2026-01-16 22:16:00
i wanted to try my hand at joining the bear carnival, which i think might be a great exercise in blogging for me! this month's theme is "how i ______", hosted by steven of tanzi media. i thought it'd be fun to share the different ways i brew tea and invite others to join me in celebrating asian tea!
sometime early last year, i attended a local coffee festival with my family. we were there mostly because my brother is an aspiring home barista and wanted to check out different coffeeware and beans. i'm not super huge on coffee so the stall that caught my eye was a small one being run by a friendly looking guy holding a sign that read "come drink tea with me!". i sat down across him with three other people. he started the tea session by introducing gōngfuchá (功夫茶/工夫茶) to us, explaining what the preparation method entails and why it is practiced. he let our small class try three different teas that day: taiwanese duckshit oolong, a laotian green tea, and japanese gyokuro. i've always been a tea person but this was my first deep dive into chinese tea preparation methods and i was immediately obsessed.
when i visited hong kong a couple of months after, i made sure to include a tea class in my itinerary where i was instructed on how to use each piece of a gongfu tea set. ever since then, i've rarely brewed my loose leaf tea any other way.
this is by no means definitive — especially because i'm lacking in some of the fancier equipment, but i did buy a gongfu tea set that had all of the essentials so that is what i will explain.
i like practicing gongfucha because i think it gives me a lot of mileage out of my tea. it's really interesting being able to have the same three grams of tea leaves taste entirely different depending on how many infusions you've done; whereas brewing your tea in one big teapot gives you more of an "average" of the flavor. because of how slow the process is, i also think it gives me more time to wind down and really appreciate or study what i'm drinking :)
as a fan of asian tea, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that i happen to enjoy drinking matcha. matcha has become quite popular lately, though mostly in the form of a latte. don't get me wrong, i enjoy matcha lattes too! i just wish there was a bit more appreciation for drinking usucha (thin tea) and koicha (thick tea) especially because everyone seems to be obsessed with "ceremonial grade" matcha — which doesn't even really exist, mind you.
i think it's more appropriate to categorize matcha quality into culinary grade, usucha grade, and koicha grade. a lot of the matcha influencers seem to recommend for lattes are usucha and koicha grade, which isn't bad, but sometimes not very cost efficient or a good fit. milk severely cuts down flavor. for example, i love yamamasa koyamaen's samidori in lattes but yamamasa koyamaen's more expensive offering shikibu-no-mukashi is dreadful in lattes. its flavor profile is far too mild for milk, where it completely disappears. on its own however, it is delightfully creamy and full of umami. i could go on about the misinformation surrounding matcha but i'm going to cut my rant short and just tell you how i brew it, which is what you came here for.
i don't normally drink my lattes with sweetener, but if you want to use one i think maple syrup or simple syrup pairs the best with matcha. if you want to make your own, either earl grey syrup or banana cinnamon syrup are great choices and easy to make at home! you can replace the milk with water for a matchacano and the matcha powder with hojicha for a hojicha latte by the way! :)
there you go! that's how i brew my tea. i still use a good ol' classic teapot when i need a big batch but that's not too often these days. i do also want to stress that i often tweak my brewing process according to the tea i'm drinking, but what i've written is what i would consider my "standard". i hope this was helpful and informative for anyone looking to try experiencing tea in a new way. i'm no expert but if you have questions (and especially corrections) or just want to chat tea, feel free to contact me!
happy brewing, bear :)
an item used to hold tea before it is poured into tea cups, ensuring that everyone gets the same quality brew!↩
a "tray" where you place all of your teaware during tea preparation. it's meant to catch all of the excess water.↩
fun fact! did you know that whisking tea originated in china during the song dynasty?↩
2026-01-16 19:11:00
I picked up a few more stickers for my laptop from a lovely little shop here in Chiang Mai today.
They had baskets full of them, and me being me, I of course had to check every single one. And there it was. One lone Bear sticker among hundreds of other designs.
Did the person who made it have the Bear blogging platform in mind? Probably not. Maybe it’s a nod to the Bear notes app, some Bear Grylls utility gear, or something completely different.
Who knows. It doesn’t really matter. I know what it means to me, and that’s enough.
The same goes for the Bear blogging platform itself. Some think it’s too simple, some think it’s too complicated, and some absolutely love it. I know why I like it, and that’s all that matters.
Is it the right tool for you? Maybe. Maybe not.
Pick what suits you.
Happy blogging!
