Lots of shorter musings in this one. Enjoy!

Appetizers

• I work out to rip open packages of new watercolor paints as fast as possible

• Two separate times I thought something was burning in my house: 1) when I left an unwashed coffee mug out with leftover coffee dried at the bottom 2) when I was painting and whipped out the light sienna crayon (why does that thing smell like that??)

• I wore my sandals for the first time in the new year to a wonderful climbing session! I was giddy from a great climbing day on the train home, only to notice fluttering at the corner of my vision. I looked down and discovered a mosquito in the middle of sucking blood from my arm. I told my supervisor about this later and she was like, mosquitoes aren’t even supposed to be out yet. My mosquito attraction aura is just that good. Spring is here, I guess….

• Speaking of my great gym day, on the train ride to the gym (on a separate day) an auntie tapped me on the shoulder (a pat pat with the aggressiveness like the way moms rip your hair out while brushing it for you) and told me my climbing shoes were slipping from my backpack. She shoved them back into place for me with iron mom strength. Then gave it an extra firm pat for reassurance.

Work Thoughts: Learning and Teaching

Having something so alluring that you can’t help venturing out of your comfort zone is the key to learning. Telling yourself to try does not always work, but the impatience and hunger when what you want is so tantalizing that you Just Do It (TM) will never fail you. 

This applies as much to teaching as it does to learning. Exercise empathy to find what students want so badly to express that they will struggle to do it, and create a space where they feel safe to struggle in the open. That is how you show someone the process of learning, and the value of exercising that process to take up a new language.

Main Dish: My New Art Kit

You might remember when I used to make art. In the days I used to dream about being an ~Artíste~ I made the human figure my subject, attempted to develop a “style,” and studied the Japanese comic art I loved in my childhood. I eventually fell in love with urban sketching and nature journaling and shifted my focus to animals, plants, and landscapes. When I traveled, packing my sketchbook and my ink brushes was as essential as bringing my toothbrush and my phone charger. Now, I hardly remember the last time I sat down to make a real art piece.

I was asked recently why I stopped making art and I thought about my testy relationship with art. Growing up, I was known as one of the artistic people in my classrooms-I was always given the drawing and design duties in group projects and people held high expectations for me on assignments involving visual components. I have a haunting memory of my high school art teacher, whom I only took one class with in senior year for fun, critiquing one of my assignments-a graphite drawing of a hawk that I had stayed up much too late to get all the feathers around the face right (fun fact, it’s hanging up in my parents’ home next to my magnum opus, a technicolor painting of Godfrey Gao, may he rest in peace). I remember my teacher gasping audibly before complimenting my attention to detail and my draftsmanship, then asking me what I was going to apply to college for. I answered with the truth, which was computer science, to which he responded immediately, almost crestfallen, with “what a shame.”

When something becomes so intertwined with your identity there is no longer space for it to grow. Every artistic failure felt like I had let down a fundamental part of myself. The well-intentioned compliments from my art teacher and other people around me became little knives threatening the fragile self-image I formed around perceived success and achievement. I found it vexing when people would cite art as a proven therapeutic relaxation method when opening my sketchbook felt like staring over the edge of a canyon. I wanted so badly to flourish when I put pen to paper, but it only felt suffocating and it frankly hurt me very deeply. Watching other skilled artists having a jolly time with their craft on social media made things worse.

Those who remember my recent musing on climbing might notice the similarities between my relationship with art and my relationship with climbing as it warped over the years. Climbing began as an activity for connecting with my family, tapping into strengths I didn’t know I had, and developing a positive body image. Now that I’ve been at it for a few years, I find myself facing familiar struggles. Putting “climber” in the personal bio I wrote about myself in my mind may have been the root of it all. Frustration led to over-training, which sent my body into overdrive when I was already under immense pressure from my life circumstances. Sending somehow began to feel high stakes, because falling felt like failure, which felt like a door was closing. 

Which is hilarious! As a human who climbs, I’m literally just a body going up a wall. Why does it matter that I didn’t climb the wall in the way I imagined? In a similar manner-why did it matter that I made an ugly art piece? I could literally just turn a page and draw something new.

I’ve been thinking a lot about perfectionism because with the way that I am, its ghostly hand taints everything I do-art, writing, climbing, work. Perfectionism was a severe restriction on how I allowed myself to experience the world. I had an iron grip around one particular ideal of how something had to go, and if it didn’t go the way I imagined it (e.g., I made art I thought was ugly, I fell off my proj again, I said something embarrassing), it was all wrong and bad. My mind could not allow the reality I was experiencing. These rigid expectations made engaging in my life and hobbies very uncomfortable, because nothing in life goes according to your imagination.

