Sometimes you don't know what you want until you lose it

There's an episode of "Friends" in the second half of the series, at Monica and Chandler's wedding, where Rachel thinks she's pregnant but can't bear to find out one way or another because she's not sure if it's something she wants. Phoebe picks up the pregnancy test, and tells her that it's negative. As Rachel comes to grips with it, she realizes that she's grieving something she never had in the first place - until Phoebe tells her that she lied and it's positive. "Now you know how you really feel about it!"

Last summer, Shally tested positive for a child for the first time. At the time, it was more of a pleasant surprise - we had talked about having children, but considering the stories we'd heard from other couples that had taken years to conceive, we didn't think that we'd be able to conceive so soon. While we were excited, I'd confess that on my part at least, there was a little bit of rote-ness in the whole process. In a sense, I felt like it was time for me to become a father, but I didn't necessarily want to become a father - instead, it was just the right time for the next step.

Three weeks after the positive test, we lost the baby to a miscarriage.

It was surprising how much we were crushed emotionally by this.  Even though Beebee - our codename for the child - was only a brief presence in our lives for such a short period of time, it did feel like a death in the family as we grieved.  To be sure, our season of grief and healing was correspondingly shorter than if it was a loved one we had known for a much longer time, but it was no less intense.  We're thankful for the support of the family and friends who prayed for and supported us in that season.

Now that we are entering the third trimester of our current pregnancy (codename: Junior), I realized that if Beebee had managed to stick, we would be hitting our due date around this time.  A few reflections...

1) Most significantly, losing the first pregnancy hammered home the fact that I really do want to become a father.  There's no more feeling of "it's about the right time" - I'm simultaneously thrilled and terrified.

2) There have been few instances where I've felt more helpless and not in control than when the miscarriage was progressing over a day.  We wrestled with anxiety and denial while trying to pray and hope for a miracle that didn't happen.  There was absolutely nothing that we could do.  It has been a continuing test of faith to learn how to trust in God for things that we have no control over.  Interestingly, it has also afforded the opportunity to identify with and encourage some friends in their own situations of helplessness.

3) We are much more appreciative and fully aware of how fortunate we are that it was not difficult for us to conceive again.  We both have several friends and family who had/have tried for years to have children and have been continually frustrated.  Our heart and prayers go out to them.

4) Finally, we understand a little bit more about how a miscarriage can affect prospective parents.  A few years ago, we heard from some friends that they were experiencing one, and it was difficult to empathize at the time.  It is so helpful to have the support of a community in grief and healing, and one reason I wanted to write this in a public space is in the hope that anyone who has to go through the unfortunate experience of a miscarriage - either their own or a loved one's - would know that we can try to help.

There's a daily joy and anticipation that we experience looking forward to Junior's arrival, and for the most part we don't think too often about Beebee anymore.  But she (we arbitrarily decided that she was a she) is part of our lives now, and we do want to remember and mourn her regularly.

2011 NBA Pre-Playoffs Comments

As an early birthday present this year, my wonderful wife is getting us cable TV for the next few months so we (okay, mostly I) can watch the NBA playoffs.  How awesome is she?

And an awesome playoffs these look like they'll be.  After a vastly entertaining regular season with the Decision, Blake Griffin, Derrick Rose and Russell Westbrook taking the next step, the Spurs coming back from the old folks' home, tons of player movement at the trade deadline, and several legit contenders getting on track, I'm really looking forward to the next few rounds of hoops before Junior Lin comes along for his own basketball indoctrination.

Most other people are making their picks NCAA tournament-style for the playoffs, but I'm just going to rank my rooting interests, along with reasons why.  The top few are teams I'll enjoy rooting for on some level, and the last few teams I'll actively be rooting against.

1) Spurs - I just realized I've been a Spurs fan for over 20 years, since David Robinson joined the team in 1989.  I know that they've already got 4 titles, but against all odds I'd like to see Duncan get that 5th against the toughest competition of his postseason career, matching Kobe and putting him firmly in the top 10 players of all time (he's probably borderline right now).