2026-01-16 09:34:00
There's kind of an unspoken rule (or maybe it's a spoken rule; probably written often on the internet) to refrain from sharing news of a pregnancy until you've made it past the first trimester. 12 weeks. Anything could happen—miscarriages in the first trimester are extremely common.
Good thing my bear is anonymous 'cause boy, do I need to write about this new unplanned adventure!
I want to tell my family. I'm close with my parents, and not telling them seems like insanity! But I'm prone to miscarriage and I've miscarried before. Un-telling people is a massive burden. So it doesn't feel safe to tell almost anyone. I thought about just telling my sister; my nephew's mother. He's going to have a little cousin! She's not a great secret-keeper, though. No one in my family is... I'm pretty good at keeping secretes when I need to. But TWELVE WEEKS?? Well, I suppose it's only 8.
I found out very early, by typical standards. I'm 4 weeks and 1 day along. Baby is barely implanted. (This measurement seems dumb. I was not pregnant 4 weeks ago. But based on how they measure, that's where I'm at.) I have an Oura ring which predicts my cycle very accurately. It has never been wrong, or even off by a day or two, in the 10 months that I've had it. So when it appeared to be wrong, I thought "probably not, but I'll take a test just to get it off my mind."
When I saw the test was positive, I froze. My husband was upstairs, unaware. I sat there for probably 10 minutes, trying to figure out how I felt. More afraid than joyous, I also felt guilty. I knew how I was supposed to feel, and I wasn't feeling it.
Do I want this? The world is such shit. What happens to my career? How do I tell my husband? What would I even say?
I went with "Hey... You busy?" which we both laughed about later.
We weren't sure right away. We've waffled over the years on whether we want to have kids. There are factors that gave us pause. Are we doing this?
We slept on it. This morning we got up, he went to work and I stayed home sick (actually sick, with COVID of all things). We texted a bit during the day about what direction we were leaning. When he got home, we made the decision together. We're going to be parents, if my body will cooperate. I do want this. My career doesn't have to end. I can still work towards my goals. Together, we'll raise a good kid.
2026-01-15 22:55:38
Ahoy there!
I, and probably you, have seen a lot of these videos of anecdotes from various teachers about how bad Gen Alpha is doing. Lacking basic reading and arithmetic skills, emotional dysregulation, no respect for teachers. The list and gripes go on. It's not hard to see why.
A seeming majority of Gen Alpha kids are born into hyper-stimulating environments, ready access to addictive technology, and being fluent in iPad use before they are forming coherent sentences. It's like the adage of "don't sit too close to the TV or it'll hurt your eyes", except now it's huffing gasoline.
Kids are getting fucked over in a big way. I had a conversation with my mother-in-law who's sister is a teacher and relayed the message from the sister that essentially more affluent districts have more well-behaved kids. To the shock of nobody, kids who grow up in secure environments where at least one guardian is consistently there are growing up more well-behaved (god help you if you mention the numbers 6 and 7 in succession, though).
It shouldn't be a shock to you that metrics of intelligence usually rank higher amongst richer families, that's because they can actually afford the quality education necessary.
Regardless, I am around a lot of early Gen Alpha kids by proxy of my wife having a lot of younger cousins. The interactions are... interesting sometimes.
For example, while I've seen articles floating around about how studies are showing higher levels of technological literacy in Gen Alpha, I gotta call bullshit on that. If by "technological literacy" you mean "basic computer and smart device navigation that even older Xoomers have figured out", then yeah it makes sense. However when it comes to practically anything else, Alpha kids are not great with technology that isn't designed like a Fisher-Price toy. Basic trouble shooting is out the window it seems (this is also a problem of late Zoomers too), and even just messing with settings is foreign to them. I know it's a rather small sample size, but the Gen Alpha kids I know would be lost if you told them to change the background wallpaper on their computer (smartphones and tablets are a no brainer though).
One of the older cousins doesn't even know what a USB is... look, I'm probably gonna sound like an old man here, but how tf do you not know what a USB is? It's not like a floppy drive where it's been outdated for decades at this point, USBs are still very much a current technology.
Again, I'm aware of this small sample size, but the anecdotes seem to be piling up.
Gen Alpha isn't to blame here. It's the people behind the phones recording them having a meltdown because they took the kid's iPad away and posting it online for others to make a spectacle out of that are the problem.
These dolts who evidently haven't taken a breath through their nose a day in their life know that there's a problem, but do fuck all to resolve it. It's the same kinda people who see someone having a seizure in public and their first instinct is to whip out their phones.
