Sept 1, 2026

Can’t believe the first day of September has already arrived. Hopefully my cosmic feline will be completely back to 100% soon, so I may finally make up the travel trip I postponed a while ago.

I’ve felt a bit off for the last few days, and so has my cat. I suspect the AQI, between the wildfires, solar flares, and whatever else the universe has been throwing at us lately, probably contributed to it.

I was impressed once when my cat somehow sensed I had a fever. I had no idea. It was my first winter in DC last year, and I thought maybe the temperature in the house was rising too quickly because of the heater. So, naturally, I kept turning the AC lower and lower while taking a nap, even though I was getting increasingly dizzy. Strangely, my cat started scratching at my bedroom door like a crazy animal. He would not stop.I was exhausted and annoyed. “What is wrong with you?? I just fed you!" But then he came in looking red-eyed and alarmed, jumped onto the table, and started meowing nervously directly into my face. And suddenly it hit me: Wait. Is there something wrong with me this time? LOL. I took my temperature and saw it had climbed to 101 and was gradually going up. Smart cat, I thought.

Of course, there have also been times when I’ve been so mad that I’ve asked a psychic what exactly I did in my past life to deserve becoming the de facto veterinarian-in-residence for the cosmic feline. So far, from 2025–2026: Super moons, blue moons, strawberry moons, buck moons, and so on, somehow, he falls ill. During COVID, I even remember having to improvise emergency medicine from whatever I had in the house because nothing was open. At this point, I’ve become so experienced that I might as well just publish my own theory on what I consider a surprisingly weak area of the feline-medicine literature: FIC.

But there is always a downside to animals being too smart. They can gaslight you just like people. There was one day when I was tired and didn’t feel like feeding him exactly on schedule. He meowed once. No response. Twice. Still no response. Then he slowly walked toward the kitchen, stopped, turned his head about 45 degrees, rolled his eyes at me, and let out this strange, sharp half-cat, half-bark sound: “MAH~erf!”

The message was unmistakable. Woman, you need to go to the kitchen, cook that tuna with pumpkin, and clean those shit clumps out of the litter box.

No.

That was when I remembered a friend telling me that whenever her Chihuahua challenged her by showing his teeth, she would simply pick up a chair and stare at him as though she might hit him with it.

But that was far too much beneath me. Also, I knew my feline wouldn’t really fall for it. So instead, being the mature adult that I am, I came up with a much more reasonable solution: Maybe I needed a Burmese mountain dog. A very large one. So then the cat would finally look around and think, Whoa Gosh. Maybe I shouldn’t mess with her anymore. And somehow this idea progressed far enough that I actually visited a few dog breeders that day.

When I came home, I must have smelled like I spent the afternoon looking at enormous dogs, because my cat stared at me with deep suspicion. So I actually told him in English, “Yes, I saw some dogs today, but I didn’t take one.”

And, surprisingly, he immediately licked my hand.

For the moment, the Burmese mountain dog remained purely theoretical.

a black and white dog sitting on a cobblestone street

Aug 30, 2026

I have always been wary of the saying 不忘初心, or “never forget the heart with which you began.”

Too often, we turn it into something else: I must continue down the road I chose at the beginning, or I have betrayed the person I used to be. There is something deeply appealing about consistency in certain cultures, as in stay true to why you started, persevere, remain steadfast, see things through to the end, and never forget your roots; their opposites carry the faint suggestion of defective character.

But perhaps we confuse three very different things: Values, goals and strategies. We often fuse all three into "our original heart and intention".

Then changing a strategy feels like abandoning the goal. Changing the goal feels like betraying our values. Eventually, changing anything begins to feel like betraying ourselves.

But life rarely unfolds as neatly as the stories we tell about it: Choose a destination → begin walking → learn something new → discover that an assumption was wrong → revise the destination → abandon an obsolete road → temporarily lose your sense of identity → begin again.

Sometimes there isn't even an ending. A relationship may never receive the conversation that explains everything. An injustice may never be properly corrected. A project may remain 70 percent finished. A dream may simply cease to fit the person who once dreamed it. We may never forgive someone. We may never completely understand what happened. We may never receive the apology, vindication, reunion, success, or beautiful full-circle ending that our minds have rehearsed for years. And still, we can move forward.

Persistence is admirable when reality has tested our convictions and they still make sense. But persistence becomes something else when the evidence has changed and we refuse to change with it, when sunk costs become loyalty, fear disguises itself as consistency, and an imagined ending becomes more important than the life actually unfolding around us. We can become so determined to reach the destination we once chose that we fail to notice other shores coming into view.

