The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

This past weekend would've been my grandfather's 91st birthday so this week's post is all about him. George Tilden Stone, Jr. was born in a house that my great-grandfather had built with his own two hands (he himself was a master carpenter) in late March in 1927. Back in those days, DC was very different from the city it is today; most of the modern District of Columbia came about with the federal build-up from the New Deal and World War II launching the modern American military-industrial complex. As such, much of the city and the nearby Arlington where George largely grew up still heavily featured dirt roads and wooden buildings. When the Depression hit, his family was forced to move and most of his summers, George would live with family in Brooklyn becoming a dyed in the wool Dodgers fan as an immediate result. To the very end, the Dodgers would be his favorite sports team even decades after they moved from New York to Los Angeles. Back in Arlington, George worked as a i

This past week was CNU Day so I saw a lot of classmates from my old undergraduate alma mater posting about their college experiences and memories online so I've decided to do the same but it's me so it's going to be really rambling and longwinded. Christopher Newport University, originally a junior college offshoot of the College of William & Mary, is nestled in southeastern Virginia somewhere along I-64 in between Colonial Williamsburg and Norfolk. It was pretty apparent early on that I wasn't going to go to college out of state and CNU made the most sense of all the schools I got into for a number of reasons: Small, liberal arts-focused, close to the beach, furthest from home. I had definitely had my fun in high school and, at its absolute highs (Which fortunately came often), I never wanted it to end but college truly was the next step and after the last summer, I was ready. In some ways, the transition from high school to college was a lot like the transition

I've talked a lot about being Korean on here because I feel like that's, uh, one of the more defining characteristics at first blush rather than the amorphous Caucasian mix but that's only ever been half of the equation. With Saint Patrick's Day on Saturday, let's shift the focus to where my dad's from: Northern Ireland. More specifically from a town called Lurgan about 18 miles outside of Belfast in County Armagh. He's second-generation Northern Irish which effectively makes me third. But there was always reminders and relics of that heritage around growing up, Celtic crosses and other Irish iconography nestled in between Korean ink brushed artwork like someone took two countries literally on opposite sides of the world and threw them together in a bit of interior decorating. There's probably a metaphor for me somewhere in there. I've been doing this shit for over thirty years, it all kind of blends at this point. I know an inordinate amount of

Grad school is a grind and I like to make the analogy that it’s like a second job that you have to pay for; I’ve made that analogy several times here. I was doing all my classes at night so I could work during the day, reading hundreds of pages for each class of the driest topics of my entire life (if you ever need someone to talk global economics post-World War II, I’ve got you covered), and writing in-depth essays about the whole thing. I don’t say this all as a complaint, this was stuff I’m very interested in, writing my graduate thesis on the effect of social media on revolutionary movements in the 21st century, getting published in tech journals around the world on the changing face of cyber security and the practical applications of info tech in developing world agriculture. But I needed a break. More accurately, I needed an outlet; somewhere I could talk about my less intellectual interests and endeavors. The first thing that came to mind was doing a blog but I was kind of b