That being said, I understand FULLY how tempting it is to just let a kid go wild on a TV or something because you're mentally dead and exhausted from the never-ending demand of neo-liberal capitalism. My wife and I are guilty of this too, we let our daughter watch Wiggles on the TV.
However, I do think there is a STARK contrast between a curated show from the 90s-00s and a show like Cocomelon that is designed to be like heroin for babies. I walked in on my MIL and daughter watching Cocomelon together one time, and it was jarring seeing how, for one, low effort the animation and songs are, and two, how stimulating this show is, between the incredibly saturated colors to the jump cuts every second. What I learned was that this show uses focus groups of children to make it so there is not a break in the concentration. If a kid shifts his eyes away from the screen, the scene gets edited to address that.
Companies are literally designing everything for addiction these days. Trying to get you hooked on whatever they can profit off of as early in your development as possible.
There are also parents, like another one of my wife's aunts, who is completely incompetent at raising her kids. Both kids have severe speech impediments one kinda talks with a slurred speech and the other is borderline incomprehensible. The latter is in middle school and can barely articulate their words. It's really sad. A lot of members of the family basically tell her to get her kids into speech therapy, but she won't because it "overwhelms her"... how about put your fucking big girl pants on, get the fuck over yourself, and be a fucking MOTHER you quarter-wit. The older sister recently crashed her step-dad's truck trying to pick up her boyfriend and is likely going to face getting barred from having a license until she's 18. The rest of the family is basically telling the aunt "you have nobody to blame but yourself". If you think the aunt is negligent, their bio-dad is even worse. It just kinda reminds me of the book Careless People, and reminds me of the dad who slowed down, whilst driving their actively bleeding-out daughter to the hospital, to look out for the fish in a river. I digress, this wasn't meant to be a takedown of my gripes with my wife's aunt, just kinda had to get that out.
All this being said, I do have some hope though for Gen Alpha...
A growing number of parents ARE becoming aware of how fucked technology has become for kids. One of my wife's aunt and uncle approached me for advice on dumb phones because they know I use it and want to have their kids use a dumb phone to reduce screen time.
I do see kids hanging out outside with their friends, playing sports, etc.
During Halloween 2025, I saw that kids are still out there. They're playing, making friends, trick-or-treating isn't dead even among some of the younger teenagers. It gave me a hopeful feeling that maybe we can do something about this. Maybe Gen Alpha isn't screwed.
I think the shift is going to come from these older generations who recognize the damage of social media and even how technology is designed these days and try to reverse course. I see this shift in Zoomer's who are becoming parents. A lot of them seem to share the same sentiment as me when it comes to technology.
I think setting age-appropriate boundaries with technology is the right way to go. Limiting screen time, curating the entertainment so it's not just an algorithm determining what our kids watch, hell just BEING present with your kid is like 99% of the battle.
I understand that can be difficult, especially if you and your spouse work full time jobs (or multiple jobs), but we owe it to our kids to try. It won't be easy, hell parenting is probably one of the hardest things I've had to do, and I'm not even the primary parent, but we put our kids into this world, we do them a disservice doing anything less than giving them the best chance at succeeding in this world.
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I'm bored as hell at work. I came in early enough and there's barely anyone here, and I just wanna go home to my wife and daughter who are both sick now. They were up since 3:30am. Thankfully, the perk of living with my MIL is she came down to help my wife get a little rest and watch our daughter. I fucking hate this place and the obtuse boomers in charge who ushered in the RTO mandate. They know people are pissed, but they're hoping it goes away. I hope it doesn't. Just gotta get through this shit until I either graduate from my Clinical Social Worker program, or there is an opportunity that comes around that is too good to pass up.
2026-01-15 22:37:00
not a fan of this topic being my first post for the year, but it feels timely for me right now.
when i lost my fully work from home job last year, the one thing i dreaded was potentially having to settle for something i had to leave the house for. during the first few weeks of the job hunt, i had intentionally ignored and scrolled past job postings that required in-office work. i even skipped past hybrid offerings.
of course, then i started thinking about not making money and how much that sucks for me, g, and our cats.
so i tried applying to office gigs and hybrid options. this was towards the end of my job search, and i was already feeling pretty down in the dumps, so i had honestly applied thinking that they were going to turn me down anyway.