The other complication I experienced was balancing wanting to improve at something while also enjoying the thing. It is very hard for me to want to get better at a skill without clenching my fist around it like an angry toddler with a spoon. A sport psychologist and mindfulness coach who guested on the Training Beta Podcast (a fav not only for climbing advice but also for general life advice) put the solution aptly as holding onto your values lightly, but pursuing them vigorously. Or, as I think of it: trying hard while staying loosey goosey about it. 

When I went cooking up solutions laboratory-like with a good friend I made here in Mie, we came up with some of our own answers to perfectionism: exploration, discovery, and curiosity. What better way to cure rigid expectations than to learn to have none in the first place? Or even better, what if you made your goal specifically to be about experiencing all the wacky, unpredictable outcomes of trying something (i.e., doing whatever the hell you want and seeing what happens)?

It also helped to think about specifically what I actually love about something. If failure meant I wasn’t achieving something, what was I even trying to achieve in the first place? The list of things I love about climbing, to nobody’s surprise, does not include gitting gud and sending hard and proving I’m the shit. All of my frustration around my inability to send hard suddenly felt so silly to me.

As an aside, flexibility of thinking is one of the key parts of mindfulness. It took me many years to come from seeing mindfulness as a nebulous woo-woo concept that wasn’t for me and my busy brain to seeing it as a real tool I can exercise for my benefit in many areas of my life, including in releasing perfectionism.

I have also come up with a few mantras that pair nicely with the line about staying loosey goosey, including: “Let’s just try it”, “Let’s see what happens”, and “I can just try again.” These are reminders I use to tap into curiosity, remember that it’s never the end of the world when something goes wonky, and open myself to all possibilities. That’s just it-there are no failures or successes. There are just possible outcomes, and exploring them can be exciting!

Now, I want you to recall at the very beginning when I mentioned I can hardly remember the last time I sat down to make art. Well, psych! It was last week! When I was asked why I don’t make art anymore, I was like yeah, why DON’T I make art anymore? I got down to business assembling a new art kit, this time venturing into mixed media. Assembling the mixed media tools was already extremely exciting, but the real treat of my new era in art is the fluttering feeling of going to bed excited to get to wake up and paint something new. 

Looking back at the art I made in the past, I noticed all of it reflected my strained journey with art. My old pieces used ink and lines in a very strict, precise, controlling way. Mistakes were few, because I didn’t allow them. Since I’m now learning to work with color and shapes and mediums that I’ve never tapped into before, my work is necessarily filled with mistakes and unforeseen effects from interacting mediums. I realize that through art, I’m now really able to live my mantras. What happens if I use acrylic marker on a page wet with watercolor? I don’t know! Let’s try it!! 

The me who couldn’t conceive art as being in any way therapeutic is now officially of the past (that’s character growth, folks). Art, the very thing that used to paralyze me with fear of failure, is now the guiding light showing me how to take back the joy of climbing, and existing, by appreciating the exploration of possibility. 

Sides

Ode to Dried Kombu

One morning my coworker came to me at my desk holding a plastic bag of what looked like small strips of leather. She laid out a dainty tissue on an open spot next to my mess of documents, poured out a handful of the strips onto it, and explained to me that they were a gift from a city Matsusaka has friendly ties with. The strips were dried kombu, a type of seaweed and a common element of Japanese cuisine. In asian grocers, you usually see the dried seaweed meant to be rehydrated in boiling water and added to soups and side dishes, but these pieces are meant to be eaten directly as a little treat. 

I popped one into my mouth. You have to wait for them to rehydrate a little in your mouth before you chew them. That’s when you can savor their prickly ocean saltiness. After a bit of rehydration, it gets that bouncy, jelly-like crunch characteristic of seaweed and white tapioca balls. The sweet, lightly grassy aftertaste completed the experience. I was hooked. 

The kombu that was gifted was the specialty of our friendship city and was sold for a limited time at the visitor center near my office. I unfortunately missed that window, so I picked up some grocery store branded kombu instead. While they are not as good as the specialty brand, they get the job done. Now I know dried kombu makes a fantastic snack! It’s a fun little textural experience, like gum, but better. You can swallow it, it’s good for you, and it’s savory! I pour a handful of these in a little bowl to snack on when I feel like chewing on something but I don’t want anything too heavy or I don’t need extra energy. It’s the perfect snack to have while writing a little newsletter.