2) Thunder - A byproduct of being a Spurs fan is a soft spot for small market teams who build organizations and teams "the right way", and Spurs alum Sam Presti smartly did that with OKC (albeit with a ton of luck tossed in).  I'm honestly not a huge fan of Westbrook (shoot-first PGs tend to remind me, in a bad way, of the Marbury-Francis-Iverson days of the early 00's) but Durant and the Ibaka-Perkins front line are fun to watch.  As the Spurs further decline, I'll probably pick up OKC as a regular rooting interest over the next decade (since the Warriors aren't going anywhere) to see what they do against Miami and Chicago.

3) and 4) Magic/Mavericks - If my top two can't take it all, I'd like to see some players that I respect win it.  Dallas has Dirk and Kidd, and Orlando will probably lose Dwight Howard in a few years unless they pull off a miracle before he hits free agency.

5) Hornets - Similarly, I'd rather see CP3 stay and build a contender in Louisiana rather than taking his talents elsewhere.  Probably not going to happen this season and a longshot for it to ever happen.

6) Nuggets - A team spurned by its star and with a coach who survived cancer.  How can you not root for an underdog like that?  Not a fan of K-Mart and Birdman though.

7) Blazers - Franchise was hit by horrendously bad luck (Oden, Roy)... would like to see something good happen for them.

8) Bulls - Good young team that plays defense.  I dislike most of the other teams in the Eastern Conference, so I'll often be rooting for Chicago by default.  One reason they aren't higher on this list is because they already have 6 titles.

9) to 13) Everyone else - Don't really care about the other teams that much...

14) Heat - Humility is an important quality to learn.  Really don't want to see them validate their pre-season championship party without going through some failure first.

15) and 16) Lakers and Celtics - Both organizations have n-teen titles and appeal to me as a basketball nerd, but not as a fan.  I'll be honest, I'll root against the Lakers primarily because I'm envious (why can't the Warriors build a team like that?) and I'll root against the Celtics because they have quite a few jerks.

LA Trip Bullets

A week ago we spent a week in LA to visit friends and family, eat food, and visit the Getty Center and Warner Brothers studio. Been a busy week at work, but finally had the chance to upload pics (Facebook). Couple of quick thoughts and observations...

• It's a great blessing to be able to get together with old friends around the dinner table and talk about everything under the sun.  We got to converse about topics ranging from parenting (the way we were brought up and the way we want to bring up our kids), Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour mark for developing expertise, to our own issues and conflicts dealing with boundaries with our parents.  Lots of laughter and insight.
• Every time I go down to SoCal, I'm amazed at the sprawl of the area and the scope of multiple millions of people... who all want to be on the road at the same time.  People have to be asleep by 10 and out the door by 6 to get to the office on time at 8.  If we lived down there, the prospect of facing a 45-90 minute drive every commute would make me pull my hair out, and would be enough to discourage ever going out for fun.
• After going to Italy and visiting the Uffizi Gallery, showcasing the history of art from medieval times through the Renaissance, I've gained a greater appreciation for painting.  The audio guides explained how the painters during the Renaissance were experimenting and making breakthroughs in being able to depict accurate images with correct proportions in the fore-, mid-, and backgrounds, and going to the Getty, we could also see how artists in the 19th century were able to "perfect" realistic painting techniques before moving into the Impressionist period.  I suppose painting is one of those things you don't really start to enjoy until your 30s.
• Being avid Top Chef fans, we were disappointed that season 6 winner Michael Voltaggio's new restaurant "Ink." hadn't opened up yet, so we settled for going to his old place of employment, The Bazaar.  Most interesting dishes were the Philly cheesesteak and the Caprese salad, both re-imagined using molecular gastronomy to look and feel different but taste similar to what we were expecting.
• The Warner Brothers studio tour was our concession to an LA-specific thing we could do, since we didn't have the energy to get the most out of a Disneyland trip.  Interesting things we learned about the TV and movie-making business:
• Clint Eastwood has an almost-exclusive agreement with WB to be his movies' studio.
• The same outdoor sets have been used to depict urban New York and other cities since the 1930s.  To change the epoch, they change things like doorknobs and fire hydrants.
• Also, all the outdoor sets are fiberglass fronts on top of wood awnings and not brick and mortar.
• They build houses with two fronts rather than a front/back because there's no real need for a backyard in filming.
• We got to go onto the set of "Chuck" because we told our tour guide we were fans, so we saw the Buy More back room (with the cage) and the apartment complex... pretty cool.

