(Cat, I farted.)

May is Family Month in Korea, so naturally here is a weekend outing from one of Michigan’s most committed estrogen-girl types.

I really need to finish the coffee beans sitting at home, yet I keep buying coffee outside, which is an impressive little festival of unnecessary spending. In my defence, making coffee properly is annoyingly labor-intensive. Grind the beans, shake them into the flask, boil water, pour it slowly, control the amount, drink it—and after all that, I still can’t reliably tell you what tastes different.

And I didn’t even start with ground coffee. I decided I should buy whole beans and grind them myself, which was an ambitious lifestyle choice for a person like me.

Lee Chae-eun, Grand Master of Laziness.

This is also the person who comes home Monday through Sunday, throws worn clothes straight into the washing machine, runs it over the weekend, transfers everything to the dryer, and then begins Monday morning by taking clothes directly out of the dryer and putting them on.

Laundry basket?

Wardrobe?

Hangers?

Why overexert ourselves.

Anyway, I found a new favourite café.

And I would prefer that nobody from work discover it. We do not need to overlap.

I found it by digging through Google reviews around Grand Rapids. The ratings were good, so I drove over and discovered an entrance wedged between loading docks.

The owner does not appear particularly interested in commerce.

Sir, if you hide the entrance like this, most customers will reasonably assume the business has closed and leave.

From the outside it looked unmistakably like a truck-security office.

Inside, however, it was warm and cosy. There was even duck décor, which felt appropriate considering how many ducks spend their days defecating all over the pavement at work.

Very nice.

After coffee, I went to look at flowers.

Hello again, Meijer Gardens.

The weather was perfect: warm without being oppressive, and the place remains one of those spaces where the architecture and landscaping make complete sense together. Even the entrance feels satisfyingly open.

The gift shop had Chihuly bags and hats. The colours were pretty, but I didn’t buy anything because, for entirely irrational reasons, I don’t think the word Chihuly sounds pretty enough.

This is apparently how I make purchasing decisions.

The glass itself, though, was beautiful—that twisted, pulled-sugar quality Chihuly does so well, strange and glossy and slightly excessive. There were outdoor pieces too, embedded among the plants.

And children, naturally, were everywhere.

Watching children in a garden always confirms my belief that human beings are still basically wild hunter-gatherer animals with shoes. They were climbing, shouting, running, jumping over things, rolling around, using the landscape exactly as evolution intended.

And, as always, somebody was getting married.

Every single time I come here, someone is having a wedding.

Must you???

Could I possibly have one too someday???

If not, I suppose I’ll live alone and pull weeds.

I walked around for two and a half hours without headphones and could easily have kept going.

Worth it.

A good weekend.

A couple of weeks later, I realised something less scenic: the flea I had been trying to outrun was, naturally—

me.

ITS ME.

For a while I had been living as though every passing emotion had the authority to swallow me whole. Recently, though, I’ve finally started coming out of that cycle.

Actually, “started” is unfair.

Right now I feel completely fine.

The strange thing is that factual understanding is often very fast. I didn’t know. Now I know. That can take five minutes. But the emotional cycle that follows—feeling something, replaying it, reconsidering it, returning to it from another angle—can go around and around for ages.

Still, I would much rather walk around with a hundred question marks over my head and eventually get one very solid aha than cling artificially to a version of events I already know doesn’t make sense. The latter is far more tiring.

What I probably need to watch more carefully is the point where concentration becomes total immersion. Paying attention to something is useful. Allowing it to become the only thing in existence is less so.

That weekend the weather was beautiful. We were just past tulip season, which means Michigan had entered that pure green interval before summer gets too hot.

I have also developed a new preference: tulips are especially pretty at night, when you walk through the park and see the colours one by one under the lights.

This is the perfect weather for iced cold brew and just enough walking that you feel pleasantly awake rather than physically betrayed.

I visited another café in Grand Rapids that was impressive but somehow visually cluttered.

Then I went back to my favourite, Ussa Coffee, and immediately thought:

THIS is how you run a business.

Both Saturday and Sunday involved coffee, and I also cleaned the apartment properly and put things back in order.

The thing I kept noticing all weekend was how people treat their own spaces.

Whether intentionally or not, people leave traces. What do they choose to reveal? What makes one space feel coherent and another strangely unnatural? If a room looks awkward or ugly, what context would make it make sense? And physically, what does the space I live in say about me?

Apparently this is the sort of thing I enjoy thinking about while wandering around looking at random objects.

A life entertained by miscellaneous observations.

Recently I also happened to reconnect with a few people I knew a long time ago. It was nice and also strangely heavy in the chest.

I don’t have much else to say about that except that I’m grateful.

Everyone please stay healthy.

Around then I watched a docudrama about Spotify.

It had a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, which made me think: was it really that good?

It was entertaining, but I’m not sure the documentary itself was extraordinary. Spotify is already an interesting product; the filmmakers had good raw material.

I was also mildly curious whether there would be some distinctive Swedish quality to the founder.

No.

Western men, broadly speaking, remain western men.

Still, I got a few useful things out of it: how Spotify convinced a record industry built around album sales to enter the online world; why it cares so much about creating an artist-listener relationship rather than merely throwing algorithmic playlists at people; how it managed to beat torrent-based free music services despite also giving people access to music for free; and just how unusually talented Avicii already was from the beginning.

