Category: Uncategorized

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Baseball joy in a pandemic year

This post first appeared on Medium.

It’s September and I’m driving a vast stretch of Highway 80 with my husband and adult daughter, listening to a San Francisco Giants baseball game. We’re returning to the Bay Area after backpacking in Colorado, a last-minute detour to avoid the wildfires ravaging parts of California. The Giants are at home, playing the Atlanta Braves and leading 4–2, until Atlanta scores three runs to pull ahead. In the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and down to his last strike, Giants second baseman Donovan Solano (just returned from a ten-day Covid quarantine) hits a home run to tie the game and sends it into extra innings. Our car erupts in cheers.

I didn’t grow up a sports fan. My Korean immigrant parents didn’t know anything about America’s pastime. Making a life here took every bit of energy they had, and besides, I was a girl. My brother played volleyball and collected trading cards. I read books and played the piano. To me, baseball fans went to the ballpark with their dads and learned obscure lore at their grandfathers’ knee. They listened to the games under their covers at night, transistor radio pressed to their ear. Like everything else I learned about American life, all I knew about baseball fans I got from TV.

That changed in the fall of 2010. My husband and I were working on a big painting project, so on weekends and evenings, we donned primer-splattered t-shirts and worked while listening to the local broadcasters call the game. The Giants were in the playoffs, but a knowledgeable friend said they wouldn’t go far. To my amazement, San Francisco beat Atlanta in the division series, the Phillies in the championship series, and then defeated the Rangers to win the World Series. I started paying attention at just the right moment. Lightning struck and I was hooked.

Like millions of others, I’ve struggled through the past eighteen months of the pandemic. As I cycled through anxiety and depression, paralysis and rage, consolation arrived from an unexpected source. The 2021 Giants were made up of aging stars, unknown youngsters, and journeyman-like platoon players. They were projected to be good-to-middling, maybe winning 75–80 games. Then, early in the season, they started winning.

Sometimes they won by hitting home runs and playing outstanding defense. Other times, the victory was by the flukiest of margins: a clutch hit, a favorable umpire call, or an opponent’s error. It didn’t matter. Day by day, game after game, the Giants kept winning. Center fielder Mike Tauchman defied gravity to rob Albert Pujols of a home run. LaMonte Wade Jr’s clutch, late-inning hits earned him the nickname “Late Night.” Shortstop Brandon Crawford’s diving stops and acrobatic throws embodied grace under pressure. The pundits and the naysayers and even their own fans kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. They weren’t supposed to be this good, and yet here they were. From May through September, with the richer, astoundingly talented Dodgers breathing down their necks, the Giants hung on to win 107 games and the division by a single game. In doing so, they gave me something that was sorely lacking in this difficult pandemic year. I almost didn’t recognize the feeling: I felt cheerful.

Last Thursday, the Giants lost 2–1 in the final game of the NLDS, after an intensely fought, five-game series against the Dodgers. The season is over for San Francisco. Fans of other teams will continue riding the postseason roller coaster, while Giants’ fans contemplate both a disappointing loss and the magic of a season like no other.

Here’s what I’ll remember: we’re barreling down I-80, the night so black we could’ve been hurtling through space. It’s the bottom of the eleventh now, the game still tied, Atlanta on the field. The bases are loaded with just one out, but the Giants have run out of position players to pinch-hit so the manager Gabe Kapler sends pitcher Kevin Gausman to the plate. We groan. Pitchers are generally terrible batters. Gausman falls behind in the count, then works it full. We lean in, hearts pounding, hardly breathing. Gausman hits a sac fly to deep right. From third base, Brandon Crawford breaks for the plate and executes a perfect fade-away slide. Once again, the Giants win. And there we are — my husband, daughter, and me — beleaguered from the year, still grimy with Colorado dirt, flying through the dark expanse and screaming for joy.

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The Artist in Everyday Life

I have many ideas. Too many, really.

Like the essay I want to write about being a Korean immigrant kid experiencing America’s national parks.

Or enrolling in East Asia studies classes via UC Berkeley’s extension program.