Though if letting go were really that easy, I suppose we wouldn't struggle with it even over the smallest and most ridiculous things. I have to laugh at myself recently when an acquaintance told me, “OMG, you sound exactly like my son!” Apparently we both get annoyed when something we've planned doesn't unfold exactly the way we imagined. I had to admit she had a point. At a recent farewell party, I was irrationally annoyed when someone whom I perhaps didn't even like, acts terribly sad and sentimental and then breaks character before the end. Like, come on, commit to the performance! 😂 And she practically jumped out of her chair and said, in a heavy foreign accent, “No need for perfect endings, or whatever words you wanted to hear! What are you going to do now? Go back there and ask someone why they didn't say or do something? Or... are you going to be like ‘Yo, this is what I REALLY wanted to say TO YOUR FACE back then, and hear me out on the revised version’? ... You will literally make a knot in the brain!” 😂😂😂 I couldn't really argue with that.

And perhaps some things in life never need to be “finished” at all. They happened. They mattered. They changed us. And then life continued. We can be well intentioned but still update our mental model.

Maybe a better version is: Remember why you began, but keep asking where you are going.

Aug 19, 2026

Woke up in a good mood today and got a decent amount of work done. DC feels noticeably more alive lately. There was this month or so last year when it honestly felt like a ghost town, I swear every coffee shop I went into back then had people having the most depressing conversations. That seems completely gone now. For someone who is super sensitive to energy levels, it feels as if switching from the winter to summer all of a sudden. Feels like there’s been a new influx of DC professionals again or people just feel comfortable coming back, and that changes the energy around.

Was thinking today that some lessons in life I somehow learned very early, while others late. It’s funny, some of my most formative emotional and spiritual experiences happened during my years in Europe. I’ve always wondered why. Maybe something deeper in me found a kind of freedom there. I felt like I finally let out my teenage rebelliousness.

Maybe because of that, I always associated transformation with leaving, like I had to go somewhere completely different to become someone different. So it’s strange that I seem to be going through another one of those periods now, except this time I’m right here in the capital. Especially because this is also where I was exposed to things that changed my understanding of the world quite profoundly, while at the same time some of what I experienced here left wounds I probably didn’t fully understand at the time. There were questions I never imagined I would need to question again as an adult. It's interesting how much of human nature can remain dormant simply because circumstances have never required it to surface. There are things some may genuinely never imagine themselves capable of, until somethings suddenly make those sides come out.

It's funny, at one point I did try to leave this city, but somehow kept getting stuck here for one reason or another. I mean, at one point I couldn’t even get out of a lease when the apartment building was literally on fire. I tried all kinds of things, even went before the board to argue my case. Still no and I had to cancel my new lease in another state. 😂 And yet lately there’s been this strange succession of people, conversations and little coincidences coming out of that same world that are making me see things differently, and in stranger ways, helped me recover and see things from completely different perspective.

They say that in the wild, the plant that neutralizes a snake’s venom often takes root in the very same soil around. Perhaps the cure doesn’t require wandering elsewhere; sometimes the thing that mends you shares the exact ground that hurt you.

I don’t know exactly what I’m uncovering yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing what else this chapter — or maybe this ground — will unveil.

girl in gray hoodie sitting on brown sand during daytime

Aug 18, 2026

Today feels remarkably like yesterday, I feel like doing absolutely nothing. In an ideal world, I’d be packing a single suitcase, for a half year adult gap year doing nothing. Urgh.... but there’s still therapy to get through, a tooth to treat, and a cosmic feline to please.

It’s been a whirlwind since last year, and yet, I probably should be grateful. For almost a year, I had an entourage of CIA-level remote-viewing mediums- one of whom actually did work for them at one point before, lol, helping me decipher which doctor was good, who was telling the truth, and what on earth was going on. All of this over what is, physically speaking, a minor issue, but spiritually it felt much bigger.

I think it’s time to wrap up this very bizarre chapter. I’m still not entirely sure what it was supposed to mean, but I do sense there was some meaning in the journey, even if I can’t see all the points yet.

I’m looking forward to what remains of 2026. I have a feeling I may not get to truly move away, as I had thought in my head. How much longer will I live in the capital? We’ll see. I am kind of glad and thankful that someone convinced me last year that it didn’t make sense to move immediately, after I gave an entire speech about how much I hated the state of Maryland and how, “I’ve never had allergies this bad, and I see even birds don’t want to shit here."

I've learned sometimes you can't have a few bad apples to represent an entire population of something, or an institution, we always have to live with discernment, and with people it always will take evaluation, tests and so on.

But I feel like it's important to not let somethings spiral into cynicism, cuz that’s when we start to lose the spark in us—quite literally. There’s a Chinese word, cāngsāng (沧桑), that’s difficult to translate exactly. It’s that weathered quality a person can carry after having been through a lot, when life somehow begins to show in your eyes, your energy, even the way you move through the world. Maybe some cāngsāng is inevitable; perhaps it even gives us depth. But I don’t think becoming dimmer, colder, or less open-hearted should ever be the price of becoming wiser.