The documentary explains all of this kindly, if somewhat broadly.

For a Korean listener, the history of recorded music consumption feels something like:

LP, then cassette tapes and CDs, then Soribada, Bugs, Melon, and finally the current mess of Apple Music, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, Spotify, and everything else.

Ultimately, all of them deliver sound into the same pair of ears.

From LP through the earlier digital services, the competition was mostly about convenience: how much music can I carry, how little does location matter, how many songs can I shove into one library?

The current generation is more interesting because now the real contest is over how music reaches you.

YouTube Music benefits from the fact that you are already on YouTube, so collecting music alongside everything else is easy, and the enormous traffic means there are endless mixes and strange little edited creations.

SoundCloud is especially good from the creator’s side. Uploading work is easy; the waveform makes sound visually dynamic; and listeners can click on an exact moment in a track and leave a comment there. It makes participation feel unusually specific.

Spotify is excellent for artist obsession. The algorithm constantly generates recommendations around the artists you already like, and you can wander from songs into podcasts and audiobooks until the app becomes an infinite sound library in your hand.

Although you really do have to like the person.

I love Lily Allen’s music, loved her concert, and was interested enough to listen to her audiobook, but even then I sometimes found it frustrating. Maybe she doesn’t sustain a long narrative rhythm in the way I prefer.

Still listened to it.

Still enjoyed it.

Spotify also seems to rearrange its UX every month or two, as though someone inside the company becomes nervous whenever the interface remains stable for too long.

I listen to almost everything genre-wise. I once read that musical taste tends to solidify around age twenty-seven and people increasingly stick to the same music afterward.

I am considerably older than twenty-seven now.

So far, inconclusive.

I still listen to random things.

And now that Suno makes it ridiculously easy to click a few times and generate something pleasant enough for the ears, casual sound-making has become even easier.

Perhaps someday it will even contribute to my income.

One can dream.

The bigger problem lately is that I used to genuinely enjoy exercise, and now I dabble in the gym, dabble in yoga, and somehow never become interested enough to stay consistent.

As a result, if I eat slightly too little and lie down too long, I feel as though I no longer possess the strength required to lift a spoon.

The supplements I consistently take may be doing some work keeping me functional. Unfortunately, I recently learned that taking all of them with coffee after meals—as I routinely do—can interfere with the absorption or effectiveness of some of them.

Excellent.

Thirty-something bodily consequences also arrive with impressive punctuality. I don’t exercise enough, my arms and legs go numb more often, and low stamina makes everything irritating—including contacting people I genuinely need to contact.

And yet I still enjoy chattering.

So my existing system has been: write one blog post a week, announce that I’m alive, and let everyone who cares come check for themselves.

A magnificent child-of-no-filial-duty communication strategy.

Lately, though, I’ve started thinking I should look around a little more carefully and pay better attention to people.

Strangely, I also get the feeling that I appear on a few unexpected people’s wait, what is she doing these days? list.

If this is how it’s going to be, somebody please make me a power blogger.

I would like free lifting treatments and maybe a little double-eyelid procedure.

One Sunday morning I woke up intending to go to church and discovered that it was raining violently.

I went anyway.

Once a week I have to show up and beg away the previous seven days like a fly cleaning itself.

There is the original sin—Base Charge—and then all the little moments of arrogance I manage to destroy things with during the week—Accessorial Fees.

Everything must be reconciled.

For someone carrying plenty of debt, literal and otherwise, I’m also aware that I have a lot to be grateful for and have been very lucky.

So I got baptised and boarded the train to purgatory.

And yet, whenever life presents me with a small choice involving love, patience, or generosity, I very deliberately look away, then complain that purgatory feels suspiciously like prison and debate whether I should get off at the next station.

A mouldy little soul.

Every week I go back, attempt some spiritual washing, and by the following day I am once again crushed flat inside the hamster wheel of ordinary life.

Just another small creature.

To get out of that mindset, I probably need to approach the world with a larger heart.

This is not easy.

A while ago I used to go to Central Park to sketch, and after doing it often enough, I wanted to improve, so I took a few short drawing lessons.

The teacher said that learning how to observe perspective comes first.

If you want to represent a landscape or an object convincingly on a flat piece of paper, you establish one or two reference points and estimate the distance from those points to the important corners and edges of whatever you are drawing.

This is Perspective Drawing 101.

Even I already knew the basic concept before taking the class because my mother had once sent me to art school in middle school to prepare for a graded assignment.

But the teacher explained the next part in a way I liked.

When choosing your reference point, she said, imagine that the landscape you’re looking at is a face. Then imagine where, behind that face, you would gather the hair into a ponytail.

Use that point.

It was such an easy way of explaining something more structural: if you want to reproduce something convincingly in two dimensions, it helps enormously to understand its full three-dimensional form first.

And lately I’ve been thinking that perhaps the same thing applies elsewhere.

If I could stand a little farther back from the situations I’m in, look at the whole shape before reacting to one visible edge, and move through each day with a slightly larger heart, life might actually become easier—and more accurate.

The method may not even be particularly difficult.

It could be as simple and refreshing as stopping to drink some water and catch your breath.

Instead, I keep refusing the water, loading everything onto myself like sandbags, then wondering why I’m panting.

Maybe I don’t need to carry everything that way.

Thirst no more – Be blessed!