Or learning Chinese characters.

But one idea has persisted over several years: the artist in everday life.

I know so many writers, musicians, painters, dancers, filmmakers, and so on, who are serious artists and yet are also living in life’s rich and complicated realities: a day job, caring for children, caring for aging parents, dealing with illness and other traumas.

I would like to equip and celebrate such artists with a website and podcast.

I have the vision, the web and podcasting skills, and even the people I’d want to highlight. Now all I need to find is the bandwidth!

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Beginner Friendly

It’s a cool summer evening and I’m standing on the spongy outfield grass of a local middle school trying to remember the points of properly throwing a frisbee: Plant the back foot. Look where you want to throw. Move the arm across the body in one smooth motion, then flick the wrist.

Relax.

I take a breath, turn, and throw, and watch the plastic circle arc up and far to the right of my target. With a pang of embarrassment, I watch my throwing buddy wave off my apologies as she runs over — waaaay over — to pick up the misthrown disc.

Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve expertise. By the count, I have about 9, 985 hours to go — roughly 20 hours a week for ten years —  before I become an Ultimate frisbee virtuoso.

Growing up as a bookish girl in an immigrant family, it never occurred to me that sports could be fun. Also, even as a child, I hated feeling incompetent. The list of traumatic childhood memories associated with mandatory sports or physical activity is too long for one blog post: Standing on the outfield in kickball desperately hoping that (please, please, please) the ball wouldn’t come to me, being the last to be picked for a team, the torture that was the Presidential Fitness test — I could go on, but I will save the rest for my therapist.

For the past four years, I’ve watched my daughter Anna grow increasingly more devoted to the sport of Ultimate. I’d begun to regret that I’d never played a team sport. Over the years, I had learned to jog and even enjoy going to the gym, but learning a new sport seemed to be a privilege afforded to youth.

“If only there were a beginner-friendly way to play Ultimate,” I said more than once. “I’d totally sign up.”

So when a group of moms decided to form the Flaming Mother Huckers, how could I say no?

The FMH is a women’s Ultimate team made up of beginners or those who haven’t played for decades. We are good spirited and friendly, and we try hard. We are coached by experienced players (often our own children) who are generous and patient with our ineptitude.

I may hate feeling incompetent but, as it turns out, I enjoy learning new things — like how to throw, how to catch, and how charge across the grass toward my teammate — arms and legs flailing, looking every bit the uncoordinated newbie that I am — calling for the disc. Sometimes I catch it. Sometimes I drop it. But I hope it comes to me, every time.

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Boring tips for earth day

Nothing catches the eye and enlivens the spirit more than a chunk of text with the word “boring” in the title, amirite?

As a person who enjoys self-improvement projects, I often rely on the excitement of new innovations, strategies, or products to kick start me down a path to better habits, less stuff, or more organization. The changes I’ve made in response to my church’s call to deepen environmental stewardship, on the other hand, have been rather pedestrian and (surprisingly) meaningful.

Eat Less Meat — raising meat for food is resource intensive and bad for global warming, so during Lent, Wes and I stopped eating meat and fish. Lent is now over but I’ve maintained eating less meat by cooking vegetarian meals at home and choosing the veg option whenever I can. I eat meat when it is served to me and as an occasional treat (hello, sashimi). On a side note, I happened to get a medical checkup recently and my doctor was really, really happy with my cholesterol levels. The last time I had a full check up was about a decade ago, which I realize hardly constitutes a baseline, but I do remember the doctor saying that my cholesterol back then was on the higher side of normal.

Buying less stuff — We know that our landfills and oceans are filled with a heartbreaking amount of plastic. So we should replace the plastic in our lives with glass straws, reusable produce bags, and bamboo to-go utensils, right? Not necessarily. One of the greenest things we can do is buy fewer things and use the things we already have. So I’m washing plastic produce bags, reusing the boba straws we’ve accumulated, and carrying around mismatching plastic utensils. We still have a ton of plastic in our daily lives but less new plastic is coming into our home. And, yes, many of you have been doing this for years and I used to make fun of you for doing so.

