Apparently Naver Blog has entered the age of the super sample.

Which is to say: people no longer merely make things alone and present the finished result. Now everybody piles onto something together, copying, modifying, improving, and building outward until imitation itself becomes a distribution system.

There is a video explaining the idea through Tesla, Linux, and Dubai chewy cookies: the person who makes something easy enough to copy can eventually become the standard.

Naver has even started adding little information features around this sort of thing.

Interesting.

Anyway, unrelated but important: the summer of Joo Hye-rin is coming.

Her music is SO good. It reminds me a little of old Roller Coaster songs with one or two spoonfuls of bossa nova mixed in.

I’ve been making little music samples myself and thinking about uploading them to SoundCloud, but for some reason I still cannot quite bring myself to do it. Maybe Instagram would be easier. I’m debating.

And then I think about DJs who stand in front of actual crowds, play music live, and somehow lead a rave.

Truly remarkable people.

I am absolutely not built for a stage.

Never have been.

Back in school, there were these girls with giant lion-mane hair who barely came to class but somehow controlled the lunch-hour playlist, blasting SeeYa and Monday Kiz every day. Eventually I thought, This cannot continue. Someone must open a new era of lunchtime music.

So I applied to be an announcer in the broadcasting club.

I somehow made it to the final.

Then the girl competing against me did an impression of her mother as her special talent.

Done.

Finished.

I was eliminated immediately.

Some kinds of charisma are simply congenital.

And yet, being able to pitch yourself in the moment really does matter.

I have always found it strangely difficult to produce results when I am placed directly in that kind of setting.

Once, I got an interview for a sales internship. I dressed properly, took the bus, prepared a script, and even obediently practised the one-minute elevator pitch the career centre had taught me—inside the actual elevator, because apparently I respected symbolism.

It was a one-on-one interview.

The interviewer listened for perhaps five seconds and said:

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.”

That was it.

But I was young enough that it barely damaged me. I went home mostly excited to smoke hookah with my Jordanian roommate and make budae-jjigae.

In retrospect, having very few thoughts was excellent for resilience.

What I do regret is not trying to sell something—anything—when I was in my twenties.

I had microscopic nerve, and I doubt a bank would have lent me much money anyway, which means even if I had failed spectacularly, there probably wasn’t much to lose.

I should have sold bungeoppang.

I never seriously imagined running a business. Instead, I haunted secondhand marketplaces and eBay, buying and reselling things at stupid prices and repeatedly losing small amounts of money.

To be fair, I was living in rural New York. There weren’t that many people around, and whenever there were, some local fundraising event seemed to be competing for the same tiny pool of buyers.

Still, I once got invited to a small student business fair, and one girl there had built a little sourcing operation around plants. She grew some herself, contacted nearby farms, and supplied local restaurants directly.

She was my age.

I remember thinking, How does one person do all of that?

It made business feel even more distant.

At the time, I thought entrepreneurship worked like this: an idea suddenly appears in your head, you execute it perfectly with no revisions, everything moves in a straight line, and then you become rich.

Perhaps that occasionally happens.

After working in companies for long enough, though, I’ve developed the vague impression that most things need to be revised, adjusted, rebuilt, and improved several times before they become anything useful.

Which makes me wish I had crashed into more things in my twenties.

Youth may actually be measured in watts.

After work one evening, I drove out to Grand Haven to get some air and finally used my electric scooter again.

The route between my new place and work has no proper sidewalk or bike path, so the scooter has been sitting around neglected. The weather was still in that perfect phase before summer becomes aggressively hot, so I took it out and just RAN IT.

Everyone in town seemed to be outside too. Nothing special was happening, but because the weather was good and everybody was out living their little outdoor lives, the whole place felt like a local festival.

I got hungry and ate two hot dogs.

The ice cream defeated me.

Far too much.

CHEERS~

I also need to lose weight because apparently I have to get married before forty.

There is currently no husband candidate.

ACTIVELY SEEKING.

Years ago, I was in a car with an older guy I knew and a boy I liked. The older guy kept teasing me—“You like him, don’t you?”—so relentlessly that I genuinely could not breathe.

Eventually I said, “Fine, I’ll shave my head and become a Buddhist nun.”

The boy I liked looked horrified.

The expression was basically: I knew this noona was weird, but what kind of sentence is that?

And now here I am, thirty-four, still unmarried.

I suspect I may still be saying things like this at forty.

Another weekend I went downtown Holland to see The Mandalorian, and there happened to be a little weekend market going on.

You know I love these things.

People had basically gathered together and put miscellaneous things out for sale, and I walked around very happily.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with tomatoes.

I want to grow tomatoes.

After watching The Mandalorian at a leisurely pace, I rested for a bit and then went stargazing, which had actually been part of the plan.

Whenever I want to remember that Michigan is still, in large part, open country, I go look at the sky.

I used to do it fairly often until winter interrupted the habit. Coming back in early summer felt different. The air was softer, more people had brought chairs and telescopes, and the whole place had the mild sociability of a neighbourhood outing rather than an astronomical expedition.

Through a telescope, most celestial objects are still astonishingly small.

So I mostly prefer the naked eye.

A camping chair, the sky overhead, nothing particularly required of me.

If I get curious, I wander over to one or two telescopes. Some belong to the observatory and some belong to people who have simply brought their own, so it is polite to ask before leaning into somebody else’s universe.

That night Venus and Jupiter were supposed to draw close together. Venus sat inconveniently against the tree line, so I never got the perfect view of the two meeting.

Still, even with my increasingly unreliable eyesight, I could tell Venus was Venus.

Good enough.

For something more serious, Adler Planetarium in Chicago is better. Its domed projection fills your entire field of vision in a way even a very large television cannot. A documentary in your living room is still a rectangle. A planetarium briefly removes the room.

But that night Michigan was enough.

Sitting there reminded me of a friend who travelled through India in her twenties. She once spent a night in the desert with soju, camels, and a sky so full of stars that it seemed almost badly designed—too many of them, all at once.

I always thought that was brave.

So was the rest of the trip. At first she got ripped off by rickshaw drivers; eventually she became experienced enough to out-negotiate them.

She grew into the journey.

I admire that kind of nerve.

I also know I probably don’t have it.

I am now a cautious thirty-something estrogen baby. I am unlikely to cross India by rickshaw, sleep beside a camel, or test my bargaining skills against professional scammers.

My version is smaller.

Drive somewhere after work.

Take out the scooter.

Buy too much ice cream.

Sit under the Michigan sky until it gets properly dark.

Sometimes I think youth really is measured in watts—the amount of force you are willing to throw at the unknown before calculating whether it is sensible.

Maybe mine is lower now.

But the light lasts longer these days.

That seems worth something too!