in a nutshell

• the last post was way back in january.
• since then, i’ve been settling back into Berkeley, playing guitar, and started a job in ai safety.
• i’d love to hear from you :)
  • i welcome updates long or short
  • a prompt (opt.): what have you done lately that has gotten you into “flow” state?

contents of this post

• ~1500 words about my life
• media recommendations
• FAQs

love and peace,

rohan

看那麼多英文讓你太累嗎? 歡迎你用翻譯機器来翻譯這篇文章

PS. updates:

• my friend leon and I told our “banana story” back in april. it’s on youtube.
• my instagram now will have photos from my life
• the website is under construction. posts can be navigated from here for now.
• please let me know if another email address works better for you

LONG-FORM WRITING ABOUT LIFE

Settling

I last published a blog post sitting in a co-op (“Duckpond”) in Oakland. I stayed there for three months while I was getting my bearings in the Bay. It was a house of seven humans and one dog, Ducky. She and I quickly became best friends – both of us had four limbs, loved the outdoors, and were unemployed for many moons. Ducky’s guardian, Andrea, provided food and housing, while I was there to provide emotional support and field trips to the local park. Being at Duckpond was grounding. At a time with so much uncertainty, it was so nice to have people around every day and someone who’d definitely notice if I slept in (I wrote more about Ducky here).

I’ve also been grateful to have my friend Leon. He lived with me for a year in Taiwan, and now is pursuing a career as a pianist here in the Bay. I crashed at his house for a few weeks when I first got here. For fun, we also told a joint-story from Taiwan on stage in March (🚌🍌🇹🇼) through an organization called First Person Story.

As I experience this transition back to the Bay, I have many moments of nostalgia for life in Taiwan. I remember one evening walking around Lake Merritt. Leon and I were trading memories of our year in Taiwan: stories of our 2nd grade students dancing fanatically to Black Pink, about the old guy across our apartment who spoke with a thick Taiwanese drawl and who gave us sugar apples, and the weird salvationist organization I almost got indoctrinated into. Over each passing month, these memories recede in my mind, and so do my connections to people in Taiwan and the language, Mandarin – that carried me to boba shops and ping pong lessons and the small villages on the East Coast. Memories that lie dormant, but activated in full force when the moment arises.

When I visited California, an uncle of mine asked me, “so, now that you’ve lived abroad, have you figured out what you’re doing with your life?” The answer is “not at all”. I was talking to my new housemate, YLai, about what I learned from doing a “gap year” (he also spent a while in Colombia before starting college). We both found we learned about ourselves – traversing the inner world and understanding what places, people and things make me happy.

Working

The last update on my career situation was rather bleak, but in the end I did find a job! When people ask about it, here’s what I say:

“Have you heard the theory that AI is going to takeover the world? …person responds yes or no … Well , I work at a place where people are very concerned about this.”

Constellation is an AI safety research center. We run events and programming to support the work of alignment researchers (ie. people who test models and try to make them not do scary things. The aim is to facilitate field-building and gradually influence people at major labs to support the alignment of AI systems. My organization itself is about 25 people, supporting several hundred who have access to the space.

The culture is a blend of a tech start-up and a non-profit. Chiefly mission-driven, but funded well enough that our staff have cushy lifestyles, especially for the non-profit industry. My day-to-day is operations, which essentially the mundane, logistical aspects of creating a smooth, seamless space… onboarding, events, and the management of our administrative systems. I’m grateful primarily to have a job, but also to be in a field that feels prescient – AI safety seems to make the news all the time, and oftentimes it’s people in the Constellation ecosystem who are being interviewed in these situations.

I like it chiefly because of the kind people. My manager is wonderful – he has vast non-profit and start-up experience, and it really shows in his reasonableness, consideration, and breadth of skills. The team is close-knit and small enough that I know everyone fairly well, since my work requires me to collaborate with people a lot. I feel a lot of belonging at work, like they’d miss me if I were gone – which is important, because the nature of modern office life is that I spend more waking hours in the office than anywhere else.