Squiggly Nonsense

When I first started switching my daily journaling into my target language, my penmanship sucked so bad it hurt. I spent many years perfecting my penmanship in the english alphabet and realized I had to do the same for Japanese. I set out on a long journey to learn what kinds of styles of handwriting exist for Japanese by entering the world of Japanese planner social media. Every day I blessed my eyes with carefully arranged compositions of stationery and notebooks and handwriting, oh so much beautiful, meticulously handwritten characters. I learned there was a word for the type of artistic perfection in writing words with an ordinary pen for ordinary things, like your to-do list, separate from the word for calligraphy, which refers to art done with a brush. 

I also loved calligraphy. I had a phase where I followed numerous amateur and professional calligraphers on social media writing in both Chinese and Japanese. This was actually extremely useful to me because one of the hardest things about both languages is learning how to read everything in cursive, an essential skill to employ specifically when you need to read a very stylish restaurant sign. This skill can only be honed through repeated exposure to what looks like squiggly nonsense. I looked at so much squiggly nonsense that I learned how to write my own squiggly nonsense.

Calligraphy and penmanship were only a means to an end. I just wanted to write good, and when I achieved that, I didn’t develop it further into a true hobby. It remains something I do twice a year when I want to write something nice on a postcard.

Last month, I had the pleasure of engaging in calligraphy again (one of the two times a year) at the neighboring town’s international exchange club.

It felt good to let loose with a brush. The best thing about calligraphy is that you have to be swift and decisive once you put the brush down. The less hesitation, the better it looks.

Weight-lifting is my giant rubber band

Not only is it good for bone density (something my body type is known to struggle with, especially the older I get), it is also good for literally every other function in my body.

I think I’ve been in fight or flight for 8 months and lifting (combined with other high intensity, interval-based exercise) is seemingly returning my body to normal function by controlling cortisol levels. Lifting is helping me walk normally after years of struggling with muscle imbalances. Ironically, lifting weights is also helping me release the burden of muscle tension by peeling my eternally rocky shoulders away from my ears. My core is finally back in business correcting anterior pelvic tilt and straightening my spine, keeping me upright while sitting and protecting my lower back when bending over. Weight-lifting is the giant rubber band holding my entire life together.

Weights, yo. Everybody should lift them if they can.

Pushups for the brain

“The important thing is not that you’re good at [mindfulness], but that you do it.” -Alex Bridgewater in The TrainingBeta Podcast (Episode 283)

I’ve been trying to have mindful breakfasts. I wake up, don’t touch my phone, wash up, and make breakfast. If it’s sunny, I’ll open the veranda door and sit on the ground facing the ray of sunshine streaming through it. Then I eat. I try to focus on chewing well and enjoying flavor and texture. 

This is extremely hard. I’ve learned that my brain is so crowded in the mornings. The thoughts can be overwhelming. I instinctively reach for things to occupy my brain with replacement thoughts-a book, my planner, jazz tunes, the entertainment rectangle. I have to physically stop my body from moving to retrieve distractions and sit my ass down in the sunshine to just fucking chill and EAT. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing a game over and over again.

But then I remember mindfulness is just pushups for the brain. You don’t have to git gud. Just gently guide your thoughts back when they stray and watch as you win again and again and again.

What we inherited from our parents

1. How to avoid LA traffic

2. Hiking and walking as fun, chill hangouts

3. How to make perfect circular dumpling wrappers from fresh dough

4. Eating fruits unpeeled for extra fiber

5. Route to the airport with the least lane changes

6. Opening your windows to let the cool desert air in and closing them in the morning before the temps rise, for minimal AC summer heat survival 

7. Owning an adventure vehicle

8. Parking the furthest away from a store where there is more space and relatively less danger. Also gives you a chance to have a little walk!

9. Parking under a tree, which increases risk of bird poos, but prevents your car interior from baking

10. 8 minutes for hard boiling eggs

11. Collecting hobbies

12. The backyard garden? You mean my fruit orchard and veggie field?

13. Sesame oil on crispy fried eggs

14. Deep yearning for loquats in the summertime

15. Making art about traveling

When do you know you’ve truly settled into a place?

When I biked to work on the first day of my new job, I remember having to take my phone out every 5 min for navigation assistance. The roads get so narrow here that I would pass an intersection marked on the map without even having realized it. Then I would have to stop, backtrack like a clown, and bike tentatively down extremely narrow streets while shuddering in fear every time a car raged past me, barely skimming my shoulder with their rearview mirror.

It’s now been nearly eight months here and I’ve since curated a new commute path after deciding the main road noise sucked and the factory I passed every day stunk (literally). While biking to the station the other afternoon, I met a temporary road closure and surprised myself by rerouting without hesitation. I happened to take part of that old work commute route, through those narrow roads past formerly invisible intersections, past the stinky factory. I made it to the station with only a minute or two extra on the clock, feeling like I had gamed some kind of system.