Utilizing community — I’m learning from the green warriors who are leading the way in my real and virtual community. For example, there is a woman in my church who collects mylar (chip bags, power bar wrappers) and many other hard-to-recycle items to send in to this website to raise money for her child’s school. She has agreed to collect such items from others — I’m so jumping on that bandwagon!

Bringing trash home — The El Cerrito Recycling Center is amazing. They take many things, including “plastic film,” which is everything from cling wrap to grocery bags. Also, the City of Berkeley will take any hard plastic (cups, yogurt containers, trays). Since we have such great recycling options, I try hard not to send things to the landfill (and, yes, I know there is an international recycling crisis right now because China is eschewing foreign plastic). So when I eat a Cliff Bar or Anna buys pearl milk tea, we carry the trash home. I have not yet become sufficiently radicalized to bring other people’s trash home…but you know, I’m open.

I would love to hear what everyday things you are doing to build a greener world. Happy Earth Day!

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Backpacking Joshua Tree National Park

Date: Feb 16-18, 2018
Location: Joshua Tree National Park
Trail: Boy Scout Trail to Window Loop (out and back)
Total Mileage: 18 miles
Hikers (listed by hiking names, from oldest to youngest): Jake, Hot Lunch, Tricky Kate, Positive Pierre, Mountain Pup

I wouldn’t have chosen Joshua Tree National Park as the next destination in my still-nascent backpacking career, but it is just two hours from where Tricky Kate goes to college and the prospect of her coming along motivated us to overcome the biggest barrier to entry which was…

Water.

Joshua Tree is a desert (two deserts, actually, the Mojave and the Sonora) and therefore lacks natural, accessible (to humans) water sources. Because it is a desert, even if you do come upon water (from a recent rainfall, for example), you’re supposed to leave it for the desert critters.

Did you know that a liter of water weighs 2.2 lbs? Because it was winter, we figured we could get away with 4 liters of water per person, per day. For a 2.5 day trip, this meant that each of us needed to carry 22 lbs of water, in addition to the rest of our gear. Yowza.

February (and especially President’s Day weekend) is a very popular time to come to the park. We knew we wouldn’t be able to make it there early enough to snag a first-come-first-served camping spot, so we opted to hike out and spend our first night in the backcountry.

We arrived at the trailhead at about 5:30 pm. After filling out our (free) permit, we headed off.

As the desert landscape sank into darkness, the night sky filled with stars, the likes of which we rarely experience in our light-polluted world. The Dippers, the North Star, Orion’s Belt…we could name only a few of the innumerable stars we saw above us.

After walking for about two hours, we set up camp off trail (at least 500 feet, please) and went to sleep on what turned out to be a very cold night. I slept in my down sleeping bag wearing my rain jacket and a hat and still felt uncomfortably chilly. It was the kind of night where you constantly wake up because it’s hard to get comfortable and it’s so freakin’ cold and you have to pee but it’s too frigid to contemplate getting out of your sleeping bag.

The temperature had only dipped into the low 40s, but when we woke up we found ice floating in our water jugs. Jake explained that in the desert, 40 degrees can feel a lot colder because of the loss of infrared radiation to outer space. I’m still thinking about this one.

We ate breakfast and packed up and continued along the Boy Scout Trail in what turned out to be perfect hiking weather. We took a break shortly after the turnoff to Big Pine trail to scramble up Big Pine mountain. Positive Pierre bounded up the boulders like it was nothing. With my general fear of heights and my shoulder injury, I was the slowest of the group but everyone was very upbeat and patient with me. (This is not my most favorite feeling in the world, but I’ve mostly decided that if I want to keep exploring the wilderness, I have to just get over it.)

From the top of Big Pine Mountain. Not sure why Positive Pierre is looking so serious here. He was usually so…positive.

We made our way to the Window loop trail and set up camp among the surreal-looking rocks and boulders, then spent the rest of the afternoon napping, exploring, and climbing another peak where we discovered an enormous trove of what turned out to be bat guano. Eek.