A few thoughts on marriage

Today, my lovely wife and fellow parent-to-be celebrates her birthday. As we enjoyed food and dessert with a few of her friends, as well as looking forward to going out ourselves tomorrow, I'm reminded that marriage is this neat and mysterious thing.

I remember the long conversations late at night during college and after graduation, musing about our future spouses and the age-old question, "How do you know he/she's the one?" And while you might chalk it up to a checklist of qualities, a vision of flowers and sunshine, hormones, a voice from God, or some indefinable feeling, ultimately, we don't really know for sure. We just know what we know about each other, make a commitment based on that, then spend the rest of our lives working on making that commitment more and more sure day by day. Kind of like faith.

I know from friends' experiences and books that our marriage will be tested, perhaps severely, as we transition into this next stage of our lives, but I'm still glad that we get to do this together.

Happy birthday, honey.

7 Billion People in 2011

Sometime in 2011, the world's population will surpass 7 billion... and Baby Lin just might be the one to push it over that mark!

Interesting video from National Geographic depicting what 7 billion looks like, and the impact on resources, etc:



Direct link (for Facebook)

I hope our child will be able to bless and impact others more than he/she consumes.  Speaking of which, hopefully we'll learn the gender this week.

Reactions to "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"

Since we're hoping to enter the realm of parenthood later this year, I've been following the various links and comments across Facebook on Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. As an Asian, an American, and also a Christian, there's an interesting confluence and clash of values, goals, and styles showing up. Some of my own brief reactions and thoughts on the article, and the numerous followup articles springing up all over the web...

• First, thanks to Andrew N and Andrew W for posting this comment thread that includes an email reply from the author, Amy Chua, to an upset reader, pointing out that she did not choose the title of the WSJ article excerpt, and that the excerpt is not necessarily indicative of the content of the book it is promoting.  So, no need to demonize the author as this is all a (very successful!) marketing stunt.  Still, a good topic to consider.
• Things that most everyone seem to agree on as good goals and principles for successful parenting of one's children:
• Development of a strong work ethic, delayed gratification, and other good habits (quote: "Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America.").
• Equip them to be able to be independent and self-supporting as adults.
• Discipline and tough love are often needed to teach/direct children to what is best for them and their future because they can't see it themselves.
• However, the various articles linked above are filled with testimonies of the damage that can be inflicted by the extreme aspects (in particular, insults, belittling, unreasonably high standards, and lack of praise/satisfaction) of the "Chinese" parenting style mentioned in the article:
• Chinese women have one of the highest rates of suicide and depression.
• Products of this childhood often include high achievers and materially successful adults who hate their parents.
• Personally, while I grew up with parents who helped set high goals for my brother and I, they generally did not resort to insults and belittling as motivators.  Because of this, I never doubted my parents' love and trusted that they knew what was best for me.  I would try to work hard to delight them because I wanted to.  I hope to model that for my kids too.  Some of the things they did that I can remember:
• Spending a lot of time patiently, firmly, but kindly teaching and working with me on things until I "got it".
• Praising effort as well as success - something that I think may be relatively unusual about my family.
• I'd like to believe that the "strengths-based" literature that has been gaining popularity in the business world over the last two decades or so can be applied to parenting as well.  After the development of good habits and character (honesty, integrity), it seems to make sense that since each person has innate natural gifts and talents, after getting to a "competent" level in other areas, it is more worthwhile to hone and develop these natural gifts and talents rather than spending an inordinate amount of time becoming "Excellent" in everything.  As several people have pointed out, academic excellence can lead to good doctors, lawyers, and engineers, but doesn't develop leaders and innovators.
• This means that at some point in the kid's development, in addition to character and work ethic development, we need some way of identifying gifts and talents to develop... which seems like the freedom, and perhaps the motivation, to experiment is needed.
• Brian L pointed out, and I agree, that another aspect of parenting I'd aspire to based on my own experience is helping my kid to avoid regrets later in life, because as adults with more experience, we can see and give personal testimony to things we wish we'd have done differently.  Two personal examples:
• I didn't necessarily enjoy piano growing up, but it did give me a solid background and foundation in music that has helped nurture a great love and appreciation for many different types of music and instruments today. In the long view, I'm grateful that my parents introduced me to it.
• I wish I'd have made more of an effort to learn Mandarin when I had more opportunity and more ability to do so, and I'll probably make that known to my kids.  Incidentally, it seems that while learning a language similar to English (like Spanish or French) is do-able in high school, learning an entirely different language like Mandarin is best undertaken either when very young when the brain is still developing, or intensively in college when there is greater desire.
• Finally, as a Christian, it is sobering to consider that my relationship with my kids will likely be the biggest influence on their view of their relationship with God.  Judging by the comments and testimonies I've seen from Asian American Christian friends on this topic, many of us are still saddled with baggage from our pasts with overbearing parents and with Asian churches who seem to espouse similar values of conditional love based on obedience and success.  
• How can we avoid this?  I agree with Byron that one thing to be conscious of is that insults, berating, belittling, shame, etc. as motivation might be effective motivators, but at the cost of relationship.  That being said, given human nature, I think it's almost unavoidable that at one point or another, the patience of a parent will give way to these things.  In that case, it's equally as important to be able to apologize to our children and ask forgiveness, and not just assume that the ends justify the means.
• All in all, I hope and aspire that the unconditional love, acceptance, and approval that is available to me through Christ can be the foundation for all my relationships, especially with my children - and that the unconditional love they receive from their heavenly and earthly fathers can be the foundation for their lives as well.

