? I just didn't expect it to make that big a difference on the people going.

I sat next to a grandpa with his grandson in tow who told me he was 88 and had been going to the opera since the 60s. Eighty-eight years old! I wish my grandparents could live that long. He recommended going to see Aida and one more I forget. Don Giovanni? Barber of Seville? Ah well, it's not like I don't have enough I already have my eye on next season. Turandot, Madama Butterfly, La Traviata, Carmen... The only limit is my (very limited) budget.

*   *   *

I took V to Jersey to show him around today. We ate our way through Journal Square, which has so many Indian restaurants and stores people refer to it as India Square. A shame it's so far; I have so much more to learn about Indian cuisine.

Gur rasmalai (left) and raj kachora chaat (right) from Mithaas

Pav bhaji from Honest; this place is too expensive, I think

Palabok from Little Quiapo. First time! The sauce reminds me of egg drop soup.

Got serious decision paralysis at Philippine Bread House. Look at it all! If anyone has recommendations for Filipino pastries beyond pandesal and ensaymada, please send them my way.

One of my gripes about Jersey is that it can be a little hard to get around. PATH has limited reach and the NJ Transit buses require you to buy tickets on the app beforehand. To make the trip from Journal Square to Hoboken go by more quickly we Citibiked. I think this was my first time taking one in New York (er, the NY metropolitan area), and my first time on a bike in a long while, and although it is incredibly scary, even in the relatively cycling-friendly Hoboken streets, it's so fun to feel the breeze in your face, and so quick too. I am now mulling getting a membership for myself.

V kept making fun of me for biking slowly. I like to do most things slowly — what's the rush? — especially if they come with a breeze and a view, though the main reason is that I was scared out of my mind. Scared of getting clipped by a car trying to pass me and scared of biking headfirst into an door opening abruptly on a parked car. So much can go wrong on the roads, and without helmets the whole ride felt like gambling with my life. Not that V cared: he sped down dark underpasses and around blind turns without so much as tapping the brakes. Whoever made us must have forgotten to give him the ability to detect danger and given me a double dose instead. With me in tow it took him twice as long to get anywhere.

This is not something I haven't known. When we used to play Halo together V would always rush in headfirst with no regards for his (character's) well-being while I stayed behind cautiously formulating a plan that minimized risk. It's just intriguing to me that someone who shares almost all my DNA and was raised by the same people at roughly the same time as me can be so, so different.

Sidenote about the New Jersey streets: even though they are better than New York streets, most of the time in Hoboken you're still sharing the road with other cars and nothing in between. On Washington St cyclists are sandwiched between rows of parked cars and moving traffic, which is scary because you can get hit from pretty much anywhere. In Jersey City I saw a few protected bike lanes separated from the road by barriers — an improvement, to be sure — but those are few and far between, and the cars on those roads are going much faster.

In Hoboken I paid Torna's a visit since they're closing in July. Their Sicilian with sauce is far from my favorite slice of pizza but it saddens me to think that they'll be closing the shop after more than 60 years in business. The owners are nice and the place is always a pleasure to visit. The inside of the store is so quiet and still I imagine it still holds some of the past between its walls.

2025-06-02 01:47:00

I came across a post on Bear recently, discussing male loneliness. The argument was that men are lonely because women are now “whole” and that men hate women for it. And I just… don’t think so.

That kind of take might come from a place of trying to be thoughtful, but honestly? It misses the mark. Badly. It turns male loneliness into a reactionary punishment: “Women healed and now men are mad and alone.” That’s not healing, that’s polished misandry dressed up as pseudo-feminist commentary. And more importantly, it flattens an entire gender’s experience into one bland stereotype.

The biggest problem? It erases queer men completely. As if we don’t exist in this conversation. As if male loneliness is a straight issue caused by straight relationships falling apart. But some of the loneliest people I know are queer men, disconnected from straight male bonding and often left on the margins of queer spaces that don’t reflect us. Where do we fit in these “he’s just bitter because women are thriving” narratives?

We’re not lonely because women evolved. We’re lonely because a lot of us, queer, trans, neurodivergent men especially, were taught not to ask for help, not to show softness, not to cry or confide or lean on anyone. We were never taught where to place our anger. We’ve grown up with emotional suppression baked into us, watching peer closeness rot into competition, or worse, silence.

And when we do try to talk about it? Takes like these get platformed. Takes that aren’t about fixing it, but blaming men for their own isolation. And sure, some men absolutely need to unlearn toxic behavior and misogyny. But others are quietly dying under the weight of isolation and loneliness. And that deserves more than a smug paragraph about how women became whole and left the rest of the world behind.

