Latest Posts
- Forward and Backward
I haven’t been posting lately because I felt like I reached a nice plateau in my mental wellness. Summer has certainly been an important factor… - Forgiveness, A Personal Contemplation on White Supremacy and Asian American Identity
I’m lucky to be in a place in life where I can go to therapy regularly. It started a few years ago when traumatic events… - That Time I had a Wild Panic Attack in a BART Station
Six years ago I walked onto an outbound BART train at Montgomery Station after work. It was like any ordinary day taking the train home… - Financial Literacy Tips for Self-Worth
Continued financial literacy notes from Financial Literacy and Mental Health Hedonic Adaptation Amount of money !== mindset Money can change quality of life but does… - Therapy is Dead or The Ego Needs Anxiety
The self seeks recognition from others (full, honest, authentic, and non-judging recognition) – the ego, however, likes its recognition to be conditional upon its own… - Financial Literacy Tips for Mental Health
Apparently there is a whole field called “financial therapy” which focuses on the psychology aspects of money. I took a Zoom workshop from The Financial… - Revealing Your Distorted Thinking
I have tried many different mental health websites to see if I could gain any new wisdom into my life. There is one out of… - A Compassionate Letter to Yourself
The group session prompted us to write a compassionate letter to ourselves. Now after a few weeks I’m looking back and thinking how short and… - Dealing with Uncertainty, Higher Power, and FOMO
I learn so much about what’s happening to me by hearing others convey the same experience. This week’s group therapy dealt with uncertainty. It was… - Pandemic Misery and The Power of Now
I can’t believe I am only now reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I probably heard Oprah championing it growing up but I… - Getting Stuck in Trauma
Something that EMDR really revealed to me as an important concept is how we get stuck in traumatic memories. Under stress the brain neurons get… - Drawing Grief and Loss
Every week I join this lovely therapy group over Zoom and each week is a thematic exercise. This week we were asked to draw what…
Latest in Cities, Society, and Design
- Burning Down My City
I tweeted earlier during coronavirus about how the “100-year pandemic” is something that long-term planning is indeed suppose to address. Like the 100-year flood in land use, the decisions we… - Micro-Units: What’s a Proper Living SpaceMicro-units were all the rage in DC this year. About a dozen projects are in the works. There is nothing too new about this marketing label for what are essentially…
- We Need a Second Transbay Tube
In the past year a renewed push to build a second Transbay Tube across the San Francisco Bay floor has heated up. BART has been plagued with it’s own… - Will the U.S. Adopt Scooters
While Americans are still entrenched in this idea of make the car great again with autonomous systems, there’s another urban transport mode people have overlooked, the scooter. The scooter or… - On Ride-Sharing Becoming Permanent Transportation
It’s clear that ride-sharing’s reputation has been rather tarnished by public policy backlashes this year, but this hasn’t diminished its popularity. In my view, I see Uber and Lyft as… - Reflections of the Mission District in the Mid-2010s
In honor of Jane Jacob’s 100th birthday, I thought I’d share what I learned from San Francisco’s neighborhoods and what made them great places to be. Lost in the tech… - Trading Four Wheels For Two, A Follow-UpIn 2008, Minnesota Public Radio interviewed me about bicycling when the idea of being a full-time bicyclist was just starting to gain traction. At the time, bike lanes were only…
- Why They Still Are “Willing to Relocate to San Francisco”Why is it in 2016, we must be willing to relocate to San Francisco?
- Transit Tech StartupsShaun Abrahamson of Urban.us detailed a list of “Pop-up Mass Transit” startups operating now. From a VC perspective, he’s concerned about how game theory will make or break their mobility…
- Geography of Nowhere Remains Relevant for the New Urban AgeJames Howard Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere was published in 1993 but it’s view of our current urban landscape remains just as relevant today. Kunstler is a journalist turned urbanist critic, much like…
- Stop Making Developers Build ParkingAs I think of New Year’s Eve complaints about Uber surge pricing I am reminded again of another supply and demand quandary, parking. Just as Uber attempts to encourage more drivers with…
- How About Free Sunday Transit“Why is public parking free on Sundays but public transit is not?” said @ptraughber on Twitter the other day. I couldn’t help but fume about this very question as it…
- Soft Planning or Lipstick on a Pig
I often think of city planning as composed of “hard” and “soft” approaches which shape and define land use and design. Hard planning consists of real shit like height limits, density,… - Ride Sharing and the Future Urban FabricI felt this TechCrunch article “Ride Sharing Will Give Us Back Our Cities” jumped the gun for me on issues of land use equity. Planners have to be skeptical about…
- Carless Cities and City IsolationA friend of mine suggested to look into Cinque Terre, a car inaccessible city on Italy’s western coast. The hillside village consists of terraced homes created over the centuries on rugged terrain overlooking…