The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

If you follow me on social media, I think it's safe to say that the things I get the most excited to talk about are international travel and live music; that's the heartbeat to everything else for me. Like, obviously, I enjoy talking about movies and all that geeky stuff -- I ran a podcast for over four years where I got to use that as an outlet for that and I write about that stuff for a website five days a week, that's all well-trod ground. What I've always loved about music is it's the moment when poetry hits melody and you catch it like and its just this beautiful symbiotic moment with the musicians vibing off the crowd and vice versa. More than that, it gives my mind something to focus on. My psychologist in college brought to my attention I have pretty high-functioning ADHD and, as he sat me down and talked to me about it, it really did all make sense: My conversations often veer into deep tangents on the slightest moments, I'm usually working on multipl

1993 is to me what 1969 is to Quentin Tarantino in terms of relative age at that time; Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is as much a love letter to this begone era of Los Angeles as it is a memory exercise for the award-winning filmmaker and he proceeds deeper into his own middle age. I don't feel middle-aged but I don't necessarily feel young either, it's the international travel and live music that keeps me rejuvenated -- it always has -- which is why I lean so heavily into it. Anyway, 1993 was a weirdly formative year for me. We had been living in Fairfax for about a year at that point (Calling this Once Upon a Time...in the District seemed like a much better title than Once Upon a Time...in Fairfax , yeah?), I wrapped up kindergarten and started first grade. My sister would turn three that May and I would turn seven that August. It was a weird gap year in that it was the only year in elementary school where I had no major extracurricular activities; no sports, it was

It's July 2019. I'm at Baekyangsa Temple about two hours south of Seoul up in the forested mountains. It is a Buddhist monastery, open to the public for temple stays where they can meditate, commune with nature, learn how to prepare kimchi in the traditional way from the resident monks, and train in Korean martial arts. I didn't come all this way to learn how to make kimchi. "Are you well?" asks a sister monk, her head shorn of all hair as she sits on the wooden floor across from me. The dialogue catches me off-guard as the first two hours of the day had been spent observing and respecting the order's vows of silence as they start their day before reciting ancient prayers and striking traditional drums. She notices I'm perspiring, with Korean summers always running hot even in the mountains, the heat radiating through the rice papered buildings. " 예" I respond in my broken but serviceable Korean. "Thanks for letting me stay with you for

Man, I really wish I had something interesting to tell you guys about this past year. No, I mean of course this was the year when the levee finally broke wide open in ways I honestly could have never imagined. When I walked into 2019, I had some things I knew I wanted to happen, an impending trip to Europe (which you can read all about in the last blog post) and a burgeoning writing career. But what actually happened was this weird, wild adventure that spanned five continents, eight countries, and fifteen states. This was the year that I got to set foot in the Sahara, walk the Great Wall of China and ruins of Ancient Rome, reconnect with both my paternal and maternal origins, reintegrate music and travel back into my life after such a glaring long time away, and actually become pretty prolific with my writing/translating career; this is the year when that all happened. This is why that matters...and why it can never happen again. Let's get the travel stuff out of the way fir