For now, I think I’m allowed to just be.

Aug 17, 2026

Got up at 11am, but still so tired, yea...it's weird, almost like I ran a marathon yesterday or something but I barely worked out.

I hope my boss won't notice, or somehow discover my blog.

Aug 15, 2026

a golden emoticive smiley face on a black background

Had a full week of writing intensive emails and I am so burnt out. I basically slept through the entire morning today. Then, fresh off a nap this afternoon, I was in my PJ, leaning against the balcony railing to gaze at the lush green woods afar, for good eye care practice.

Suddently, I heard "HEYYY! CAN YOU HEAR ME? COULD YOU PLEASE HELP ME?!” I saw one floor up, across the courtyard in the adjacent wing, a bewildered-looking college kid was frantically waving his arms from his balcony. What the??

“I’m locked out and I don’t have my phone!”

Naturally, my peaceful afternoon was officially on pause. I yelled back to get his apartment number, and headed down in PJ to find the building manager.

Luckily, our building manager happens to look like a nightclub bouncer, imposing, and not easily rattled. He grabbed the master keys, and we took the elevator up to the 8th floor.

As we walked down the hallway, the whole situation started feeling a little odd: We got to the apartment door, and the manager turned the knob. It wasn't even locked. We cautiously eased the door open, bracing ourselves for… something. He slowly opened the door, and we saw light color furniture, it was silent and nobody in sight. And then we saw him, standing on the other side of the balcony glass like a fish in an aquarium, in a t-shirt and gym shorts. The sliding balcony door wasn't just locked by a standard handle toggle. A physical security latch on the inside was visibly flipped to the left.

The manager and I exchanged a long, silent look. How on earth did you lock yourself on the outside of a door with an interior slide bolt?

Our bouncer looking manager was not afraid of him I guess, lol, he slid the latch and opened the door. The kid tumbled inside, "OMG guys, thank you so much! I swear I actually live here, I can show you my ID.”

Manager: “Don’t thank me, thank her.”

Me: “Oh, don’t worry about it! Anyone would have done the same.”

Then the manager turned to me: “How can the apartment properly thank you? What’s your apartment number?”

I gave him a look, and said, “Oh, don't worry about it, that’s not necessary!”

As I turned to walk back toward the elevators, I heard the kid asks,“Hey, I really want to write her a thank-you note, how do I do that?”

Manager :" Well, if she wanted you to know her apt #, she would have told you already.”

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Honestly, whoever is teaching this kid over at Georgetown or AU or whatever needs to assign him more homework, or at least get him to stop watching cheap, B-rated Netflix flicks.

What a weird day, I guess it did help to break my stress right in half. I’m back on my balcony now, coffee in hand, double-checking my own locks just in case.

Aug 13, 2026

Solar Eclipse, Cosmic Felines, and my Holy Path to Sainthood

Tears and #$%!, unpack the swimsuit, and put the sunscreen back in the bathroom cabinet where it belongs. I was really looking forward to miami trip. But the universe had other plans. My feline had a flare-up during the solar eclipse. Because of course he did.

At this point, I’m convinced my cat isn’t just sensitive to pet dander or grain-free kibble, he’s directly wired into the planet’s electromagnetic core. Over the years, he has managed to fall ill, throw up, or generally lose his mind during every major celestial and meteorological event known to humanity. Solar eclipses? Flare-up. Lunar eclipses? Flare-up. Severe planetary alignments, meteor showers, localized tornadoes? You guessed it. Why me?? There must be a reason...

I’m pretty sure I’ve achieved major sainthood at this point. But perhaps I will do something productive this weekend instead. I’ll work on the Resonance Project!

(Look, they say the eclipse brings energetic resets, right? I'm just waiting for that fresh cosmic energy to hit my keyboard and magically draft three pages of grant-worthy prose for me.)

In the meantime, the universe did manage to grant me one small mercy. If the sky is falling and my cat is acting like a celestial barometer, at least yesterday's Portugal wine didn't disappoint.

So here’s to energetic resets, fragrant wine, unfinished proposals, and the glorious, saintly life of catering to a cat who gets sick every time the moon covers the sun.

Aug 11, 2026

How Many of These Do You Have?

I can’t believe it’s already been a year since I left gov. Looking back, I still remember colleagues who were genuinely terrified of befriending their yoga instructors, lol. Leaving that hyper-vigilant mindset behind has been a breath of fresh air.

If there's one thing I miss, though, it’s the high-level continuing education language courses. They were taught by absolute masters who dove deep into contemporary lingo, modern slang, and the subtle cultural subtext.

English is great for a lot of things, but when it comes to categorizing your social circle, it’s surprisingly lazy. You’ve got your “friends,” your “besties,” and maybe your “work friends.” That’s about it. Chinese, and some other languages, on the other hand, operates like a high-precision sorting algorithm for human relationships.