We returned to camp and while we waited for our water to boil for dinner, I read aloud from the pages of a New Yorker article about polar exploration that I had torn out of the magazine and brought along (fantastic article — well worth your time to read). Despite all the snow and ice, Antarctica is a desert so it felt especially fitting to read about polar explorers’ travails and feats of endurance while we were huddled over our little camping stove in the middle of the Mojave.

Our campsite, night 2.

I was trying to explain to a coworker who had never been camping why it’s so fun. Camping in general — and backpacking in particular — usually involves a series of minor discomforts. You don’t sleep well, it’s cold, it’s hot, your muscles are sore, your pack is heavy, the food is terrible (though instant mashed potatoes and tuna packets never tasted so good as after a long day on the trail). So what makes backpacking fun? The five of us on this trip agreed that we had had a really fun time and itched to do it again. Why?

For me, it comes down to these things:

  1. Nature! As Thoreau wrote, “We need the tonic of wildness.”
  2. Exertion and simplicity — for a day or two, we were forced to unplug from our technology-filled lives and focus on the most basic aspects of life: food, water, shelter. While physically taxing, it’s mentally super relaxing for me.
  3. Camaraderie — we laughed. A lot. We worked together and encouraged one another and generally enjoyed one another’s company.

 

 

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Sunday poem: Wendell Berry

From Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

IV.

Who makes a clearing makes a work of art,
The true world’s Sabbath trees in festival
Around it. And the stepping stream, a part
Of Sabbath also, flows past, but its fall
Made musical, making the hillslope by
Its fall, and still at rest in falling, song
Rising. The field is made by hand and eye,
By daily work, by hope outreaching wrong,
And yet the Sabbath, parted, still must stay
In the dark mazings of the soil no hand
May light, the great Life, broken, make its way
Along the streamy footholds of the ant.
Bewildered in our timely dwelling place,
Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.

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Backpacking to Maude Lake, Desolation Wilderness

A highlight of the summer so far has been getting to hang out with three young Mudders (a student or alum from Harvey Mudd College). One Mudder is living with us for the summer while she interns at a little-known internet search engine company. The other two Mudders have graduated and are waiting to start grad school and a new job respectively. (Our daughter Kate attends HMC, but is away for the summer so we are using her friends as substitute children).

If you haven’t gone backpacking for, say, 20+ years, I highly recommend going with adventurous young adults in their early twenties. For one thing, they are strong and will carry a lot of the heavy stuff. They will volunteer to carry and cook the food and bring nice extras like hammocks or an extra blanket to use when napping outdoors.

We drove out of the East Bay at 5:00pm on Friday. With a dinner stop and traffic, we didn’t roll into our car camping spot at Wright’s Lake until 10:00. I immediately pitched a tent but others chose a more direct sleep option.

There is a person in there. Picnic table bed…why not?

Our plan was to sleep in until 8:00, but the bright morning light and the presence of many mosquitos “encouraged” us to hit the trail early. It was a varied, lovely, occasionally uphill 5-mile walk to Maude Lake.  

We found a nice campsite and two Mudders offered to prepare lunch while the third Mudder entertained us by reading from CS Lewis’ Perelandra. Lunch was “fajitas” made with canned chili con carne. I don’t know if it was actually good, or only everything-tastes-good-after-a-long-hike good, but it was delicious.

Wes and Mudders 1 and 2 decided to explore a nearby peak but Mudder 3 and I decided to nap and read and nap some more.  After a bit, we decided to go for a swim in Maude Lake, which turned out to be more of a quick dip because water was so cold it literally knocked the breath out of us.

The weather was perfect and the day so pleasant, but once dusk arrived, those darn mosquitos came back with a vengeance. We had to eat our yummy pasta dinner as fast as we could before being driven to cower and play cards in one of the tents. We were all a bit stiff from all that hiking and sitting in the cramped tent space wasn’t ideal, so we took a break from card playing to stretch.

The next morning, we decided that we had time for a mini hike and so set off. That view! I managed to jerry-rig a tripod and used the timer on my phone to snap that ever-elusive all-group photo.