Maybe the true test was when I showed a friend around the castle ruins on cherry blossom viewing day. Every time we made spontaneous stops and detours (we are both the type to make loose plans and wander) I recalculated our route to pass back through all the cool stuff while getting us to even MORE cherry blossoms, all without consulting the phone a single time. (Can YOUR gps do the 4D chess of guiding a tour using the knowledge of every cherry blossom tree and historical site in the city, all while avoiding the cursed roads and crowded spots??)

Perhaps the ultimate sign is how I’ve learned to look right, then left, before crossing the street.

The longer I live in Matsusaka, the more attached I become to all the spaces I’ve made memories in and all the people I’ve come to know. I want to dig my toes in deep and scream and shout about the city’s cool history and fun spots, but more than anything, I want to show people how rewarding it is to learn about a new place and experience it as one of its little moving parts.

I’ve also come to miss California dearly. Part of my job is essentially being an ambassador for internationalization, so I am often asked to write or talk about my life in the US. Most of that life was spent in the best parts of the golden state. I think that’s such a gift. It’s such a privilege to feel so torn wanting to explore new iterations of my life out in the wide world, while yearning to return to the most beautiful place on earth.

Kiss Kiss Fall in Love

Sakura season came and went in a flash! Many people make trips to famous castles and gardens in big cities for flowers around this time of year. I went to the humble castle ruins park of my city with a friend.

End of March to beginning of April is the time period you usually want to shoot for. Apparently this year, things were slightly slow-going.

On our first walk-through we ended up accidentally exiting the park, so we passed through the city’s shrine and walked back through the castle guard residences.

I don’t usually eat street food, so I let myself go wild here by eating 1) one big skewer of chicken thigh 2) a bunch of malformed Doraemon castella cake bites. I discovered the joys of sitting and hanging my legs over the castle walls while eating a snack. We sought out a quiet corner to eat the rest of our cursed Doraemon cakes. This was possibly the best and most underrated viewing spot of the whole day. We spent an hour gazing out over a thick blanket of nice blooms from the trees below near the museum.

I learned that most of these trees are of a cultivar called Somei Yoshino, which don’t grow unless planted by a human. This means all of the trees around us, including the ones hanging out in less populated areas like mountains and remote shrines, were thoughtfully placed out there by someone for the sole purpose of adding a little color to the world.

In our journey around the former castle grounds we spotted one tree with a hollow that, upon closer inspection, was crawling with disgusting-ass bugs. I took a picture of them and will not include it here, but just know that it existed. It was grotesquely intriguing. I could not rip my eyes away even while shuddering in disgust watching the buggers mill about holes in the rotten wood. What caused this tree to get so messed up?? What were the bugs doing in the tree??? What are the bugs even called????? My friend was unphased by the concept of bug and took an extremely zoomed in photo of the ugly things to submit to image search, but our questions were never answered.

We ended our afternoon by hanging out at Suzunoya, the former study of the famous scholar Motoori Norinaga. This study was relocated here to the castle grounds as an addition to the museum dedicated to him, located nearby. The building is a lovely traditional style construction with a curated garden in the back. Norinaga was known to have stationed his desk in the room directly facing the garden so he could look up from his writing and see green. I thought of how I did the same thing with my desk, stationing it so that I could sit facing a bright window, except I look up and see a car dealer. I envy Norinaga.

The clouds had just rolled in, so instead of venturing back out to seek more flowers, we just sat here looking at the garden for an hour and a half bird-watching. This was the most relaxing outing I’ve had in a long time. After hours of watching sparrows and pigeons (ordinary, but still incredibly interesting) peck away at the ground, we were rewarded with a glimpse of red-a small woodpecker, working its way up the trunk of a cherry blossom.

After a quick dinner at a renowned spot in town (that serves the LARGEST portion of noodles I have ever seen in my life), we headed back to the castle for the illumination. Yes, there was more. Illuminations seem to be a big deal here-the evening crowd easily beat the afternoon crowd.

My favorite night view was from this spot I rest at on evening runs to the castle park, where you can get a panoramic view of the local peaks. The evening lights from windows to residences and businesses look like stars glittering on earth. It was nice to share this view with someone else for a change.

Apparently the place to be was this little arrangement of fake bamboo lights. I think there was supposed to be some kind of romantic significance to walking through the lights with a partner. People seem to love that sort of urban legend here. A “power spot,” they call it.

We ended our evening investigating this area with an art installation that looks like a bunch of little fingers sticking out of the ground. There were about four or five fingers total. There was no explanation as to what it all meant, only a plaque that mentioned this was part of a sculpture contest and told us the name of the piece, which I have already forgotten. This led to more unanswered questions. What were these fingers?? Why were there so many of them just littering the ground?? What does it all mean???

