Lessons Learned from 30 Days of Blogging

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last month, I decided to blog every day. As I explained earlier:

For whatever reason, I’ve found writing hard to do the past few years, and this year has been the hardest. I’ve also been disinclined to think out loud, even though I’ve had a lot I’ve wanted to say and share, both personally and professionally.

Mid-way through the experiment, I reported:

What it’s been doing is helping unlock whatever has been inside of me. I’ve been precious about sharing what I’ve been thinking, not wanting to say them unless I can say them well and feeling paralyzed as a result. I’ve also found it overwhelming at times to try to blog. I guess things are crazy in the world right now, and it’s not only affecting my mental health, it’s hard for me to make sense of it all.

Blogging as a practice has reminded me not to be too precious. The less I try to say, the less overwhelming I feel. The more frequently I share, the less I have to worry about saying it all in one piece, which makes it much easier to write. Plus, even though I don’t think I’ve shown it yet, I’m starting to remember what it feels like to write well. I’m rounding into shape again, which always feels good.

…

The biggest surprise has been that sharing regularly has helped me re-engage with my broader community. I didn’t think anyone really followed this blog anymore, and because I’m rarely on social media anymore, the algorithms seem to have decided I’m not worthy of most people’s feeds. Still, some people are paying attention to what I’m saying, and getting to hear from them has been a treat and is also motivating me to write more.

After having finished the experiment, I’m not sure I have anything different to report, other than to say that I don’t think I had any breakthroughs after 30 days, and I want to keep exercising this muscle. I thought seriously about extending my project through the end of the year, but I opted against it for a few reasons. Even though it wasn’t particularly stressful, it wasn’t stress-free either, and I don’t need the added pressure this month. It also tires out muscles that I’m using for work right now. I can focus on developing these muscles more when work settles down.

In the meantime, I think the exercise still is helping me share more than I was before. This is my third blog post in December. I think a good pace for me is to be blogging about once a week, especially when those posts are more or less organic.

Maybe the most interesting thing for me was seeing what I chose to blog about. This wasn’t just a writing exercise, it was a sharing exercise. I aggregated all of the tags from those 30 days of blog posts and ran them through WordClouds.com to see if I could detect any patterns.

Not surprisingly, I wrote a lot about COVID-19 and the elections. It was nice to see that I wrote quite a bit about collaboration. This wasn’t my goal, but I admit I was curious to see how often I felt compelled to write about “work stuff” — the original purpose of this blog — especially when I had so many other things on my mind. I loved that I wrote about a lot about making — food and art and photography and stories in general.

Finally, I was curious about the people and places I wrote about. Here were people I knew whom I mentioned in various posts (not including my partner and sister, whom I mentioned often and didn’t bother tagging):

I loved seeing this list. My interactions with others play such a huge role in what I think about and how I feel, and I love being able to share this space with the people in my life.

People I mentioned whom I don’t know:

Places I mentioned:

  • Africa
    • Nigeria
  • Alaska
  • California
    • Bay Area
      • Colma
      • Oakland
        • Joaquin Miller Park
        • Mountain View Cemetery
      • San Francisco
        • Fort Point
        • Golden Gate Bridge
    • Los Angeles
      • Forest Lawn
  • Cincinnati
  • Santa Fe
    • Ghost Ranch

The Current Lockdown, Security Theater, and Second-Order Effects

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

We’ve been under “full” lockdown here in the Bay Area for almost a week. The rules have been much more lax than they were when we first went into lockdown in March. Understandably so — we know a lot more about the virus now than we did when it started. However, the changes have barely been evident to me. All the retail stores are open, and people seem to be out and about just as much as they were two weeks ago.

Outdoor dining, however, isn’t allowed. This smells like security theater. If you can spend 30 minutes in a poorly ventilated store with others — admittedly, with everyone masked — is it really less safe to eat outdoors spaced from others?

I get that you have to do something different (3,000 people dying every day is absolutely horrific), that sometimes it’s the second- or third-order effects that result in the changes you want, not the first. But I feel for folks who are most impacted by these rules (such as restaurants) when it’s not clear that the rules are addressing what most needs to be addressed. It’s also just confusing for everybody, and you have to wonder if the confusion is undermining the point of the order in the first place.