We then packed up our campsite and hiked back out, somehow managing to end up on the opposite side of Wright’s Lake than where we had parked.

We waited by the cool water while Wes and Mudder 1 went to get the car. We drove back through the Sacramento heat (103 F) in our 1996 van that doesn’t have AC. So much bonding.

Thank you, Mudders! The trip was really fun and I’m already itching (mosquitos, ha ha, get it?) for more.

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Sugar Detox : Day 1

If you want to eat healthier, it usually means cooking more. It’s the “high maintenance” aspect of any kind of program, whether it be paleo, Whole 30, Weight Watchers, AIP or whatever. Unless you are willing to pay top dollar to have quality food made for you (there are now many food delivery services that cater to special diets) or be willing to eat the same boring foods all the time (Trader Joe’s turkey burgers, anyone?), you have to cook.

I went to the library and checked out a book by the author of one of my favorite paleo cooking sites, Nomnom Paleo and a second book that looked interesting.

For the first day of the sugar detox, I had

Man, that’s a lot of protein! Other than that very obvious observation, I will note that the large, protein-intensive breakfast kept me full for a long time. Both the spicy pork stir fry and the beef chili were quite good and very easy to make.

Tomorrow, I will try and eat more veggies. I’m used to relying on fruit as both a snack and a source of fiber. I think I have to ramp up my green veggie game.

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Sugar Detox – Preparation

Tomorrow (July 1) is the start of our one-month sugar detox. Are you ready?

Remember, the first three days of the detox are the most rigid. What you can eat:

  • Up to 6oz protein per meal
  • up to 1 oz nuts – 2x day
  • up to 1/2 avocado per day
  • unlimited non-starchy veggies like arugula, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, kale, peppers, zucchini
  • up to one cup black coffee
  • unlimited unsweetened tea
  • vinegar, spices, oil for cooking

On the “No” list

  • added sugar (obviously)
  • artificial sweetener
  • alcohol
  • dairy
  • fruit (except lemon/lime for add to water)
  • starches: pasta, cereal, rice, quinoa, etc

Eating from such a restricted list of foods means stocking up on foods that I normally wouldn’t buy, but I find that having some convenient stuff on hand is really helpful. In my fridge, cauliflower and broccoli “rice” from Trader Joes and turkey burgers. I’ll also stock up on pre-washed kale and eggs. Lots of eggs.

May the odds ever be in our favor!

 

 

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Midyear Reset: One Month Sugar Detox

As far as detoxes go, this one in this article featuring Dr. Robert Lustig seems reasonable and challenging, but not TOO hard. It’s designed to help you break up with sugar. You basically do a low carb diet for the first three days, then slowly add in other stuff.

Wes read Dr. Lustig’s book, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease a while back and became convinced of the toxic impact of all the added sugar in our diet. We’ve also had friends with some pretty tricky autoimmune issues who have been vastly helped as they’ve eliminated added sugar.

But sugar is everywhere and very hard to avoid. Also, it tastes really good.

That’s where intentionality and structure can be really helpful.

The first three days of the detox are fairly simple:

Days 1- 3: no added sugars — but also no fruits, no starchy vegetables (such as corn, peas, sweet potatoes and butternut squash), no dairy, no grains and no alcohol. No artificial sweeteners.

“For example, breakfast can include three eggs, any style; lunch can include up to 6 ounces of poultry, fish or tofu and a green salad, and dinner is basically a larger version of lunch, though steamed vegetables such as broccoli, kale and spinach can be eaten in place of salad. Snacks include an ounce of nuts and sliced peppers with hummus. Beverages include water, unsweetened tea and black coffee.”

For many of you, a sugar detox does not make sense right now. You are on vacation. You are on a pilgrimage. But for the rest of us, why not a midyear health reset? Who wants to do this with me?

Detox starts on July 1.

Leave a note in the comments or shoot me an email. If you don’t know my email address, you can reach me via this contact form

By the way, the photo is of some almonds on my desk at work. I’m planning to eat more than that on this detox.

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