The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

It wasn't until 2014 that I made my way to Seattle for the very first time. A childhood friend had moved out to the Emerald City a couple years before that taking that transcontinental leap of faith to follow a love interest that didn't end up panning out. He fell in love with the city pretty hard though (he had talked a good game about moving there or San Francisco all through high school and actually followed through) and decided to stay. By the time I arrived to visit him for the first time since the move, he had begun dating someone new; she would go on to become his wife. Before that first trip, the only things I really knew about Seattle were that it rains a lot and it's a good music town being the old stomping grounds of Nirvana, Heart, and Soundgarden to name a few bands I listened to growing up. The city is the home to the Seahawks (then fresh off a Super Bowl win) and the Mariners but the Mariners hadn't really mattered since they lost Ken Griffey Jr. and

I'm a Korean-Irish kid from DC that digs rice and soju as much as I do potatoes and whiskey. My sister and I were raised in a home that alternated between stuff as WASPy as pot roast and cabbage with a fork and knife at the kitchen table and sitting on the floor at a Korean tea table that only stands a couple feet above the ground enjoying pan-fried mandu along with japchae. I like to think being biracial meant this grand expanded palette and I do generally enjoy foods from all over the world. There is one glaring exception given my heritage: I don't really like kimchi. At all. No soul-searching backstory, no amusing anecdote, no auditory metaphor where I try to connect this to music and rhythm as usual. I just don't like kimchi. "Oh, Sam!" I can already hear some of you, "It's a staple in Korean cuisine! Maybe the homemade stuff just wasn't right for you. The restaurant-prepared kimchi is a lot better!" Yeah, look, I've had plenty of r

I wore a couple different hats in high school whether it was running around with the school's marketing club putting together business plans and presenting them at conferences all around the country or jumping in on drama productions when they found themselves an actor short and needed someone that could learn lines quickly but the group that I wanted to be part of the most was the high school guitar ensemble. Apart from playing the coolest instrument around, a lot of them had this unmistakable swagger without being douchey about it; they were hip and knew it but wouldn't rub your face in it. They would always play in the school-wide battle of the bands at the end of the year doing stuff on stage I had dreamed of doing since I heard The Beatles for the first time. I wanted in on that and I wanted in on that bad. In an earlier post, I mentioned the surprise of getting my own guitar from my mom that first high school Christmas and my promise to make it more than just a passing

On some level, I always figured I was going to do grad school I just didn't know where and studying what exactly. It was never going to be pure communications; that was too broad and I wanted to combine my foreign language studies with my primary major towards something at the next level. After taking the GRE, I tentatively started applying for schools all over the world, really, but most realistically to schools all around the country. Most of these included international communications or international relations programs though I did actually apply for a linguistics program at Georgetown; during my interview for admittance, we both reached the conclusion that the degree wouldn't have been a good fit and I really wasn't interested in accruing over $100K in debt over the course of two years. It ultimately came down to the University of Florida's International Communication program and George Mason University's Global Affairs program with a concentration in Media &