I believe in healing. But real healing doesn’t turn pain into superiority. If your version of feminism requires you to throw men under the bus, you haven’t actually escaped patriarchy you’re just climbing on top of it and upholding the very thing you seek to destroy.

2025-06-02 01:00:00

[Week of May 25, 2025]
I recommend 50 ways to leave your lover by Paul Simon in the background

Data

Flat white coffees: 2

Eggs eaten: 0

Books: 0 Pages read: 40: S(0) M(0) T(17) W(0) T(0) F(23) S(0)

Chicken in meals: 4

Cafe locations: 2 old timers visited twice each, 1 cakery

Momos eaten: 11 pieces

Life

I have been confused if I am tired or lazy.

It is interesting, the act of reflecting life here. I feel so inconsequential, and yet when I sit down to it, I find my routine life very precious. Maybe this is why I am drawn to works of art that carefully showcase the beauty in ordinary lives. With the right people, in the right ways to spend time, it could be extraordinary. Maybe not. Ask me in 30 years.

On a consequential morning, I witnessed a scene that looked like it was captured from a nature documentary. It was cloudy with signs of rainfall. I was at a government building which I cannot name or locate on a map. My suffering in wandering around a government complex was minimal due to the improved weather. I came across an unattended child. Bare bottommed and smiling face, I watched the child wander the same courtyard where I was. He was perhaps no bigger than 3 years old, or was she 2 years old? I do not have the talent to guess a child's age by merely looking at them. I opted to believe that the mother was close enough and the child, one in a government complex, would certainly not be lost. I walked. The baby/child walked. And then came three dogs. Two of them continued to behave as we expect dogs to, sweet enough and eager to please. They were prancing, jolly. One dog however, who originally was frolicking with his two mates saw the baby by themselves. Suddenly, with no prompting from me or the baby, that dog changed its posture. The dog lowered its gaze and stance and started moving towards the baby, teeth bared, growling. In moments, two feet became inches. I waited for my instinct to kick in, "save the child". It felt inadequate. Confusion was prominent. But my reliable vocal cords felt warmer. I screamed at the dog, finger pointing, shaking, an enraged look in my eyes. I was an ape, I was a mother, I was a queen! I had braced myself for an attack, expecting his attention to shift to me in revenge for taking away his... breakfast? He looked at me and bounced back, acknowledging the alpha in me. Everyone dispersed and the courtyard returned to its normalcy. My partner Ru got his learner's license, the baby was safe, the mother still missing, the dogs left us alone, everything was well.

I told my friend Sm in the most complex way that I could help her if she accidentally killed her spouse. I was only trying to show her my support to present a fake alibi to the police. I think she is still reeling from my projected image of such an "oopsie" from her.

The app How We Feel, I have slowed down on it. This is unsurprising as I have been feeling alright. I am busy, I am motivated, and my emotional recollection is often non-existent when I am feeling even slightly better than alright.

My hair needs oiling. I have not oiled it yet.

Took my parents out for drinking with Ru, and we all got tipsy. I think my father is enjoying the freedom of finding drinking buddies in his children, old and new, the back to back ordering of beer jugs and "cheers" between him and Ru. He was also indulging in a lot of chilli chicken and I think that contributed to 50% of his happiness.

Writing for Nerds cohort, an online group activity for 4 weeks, is what I have joined to be kind to my future-writer-self. Here everyday we have tasks related to developing the writing muscle and we are to spend 15 minutes to do them. I began the week with enthusiasm and energy, but it dissipated away as the weekend drew closer. I am now setting sights on tomorrow's agenda, a new hope for new energy.

The week led me to this piece that I have revisited many times.

I asked a friend a simple question about happiness and got an abrupt reaction. We recovered soon but I have pondered since, how do we go from a new friendship, a warm friendship to a loving friendship without going back and forth on boundaries?

My friend Noo went off the grid for a few days, and I held back the urge to think of worst case scenarios and reprimanding her in any way for being unreachable. I managed my anxiety, I did not feed my fear, and she had a lovely time.

By Saturday I was mentally depleted, and did not have a single original thought. I could not even decide on what movie to watch.

I am feeling a new discomfort at revisiting my history, to see it in jokes or hear it mentioned to a person I meet. Ru said some lovely words to me about our histories and blame, on how subconsciously people will try to find a responsibility or rationale in the person who stayed, in the person who took the hurt. And he said, "Don't let that win."