2010 Italy Recap: Overview

It's been two weeks since we got back from 2 weeks and 2 days in Italy.  Awesome trip!  Highly encourage anyone who can make their way over to Italy to spend a good amount of time soaking in the sights, sounds, history, and food of this very-California-like country.

I'll do my best to summarize the highlights and lowlights of our time, that'll hopefully be entertaining for you, dear reader, as well as providing a resource to anyone trying to plan their own trip sometime down the line.

Itinerary
... with day trips noted.  Links go to the photo albums for that site:

• 2010-09-27 to 2010-09-30 - Rome
• 2010-10-01 to 2010-10-03 - Sorrento
• 2010-10-02 - Pompeii day trip
• 2010-10-03 - Amalfi Coast, Amalfi, and Positano day trip
• 2010-10-04 - Naples
• 2010-10-05 to 2010-10-09 - Florence
• 2010-10-07 - Brief outing to Siena and San Gimignano
• 2010-10-09 to 2010-10-12 - Venice
• 2010-10-10 - Murano, Burano, Torcello day trip
• 2010-10-11 - Verona day trip

We got a pretty good hotel and travel deal from Costco Travel that covered hotels and transportation for Rome, Florence, and Venice, with a few sightseeing tours included.  Since we wanted to visit the coast as well, we built in the side trip farther south to Sorrento and Naples.

Unlike some guides, we scheduled our trip going from south to north, rather than north to south.  We actually liked this a bit better because we packed most of the sights and high-intensity cities at the beginning (Rome and Naples in particular) when we had more energy, and were able to relax and chill more towards the end in Florence and Venice, as we got ready to come home.

Overall City Ranking

1. Florence
• our favorite because it had the best combination of interesting stuff to see and learn about (Renaissance history, art, and science), food, and relaxed atmosphere - wide streets so you don't feel the crowds, plenty of open piazzas to people watch.
2. Rome
• second favorite because of the fascinating Roman Empire and all the associated history - the scope of the empire, innovations in government and finance, the birth and corruption of the Christian church.
3. Pompeii
• amazing to see 1st century Roman civilization frozen in time, and realizing that it's not that much different than our own.
4. Sorrento
• made for a relaxing home base to explore Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast.  Some good restaurants too.
5. Venice
• iconic canals, but kinda pricey and super crowded with tourists coming in every day off gigantic cruise ships.
6. Amalfi/Positano
• beautiful coast towns with great views, but it didn't really feel like "Italy" considering everyone was a tourist.  We heard more English than Italian here.
7. Naples
• Manhattan on steroids, or Italy at its most concentrated.  Very few tourists, so we stuck out; someone attempted to pickpocket my backpack.  However, the birthplace of pizza, and we had some in the restaurant most consider to be the originator.

In the next few posts, I'll go into more detail with pics.