i ended up getting two offers in a week. i had never felt so anxious about my indecision. two, almost three months, of rejections and no replies and no emails, and suddenly i had to choose between two jobs: one that was fully work from home like my old one but with almost double the pay, or a hybrid setup paying a lot less than the first.
i remember being back and forth between the two for a whole week. one wanted me to respond as soon as possible, while the other was bureaucratic and had a whole process and wanted me to wait.
in an ideal world, i would've gone for that fully work from home offering. the higher pay and the instant onboarding were exactly what i needed after three months of depressing, desperate job hunting. it would've made perfect sense.
but i chose to go with the hybrid one. the office is really far from where i live and i hate having to leave the house for so long. knowing i let go of a much higher offer was also a mental blow i had to push down for a while. but i'm approaching six months of this new job and... i kind of like it?
also, i think i'm kind of superstitious about this, but i think that a job that wants you to start as soon as possible is, based on experience, potentially going to have no problems letting you go as soon as possible too. i don't know. i hate defending bureaucracy, but the personal employment history is proving me right on this one.
anyway, here are some of the reasons i think i like my corporate, office, 9 to 5 desk job:
this was a super late reflection, but i think that i had gotten too comfortable working from home at my old job, that i was often working past work hours, staying up to meet the monthly quota that would earn me the bonus, which wasn't really that much, honestly.
instead, my new job feels like the fatigue from commuting and waking up early on a weekday are but a small compromise for the peace of mind.
i'm sad to report that the bureaucratic, lots of paperwork, company id card on lanyards, type of workplace offers me more stability and doesn't make me as anxious as i was after the old gig. on this blog, i'm always talking about how important money and my financial habits are to me because i didn't grow up with much.
this 9 to 5, even if it makes me feel really tired some days, saves me from that money anxiety. it just feels so boring and normal and... safe. and i kind of like that, having come from the rollercoaster freelancing wilderness.
i like knowing i don't have to worry about how to feed us and the cats. i like that i don't have to worry about losing clients, because my one big client is my Boss or the Company, and as long as i'm useful and they are happy with what i do, then i have that one big client. and i kind of like being a person that has experienced both sides of the employment coin; flexible freelance work from home and structured office desk bureaucracy. it makes me feel superior to others sometimes, but that's just me being crazy, i know.
so, i gave up extreme comfort and "heh heh i am my own boss" for this new 9 to 5 life that feels very foreign to me. and i thought that i would have a hard time and potentially quit within two months.
next month will be my sixth month in, and i haven't had any thoughts of quitting or looking for alternatives so far.
2026-01-15 12:59:00
I've never had a bucket list. I think I used to be the kind of person who would think about writing a bucket list, but nothing more. And back then next thought would be about returning a DVD to the automated rental place that used to be on the SW corner of Pins and Ste. Dominique or some shit.
I think not being a bucket lister ended up being a good thing for me. Having a few things you want to do, places you want to see, or crimes you want to commit (regicide!) before you bite the dust is a good thing, sometimes people come up with goals/dreams before they know who they are and then, later on, they feel tethered to those goals/dreams even when they don't fit anymore. #sunkcostfallacy
That said, I've always wanted to write a book. I did, actually. In 2011 I got a deal to write a book about the Weakerthans. It didn't work out. I didn't like my editor and my editor didn't like me and the publisher had a schedule and I wasn't keeping to it for reasons including severe crushing depression and, also, the fact that my blood was 40% bourbon. The publisher and I went our separate ways, and did so amicably, but for years I felt like a failure for not getting a book in a bookstore. I don't feel like a failure about that anymore. Other things, sure. But not that.
Losing the book deal was the third or fourth bad/bad luck thing to happen over a couple of months in late 2011 and early 2012. If memory serves, it was: got laid off, got dumped, lost a book deal, and... something else, not sure what. Eventually I ended up in the hospital because I went like, three days without sleeping and was seeing spots and hearing, uh, spots. I cannot tell you much more about that experience because I don't remember much more than who drove me there: a manic pixie dream girl friend of mine who was also rich.
Manic pixie dream girls are always rich. That's where the mania comes from.
A few months later I was in Montreal working on the first-ever C2 Montreal conference as a founding member of its editorial team. It was a blast from beginning to end. I did good work, met a person who would end up being my close friend and frequent collaborator (Amber Mac), drank scotch with Rex Jung and his wife, and, when I wasn't doing those things, I ate and drank and smoked and caroused as a boulevardier generally does.
I don't know why I told you all that, but it's all true.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch watch the Knicks
🌳 grass get humiliated
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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