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don't need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Oh, you hop on the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

• 50 ways to leave your loves, from Paul Simon (1976)

On writing itself

I am finding it bizarre to start my weekly recollection from a Sunday. I have never treated a week to be anything other than starting at Monday morning and ending on Sunday night. And this look is not fitting into my mode of reflection. This change is feeling like wearing another skin. It is a crisis of structure. It has to be challenged

This week, for the first time in a long time, I got my first organic feedback from a stranger on the internet on a piece I wrote in More Hot Sauce. I love love and love the love I get from friends and family but it is a whole different feeling to have that validation from a stranger. The internet can be a ruthless place, ignoring most individuals who pour their desires on Tumblr or journals on Substack. Sometimes a person shares the right link to a receiving friend, and they pass on to another, and you get a comment that feels like finding a gold nugget on a forest floor. She found my words relatable. It felt like getting wind in the sails of a boat standstill; You catch the draft, get swept up in the wind and you sail further into the sea.

It also stands to be true that I clearly do not trust a word my friends and well wishers say. I blame everybody for this, I have no spine. I blame sad love songs. I blame The National. I blame the lack of movies on friendships. I blame the unreliable fortune tellers. I blame my parents for not giving me a dog when I was young.

I cannot get over the fact that most sentences I write here begin with "I". I must make my my agenda for next week to pursue alternate sentence structures.

Culture consumption

The two books I have nursed this week are The God of Small Things and The Phantom Plague. Through the entire week I easily put them down to pursue television.

Rh capitalised on a night I was deeply exhausted, and continually said "watch Ginny and Georgia watch Ginny and Georgia why won't you watch Ginny and Georgia just tell me if you are never going to watch Ginny and Georgia" so I watched Ginny and Georgia. I can see that I am at the age bracket where the teenage drama does not appeal to me, and I fast forward those scenes to get to any of the other characters. Overall it has been pleasant so far and I am eager to see why Rh likes it as much as she does.

My currently reading shelf stands at a whooping 18 books. Someone shame me for this, come on.

May you get quality sleep and a flying kiss that makes you smile,

Nats

2025-06-01 16:13:41

i was a kid during the 90s through 2000s but i didn't get my first computer until the 2000s. i am no susan kare nor picasso but i developed some visual design sensibilities, during high school i made some printed media artifacts (think posters, book covers, calendars, etc.) that i no longer have copy of (just trust me, okay?).

interface rules were simple and clear, even across different platforms! checkboxes meant you could pick multiple things. radio buttons meant you picked one. users knew what to expect, and everything just worked.

after starting computer science studies in 2014 while doing on and off graphic design gigs, i'm watching in horror as a new wave of ui designers treats decades of established ui conventions like mere suggestions, even today.

the great confusion

i regularly encounter:

• radio buttons where users should be able to select multiple options
• checkboxes used for simple yes/no choices
• custom switches replacing everything because the originals "look outdated"
• complete confusion about when to use what

this confusion is part of a bigger problem. remember when you could tell what was clickable just by looking at it? when buttons looked like buttons and links were obviously links? when form fields actually looked like places where you could type?

don't tell me now everything should blend together. buttons look like decorative text. links are indistinguishable from labels. form inputs are invisible until you accidentally hover over them. we've traded clear communication for sleek aesthetics, and users are paying the price.

the real cost

this isn't just about aesthetics. breaking established patterns has consequences:

• users make more mistakes when interfaces don't behave as expected
• people spend mental energy figuring out your interface instead of accomplishing their goals
• accessibility suffers when you abandon tried-and-true patterns
• trust erodes when users can't predict how things will work

back to basics

"but we're innovating! we're creating new patterns!"

here's the thing: real innovation builds on understanding, not ignorance. the designers who established these conventions weren't working in a vacuum. they tested and refined these patterns based on how people actually behave.

i'm not advocating for design stagnation. interfaces should evolve. but evolution should build on understanding what worked and why, not blind rejection of everything that came before.

before you replace a standard element with something "more modern," ask yourself: does this actually help users, or does it just look trendy? will people immediately understand what it does, or will they have to learn your special system?

recommended readings

• about face by alan cooper
• don't make me think by steve krug
• the design of everyday things by don norman

2025-06-01 08:31:00

Earlier this month, I graduated from college. An even shorter time ago, I started a full-time job. It's not really a permanent thing, considering that I'm not planning to stay in this country for long and this job is to fund my trans-continental relocation --- but it has all the trappings of one, and I'm pretending to everyone at the office that it is one.