Apparently, this past Thursday, San Francisco changed the rules again, now allowing people to meet with one person outside of their household for an outdoor, spaced and masked walk. Again, this feels safe, but if this is now allowed, what is the theory of change of this whole lockdown again?

It will be interesting to see which way the numbers are trending in a few weeks.

Walking in the Fog

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last night, my partner and I went for an early evening walk at Land’s End to try and spot some owls. As we arrived at the trail head, the fog quickly started rolling in.

Walking in the fog at night can be cold and creepy, but last night, it created a sense of intimacy. It was quiet and still, and there was just enough light to cast a cool, dispersed glow over the Bay.

As we walked, we saw a helicopter flying close to the Golden Gate Bridge. Seeing choppers in this area isn’t unusual, but this one was sweeping back and forth over the Bay, with a spotlight shining brightly over the water. It felt like we were alone in a very large room, just the two of us and the helicopter, searching for something in the water.

The Uncanny Valley of Leadership

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’m a reasonably responsible voter. I vote pretty much every year, including off-years, and I do my best to educate myself on the issues. I’m lucky to be surrounded by folks who are extremely engaged, and I often “consult” with them on issues or candidates I don’t know well. Sadly, “consult” often means simply voting the way my friends tell me to vote.

Four years ago, disturbed by the direction our country was moving, I took a hard look in the mirror about my own level of civic engagement. Because I was already spending a good amount of my professional time working on national issues, I decided to focus my personal time on local issues. It was an easy decision, because I quickly realized how ignorant I was about what was going on in my own neighborhood, much less the city of San Francisco.

I started attending local meetings (which bear a shocking resemblance to the meetings on Parks and Recreation) and reading up on local issues. I met my Supervisor, whom I had voted for, but whom I had known nothing about. I learned that San Francisco has a $13 billion (!) budget, and that roughly half of this money comes from self-supporting services, such as public transportation (although this has changed dramatically, thanks to the pandemic). It seems like I should have known all this stuff before happily asserting my civic rights, year-after-year, but I was happy to finally start correcting this.

Flash forward to today’s election. About a month ago, I looked at my ballot, and I was troubled to discover that I was no better equipped to make decisions this year than I was in any other year.

For example, there were seven candidates running for Supervisor in my district. I tried to read up on all of them, which helped me narrow the field to three, but didn’t help me beyond that. San Francisco has ranked choice voting, which meant that I could vote for all three (which I did), but it didn’t help me with the order. I ended up voting for the person endorsed by the current Supervisor. I happened to run into her at a neighborhood restaurant (after already voting for her), and she left a good impression, but good impressions — while important — don’t seem like the best criteria for making these kinds of decisions.

In animation, there’s this concept known as the “uncanny valley.” When we see cartoonish versions of people, we are untroubled. We know they are meant to be representative, not realistic depictions of human beings, and we can appreciate them as such. We also react well to perfectly realistic depictions. However, we find depictions that seem almost human-like to be creepy, even revolting. (Think The Polar Express.)

I feel like there’s also an uncanny valley when it comes to assessing leadership. Federal and perhaps even state-level officials are the equivalent to the cartoonish representations of people. There’s no way for us to really know them, so we form opinions based on things that may not actually say much about whether or not they would make competent leaders, such as their opinions on various issues or how likable they seem to be.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are the leaders we actually know — our bosses, for example. We form our opinions of their leadership based on working with them, which seems like an appropriate way to make these kinds of assessments.

How, then, should we judge folks running for Supervisor or our local School Boards? These are folks I might run into at a local coffee shop and could actually have a conversation with if I have concerns or questions. Why is it so hard for me to assess who might be good for these positions? I think it’s because they fall into this uncanny valley of leadership, where they seem accessible, and yet there are aspects of them that seem fundamentally unknowable, and that feels unsettling.

Watching the Grand Princess Leave San Francisco Bay After Its Quarantine

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

On my walk to Baker Beach this afternoon, I happened across the Grand Princess leaving San Francisco Bay after a 14-day COVID-19 crew quarantine.

On any other day, I would have barely paid attention. But these are not ordinary times. So I stopped, and I watched, and I wondered, as the sandpipers played by the crashing waves, unaware of the strange things occupying my mind in these strange times.