We do fun things, too. I’ve taken the role of social captain at work (among other responsibilities). I coordinate birthday cards, karaoke nights, and team bonding lunches which are well-attended. I also organized Constellation’s first ever Open Mic, which was awesome and had some knock-out performances (such as Bob Dylan played on a Turkish lute!).

I do feel a steady amount of professional growth. My job is demanding, but people are compassionate and supportive – I feel I’m learning a lot of soft skills like how to interact with people, how to take initiative and ask the right questions, and how to make things happen while keeping cool. Instead of Mandarin, I find myself learning to speak corporate vernacular, learning to answer “tell me about yourself”, and thinking like an operations professional.

I’ve done other adult stuff since getting a job, too. I applied for my own credit card, setup an investment account, and a bunch of adult stuff like that. I guess I’ll do taxes again in a few months. Sometimes I find myself talking about these things with my friends and I get this surreal, vertigo sensation of aging. When did I become the kind of guy who does has a 401k??? Strange, so strange. On paper I have the markers of adulthood, but in my head I’m just me.

Living

After staying at Leon’s, and then staying at Duckpond, I found a new place in downtown Berkeley. It’s a house of five – including one old friend from Berkeley days – making up the place we’ve dubbed Red Cedar Grove. This house has so far been remarkably undramatic in a glorious, fantastic way. Everyone does their chores; we have weekly meetings that last all of ten minutes; and we sometimes play board games in the evening. It’s smooth, drama-free, and cheap – kind of perfect, as living situations go.

For fun – I’ve been jamming with a group in Berkeley loosely called the Interdimensional Rhythm Riders. It features a long-haired guitarist who wants to move his family to China; a button-tucked e-saxophone novice; a Louisianan synth player; and my friend Adi who’s kickass on the cajon and foreign percussion instruments. Great to have a regular group, though I’ve only been a few times, and people who appreciate my saxophone playing (which I realize I’ve been playing since 2010).

Life these days is much more structured. I wake up in the morning, shower and sometimes run, then go to the office, and I stay there until 5pm. After I go to the YMCA and use the sauna, then walk home and practice guitar, or go out to meet a friend. Then I go to sleep. Each day is different and builds on the one before, but it’s also cyclical in its structure.

Backpacking in Asia felt like being on a tiny sailboat, where I could be blown any way by the wind, but also had ultimate freedom in my direction. I feel like I’m on a larger ship now; still in control, but movements require more thought and coordination.

Certainly, there are larger ships. If I wanted to, I could really pick up and leave any time (can only imagine what it feels like to have kids, pets, or house plants). But I don’t. A large part of me appreciates the stability, the feeling of going a month without questioning my major life decisions. With locked in commitment comes stability, and stability is the foundation for growth in other areas.

I feel the slow accumulation of experience that comes with a regularized life. And I also feel the way that it grinds on me come Friday afternoon. I long for the weekend, a breath of fresh air, a precious forty-eight hours where I get to pause and look at my life from a different vantage point. Sometimes I dive into a deep, late-night conversation, where time stops ticking and starts flowing, and I get to think about where I really am in the voyage of life.

MEDIA RECOMMENDATIONS

First time doing a section like this. Here are some movies, TV shows, books, and music I’ve found meaningful from the past ~eighteen months.

Movies & TV

• A Real Pain
  • Fantastic movie about travel, family, relationships. Are you a David or a Benji? I loved this movie and recommend it highly, though it is a certain style.
• Mr. Fantastic
  • Also weird, funny, thought-provoking.
• CODA
  • The lead actress learn how to sing, speak with an American actress, and sign for this movie!
• High School Musical: The Musical: The Series
  • Nostalgic, self-aware, humorous, appeals to the Gen Z-ers and to the teens of nowadays.
• Wicked
  • Great music, both lead actresses vegan!

Books: The books I read are few, but I do get quite immersed in them.