Time capsule

Had a little bit of a dive into my recent history today as I cleaned out some drawers in my desk.  Since I had left this at my folks' place when I moved out in 2005, all the items in it were from late college (1998-ish) to 2005.  The things I found reminded me a bit of what life was like in college, missions, and in my early twenties out of college, and the friends that I saw more often back then.  Things I found included:

Wedding programs from:
- Jason/Iris
- Andy/Pam
- Torence/Nicole

Missions support letters from:
- Danny Y
- Jason/Iris
- Wilma
- Dan/Tina
- Jason K
- Andy H
- Hideyo
- Ivana

Various thank you and birthday cards from:
- my old worship team
- James/Luwen's baby shower
- aforementioned weddings
- my missions team NYC 2000

A church bulletin from 2005.  I noticed that only 7 out of the 22 names listed on the bulletin in any capacity were still at the church, which made me somewhat sad.

A playbill for "Rent"

Letter I wrote to myself on 12/31/2000, intended to be opened up a year later.  At the time I had just finished my "0.5" out of my 4.5 years at Cal and was getting ready to move into the working world.

Fantasy basketball cheat sheet, with the top five: Shaq, Duncan, TMac, Kobe, Webber

Various Bible studies that I thought were good enough to keep but not smart enough to organize in a usable way.

Stack of business cards from my first job, as well as various paychecks/commendations etc.

3 packs 7-8 years old gum

1997 Cal AACF Brother's Appreciation invitation.  People put a lot of effort into those and it's still pretty cool to remember.

Spain 2005 paraphernalia (guidebook, ticket stubs, maps, etc.)

My 2003 layoff notice from my previous company and my hiring forms into a startup

Fun to look back every so often.

What happens when a basketball bounces off a finger...

... it becomes a little more difficult to grip things.

It's been 2 months since I regularly posted in June, will aim to have some updates later this week.

Chrome vs. Firefox

Although I'm generally a Google products enthusiast, I'm wondering if I should be a bit more antsy about monopolizing so much of my cloud information on one company's servers.  Still, in general my experience with their products tends to be better than most of the competitors, so it's hard to stay away.

Maybe a year and a half ago, I switched from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome as my primary web browser, but I still use both on a daily basis.  Just for fun, I figured I'd chronicle my reasons for switching and the pluses and minuses for each.

Why Chrome?
+++ The biggest feature that Chrome has that Firefox hasn't implemented yet is a separate process for each tab, and for various sub-processes/functions.  This was my primary pain point with Firefox that Chrome solved - whenever a page in FF got unwieldy or started running away with memory and CPU, I had to restart the entire browser.  In Chrome, I can pull up the process manager and kill Flash or the offending webpages, then refresh them, without losing all my good tabs.  This feature alone, and the amount of mental well-being it provides, was enough for me to switch.
+ The tabbed interface for Chrome has some nice features - being able to drag a tab into a new window lets me group like tabs together much more easily than in FF.

Why Firefox?
+ A feature of Firefox that I miss in my daily web-browsing now is the "Awesomebar".  In Firefox, the location bar will do on-the-fly pattern matching in your history, bookmarks, etc. and it is incredibly useful to pull up pages that you looked at a few days ago.  Chrome is beginning to implement this and it's gotten better since the first release, but FF is still better.
+ Another FF feature that is easier to use than on Chrome is the keyword bookmarking feature - basically, saving various searches as keywords so that I can go to the location bar and type "wiki [search term]" to find something on wikipedia.  Chrome can do this but it isn't as easy to implement.
+ I was never that into the multitude of extensions that FF provides, but it's nice to have the option.
+ The history on FF is much easier to navigate than on Chrome.  Oddly enough coming from Google, the search function in history didn't seem to work well - there's no hierarchy of ranking search results (i.e., if I'm looking for "NBA" in the history, I don't want it to return all the non-NBA ESPN pages I browsed just because there was an "NBA" term somewhere in the text of the page).
+ Interestingly enough, Yahoo! Mail works really badly on Chrome, while working just fine on FF.
+ Finally, FF tends to be tested and supported by more commercial/financial websites, since it was the first "successful" big competitor to IE, so sometimes I'll switch to FF or IE for personal finance stuff, etc.

Anyway, those are some of my reasons.  If FF were to ever implement the features I mentioned in Chrome above... I might switch back.

Here are Lifehacker's reasons for one or the other.  Which one do you prefer?