It… sucks. By the time I get home, I'm exhausted, and factoring in the time it takes to commute, eat breakfast and dinner, etc., I only have four hours to myself at the end of each day. The project I've been assigned to do is terrible, my coworker who'd previously worked on it spent an hour telling me about its fundamental, intractable problems, and how much he hated working on it. It's something that will make things shittier for anyone trying to buy from this company.

Is this just what the adult world is like? Your entire life, you wake up and spend the entire day sitting at a desk working on meaningless tasks that don't make the world better, and when you get home you think "finally, my time is mine" but you're too tired to do anything that feels meaningful or make any progress towards your true goals?

I take comfort in knowing that, secretly, this isn't a permanent state of affairs – working at this particular company, that is. And yet --- will it be any different after I move to Germany? The endless monotony, it hasn't even been long at all but already I feel it crushing me. The falseness with which I try (probably unsuccessfully) to act positive when I'm at work, when really I'm stressed and frustrated by my job and anxious about moving to a new country, anxious about the little spare time or energy I have to continue my clandestine job search, worried about how long it will take and how much time I have, what with everything in the US unfolding as rapidly as it is.

Certainly, some of this stress will melt away when I have found and settled into a job in Germany, to be replaced with other migration-specific stress I'm sure. When I move to Germany, I'm definitely planning on giving myself at least a month to set things up and enjoy life a little before I start a job. But in the here and now, this double life is just a lot to maintain. I told many of my college friends of my plans to move to Germany, because I want them to know where to find me. But now that I'm here in the Midwest again I have to carefully control who knows what, to maintain the secret from my employer.

The truth is, I don't even want to be in this industry. I spent four years forcing myself through a bachelor's degree in a field that I hate. I get no joy or satisfaction whatsoever out of software, I was gritting my teeth every minute I spent writing code.

What's more, I've known this. I've known I was in the wrong field for a very long time. It was supposed to be an employable, respectable placeholder until I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life, but that turned out to not happen until halfway through my very last semester.

I just somehow imagined that after I was done with my bachelor's degree, after I had finally made it all the way through college, I would be free. No more midnights in the library, no more fire alarms going off at 3am, no more communal bathrooms with sinks that some drunk person vomited into, no more grade point average determining my future employability to agonize over. It would just be over.

I imagined, somehow, that I would have time to make art.

But instead! Instead, I made the mistake of starting right away. (don't do this, don't ever do this.) I took a week to unpack, to clear out the junk my family had been storing in my unused bedroom, and I started work after that straightaway. And… it sucks.

The thing I always wanted to do was just make art. Have a little studio, maybe in the mountains of Bavaria, and sell paintings, prints, illustrations. Being an artist isn't a real job, I was told at every turn growing up. And yes, I have interacted with a career artist who told the students in my oil painting class that yes all of that is true, that doing this full-time only works if you have a wealthy spouse, good connections, or are just extremely lucky. I'm willing to shelve this dream, and let it stay as a fond fantasy for maybe when I'm old, and have saved enough to just do this instead.

In the meantime, that leaves a "real" career. Law!

In my class on surveillance, the professor described it on the first day as being like a "pre-law" course, and I recalled being glad I'd chosen this course. I had been a child that always liked to read, a high school student who loved philosophy, and for a while I had planned to major in linguistics. I had considered law school as a vague possibility since early on, but I sure as hell didn't want to tie myself down to only being able to work in the US, if I studied US law. Reading and discussing case law in this course settled it. I do want to go to law school --- and it will be in Europe.

When I look back even just on this blog, seeing an essay I wrote in the far-off time of 2023, privacy has always been something I've cared deeply about. In my sophomore year, my university rolled out an invasive "smart lock" app for students to be able to get into our dorms. Students were never consulted, the first I heard of this was when I received an email in the summer that the lock had already been installed on the dorm I would move into. I went to the trouble of reading the app's privacy policy¹ and finding how incredibly invasive the data it harvests is --- by using the app, you accept that it can take your browsing history, precise location, microphone data, and "inferences about your predispositions and intelligence" every time you use the app.²

The app went on to say that they didn't sell user data, but they did give it away for free to whoever they felt like. I was so angry about all of this that I tried to start a petition at my school, but I only convinced one other person to rally to my cause. Gen Z, at least in America, is so used to not having rights in the digital sphere that none of them cared.

So yes, I think law fits in really well with my interests. I care very deeply about my rights not getting exploited, and watching the democratic structures of my home country crumble has really motivated me towards effective ways of fighting large-scale corporate evil rather than just going to protests. No entity should be able to buy out the government of a country and remold it in the image of its own interests. No entity, whether the world's richest man or private corporate donors, should be able to buy out a government, period. The only meaningful weapon against that is law.