Despite the unsolved mysteries, this was the most relaxing and fulfilling day spent investigating flowers and enjoying existing on earth in springtime.

Thanks for being here

I lost someone in my life recently, so I’ve been thinking about vocalizing appreciation for the people in my life. I’m terrible at telling people I love them, but it’s a skill I want to improve in. I always knew any moment with someone could be the last, but now I feel that truth ever more acutely as I write this and internalize.

If you’re here reading this, you’re one of the many who have touched my life, helped me up, fed me, kept me safe, and held space for my joy. You made me laugh and gave me slices of your tangerines. You let me ugly cry in your guest bedroom and made me affogatos. You bought me cake so we could eat it together in the sunshine. You invited me to meet your friends even when you knew I’d be too shy and/or tired to say yes. You watched me embarrass myself countless times and still accepted me. You forgave me countless times as I learned to do better. You even allowed me the privilege of sitting with you as you laid bare your deepest desires, fears, and truths.

I am so thankful you chose to spend your precious time with me. You dyed me in your beautiful colors and shielded me with tender hands to make sure I’m still here and vibing today. My life is built on your care and generosity, and I can only hope to return a fraction of it all. 

Thank you for reading, for taking interest in me and my life, or for even just looking at the title or the pictures. Don’t forget your value, not only to me, but to everyone and everything just because you simply exist here today. 

Media and such

• The End of Children - Gideon Lewis-Kraus https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population-implosion

Harrowing shit. It’s hard to imagine people openly hating on kids. This inspired me to reflect on my own views on having and raising children. I also thought about how part of walkability is about making cities safer and welcoming for children. What kind of world are we living in that we are not actively making streets safe for children to run out and play on? A world without children, I suppose…

• All Work and No Play - Sam Adler-Bell https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/all-work-and-no-play/

I was thinking about how simulation games like Stardew seem like answers to the 5-9 grind. It makes the dull repetition of daily life rewarding and comforting. It strips life of all consequences related to mismanagement of our limited time (which we can hardly blame ourselves for). It gives us the fantasy of a small, close-knit community, a healthy relationship with nature, simplicity away from bustling modernity. It’s the fantasy of opting out of the Hustle. It’s interesting to reflect on what the games I love, and more broadly, what fiction I love, says about what ideal I crave, what fantasy I want to live, what I’m trying to release from suppression.

• Joan Didion’s Notes on Therapy: What We Knew Without Knowing (excerpt from Letters to John) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/07/what-we-knew-without-knowing

This made me think about how deeply and instinctively we sense the emotions of other human beings, and how we inherit anxiety and trauma from our parents. 

• Art journaling zines, the Traveler’s Times, mini essays from a little restaurant in the countryside out west, and local trekking maps. Great before bed! 

• Bound compilation of scans from the journal of Japanese poet Ishigaki Rin. 

Every time I pick it up, I learn more about how to decipher messy Japanese handwriting. Also great before bed!

• Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie

I took my time with this one but got a bit lost in the lore. Still loved it. The way the author wrote the protagonist, a sprawling AI intelligence with multiple versions of itself inhabiting many different bodies, as human-like and relatable, was incredible. The way the story jumps through space (the many bodies of the protagonist) and time (flashbacks) was also a treat.

Next Month’s Menu

Well, that was a big honker of a newsletter.

I’m happy to say that since my realization of how perfectionism was party-pooping everything I love, I have been on a strong streak of what I call Good Gym Days! I’ve been working on new climbing projects, including a tough one involving all of my weaknesses. I missed projecting, and I also missed developing projecting technique. It’s an important part of climbing, and I’m so grateful my physical condition has improved enough that I can get back into it. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a problem and thought, “it looks hard! I want to touch it!” I’m excited to see where this project takes me. 

One thing I didn’t manage to put in my big honking piece about perfectionism is the list of things I actually do value about climbing. These are:

• Trying new moves and climbing styles

• Progression and improvement

• Determination

• Playing around!

• Trailblazing my own beta

• Projecting with people

• Cheering my friends on

• Surprising myself with what I can do

Having one or more of these in my climbing session is what makes a Good Gym Day. My goal is to increase the frequency of Good Gym Days.

I’m also gearing up for a long vacation that I’m excited and a little anxious about. My body gets roughed up by travel and I’m not sure how it will affect my progress in limiting stress and recovering normal physical function. I’ll try to focus on having a good time. 

Your blossom viewing, perfectionism fighting, bumbling human who sometimes makes things and goes up walls,

Alex