• Breath by Eric Nestor
  • Here’s your daily reminder to take deep breaths, through your nose and into your belly.
• Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
  • Vance writes beautifully, honestly, humbly about his childhood and family. It’s illuminating to see the heart-felt work of people who (now) have different views from myself. I’m not a Republican but I really appreciate his writing.
• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
  • Another memoir. The audio book is on Spotify. She talks really fast! Wonderful, vulnerable stream of consciousness style of writing where you really get inside her head.
• The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
  • Great writing. COVID diaries, of a sort. Remarkably unremarkable subjects, written in a way that makes it personal.
• Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson
  • Excellent high-fantasy. Epic, profound.
• River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
  • A wonderful memoir about Hessler’s life in the Peace Corps in China in Sichuan province. It captures the magic of language learning and connection to a place – the same magic I felt in Kaohsiung a quarter century later.
• The Harry Potter Series
  • I listened to the audio version of this by Stephen Fry while wandering about China. Listening to books makes you tune into every word and deepened my relationship with these books (which I’ve already read twice!)
• A Wizard of Earthsea
  • 1960s fantasy recommended by my roommate.
• The 2-Hour Job Search, Steve Dalton

Songs: These are songs that have been significant to me lately. In this post, I’ve tried to express how my life has been in the English language, but there’s aspects of this form of communication that don’t fully convey that. Another way of saying how I’ve been, you might say, is sharing music that has resonated with me lately, like how a vinyl record has the etchings of the needling scratched into the disc. I wouldn’t call these recommendations; since music is so personal, and what resonates for me may not resonate for you. But I would like to share for you and for myself.

• Cycles, Frank Sinatra
• Until I Found You, Stephen Sanchez
• New Partner, Palace Music
• Orpheus, Sara Bareilles
• Piano Concerto in G Major, M. 83: II. Adagio assai. Recorded by Yundi Li and the Berlin Philharmoniker.
• Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right by Bob Dylan
• Mr. Tambourine Man
• Everyday, Buddy Holiday
• enough for you, Olivia Rodrigo
• You and I, Ingrid Michaelson
• When There Was Me and You, Joshua Bassett
• Stick Season, Noah Kahan

FAQs

If you’re a new subscriber, you may have questions: why blog? Isn’t this so 90s? Also have you thought about using Substack?

• Why the semi-annual post?
  • I feel it’s important and meaningful to stay in touch with people from different stages through my life. As someone whose lived in three cities (London, Berkeley, and Kaohsiung) each on three different continents, this is especially true. I find the other options for doing this en mass (Facebook or Instagram) lacking. Hence the long-form post. Those who read way down to this point are the real ones (and you should definitely email me in response!).
  • The inspiration for this was two friends (David Zilberman and Nico Stubler) who had periodic posts similar to this one.
• Why long-form writing?
  • Writing to me is a true, pure, direct expression of thought. It’s like the transcription of a memory, because the letters on the page will hopefully create some kind of experience in your mind that mirrors the ones I had.
  • It’s for this reason that I really appreciate memoirs. I find them a way to gain more life experience without doing all too much. It’s extremely instructive to me to see how other people have navigated through life – both in actions and cognitive responses. This blog is not a full memoir (I’ll wait a while longer for that) but it is auto-biographical.
• Why not Substack or another service?
  • I’m stubbornly attached the bespoke, homegrown style of my blog. Can’t say it better than Kingsley Shacklebolt.
• So how do you host your website and this email list?
  • The website is hosted for free on Github through something called Github Pages. I based the styling off a theme called Alfolio.
  • I pay for the domain on Namecheap for about $15 dollars a year. What a steal, right!
  • This email list is a Google group which I update whenever I move / make new friends.
• But then, why did you say in the “updates” section that you’re starting to use Instagram again?
  • I’m trying to have one central place to put nice photos that represent experiences I have. Using a blog for this is clunky. I suppose Instagram is useful as a way to get someone’s contact, since a lot of people have it. I might revisit this decision after trying it out.

thanks for reading!! let me know how you’re doing!!!