Huang Family Newsletter, August 2013

The highlight of the month was going to California for two weeks.  Lee and the kids flew into SJ and saw Lee's family before driving down to LA, where Amy flew to.  They hit Disneyland, saw friends and family, and went to the beach twice.  Amy flew back home while Lee and the kids drove back to SJ for a little more family time before heading home. All in all, it was a great time together.

Go, Away

The Y, which you may know our family loves, just got even awesomer for us.

In looking around for a temporary gym membership for when we're visiting my folks in San Jose over the holidays (y'know, to work off all that good home cooking), I decided on a whim to call the closest Y to their house.  Lo and behold, there's an "A.W.A.Y" ("Always Welcome at the Y") program that most locations participate in, in which you flash your card, they call your home location to verify membership, and voila - a free two-week membership is yours.

This is a huge game-changer for us, since part of what's hard about being away from home is being away from our cherished, one of which is going to the Y.  Now we can bring a little "home" away with us.  I'm going to start traveling more now, just to check out new Y locations!

Say No to Drugs

The bar profiled in this University City Review article is uncomfortably close to our house.  Although I'm on the community association board and do a decent job of keeping my ear to the local pulse, I was unaware of a recent meeting that was called to discuss the drug activity taking place on our intersection.  (I heard about it from Amy, who heard about it from a neighbor.)   

Of course, no one wants drug-selling on their block.  It's not hard to imagine what might come with such activities, and to fear for the well-being of the many children who live on that block, including our own two.  (Btw, here's another recent story of a disturbance on another nearby intersection: restaurant front windows smashed in during a burglary.  Ugh.)

In the taxonomy of neighborhoods in Philadelphia, we're pretty high up in terms of stability, attractiveness, and resources: no one will mistake our intersection for Kensington and Somerset.  But we're not immune to the worst aspects of urban life.  Let's hope we neighbors can band together and stave off things getting worse. 

A Body in Motion

I'm pretty sure I've described our church as a raggedy bunch.  We're a motley crew, once again without a pastor, dwindling in numbers and finances, and not on anyone's formal or informal list of "it" churches. 

No matter.  God loves us still.  And He keeps giving us little slices of beauty to whet our appetite for greater good to come. 

Last night was a quintessential example.  Dear friends of ours, a recently married couple, are heading out on overseas missions.  Between packing up, getting trained, and making arrangements in their new home, it's been a scramble for them.  But they hollered around on short notice to see if folks could join them in prayer the night before they left.

So there we were gathered, on a Tuesday night no less, to come before God with them and for them.  There were many more people there than I could have imagined (including myself: I rarely do something so late on a work night, and yet there I found myself).  We prayed for everything under the sun, marveling at God's providence in our friends' lives separately and now together.  And, counted among the prayers were people of a wild mix of ages, countries of origin, and stations in life.

A famous analogy in the Bible describes the people of God as a body.  Last night, that was a body in motion, sending forth two beloved parts, to do His work in a new place.  What a rich, rich time was had by all.

Glory Seeking

Hip hop usually carries impure connotations, whether thematic (violence, misogyny), semantic (heavy use of the n-word and the b-word), or visual (bling, sex).  This isn't a totally fair characterization, since not all artists feature these things.  For sure none of these things are inherent to hip hop.

One thing that you could make an argument is inherent to hip hop is glory seeking.  As an art form, hip hop can be seen as primarily about glorifying oneself.  This can take the form of showcasing the skill of the artist, whether in spinning records or spitting rhymes.  Or it can be in the choice of words (braggadocio) or posture (flamboyance).

Which is what, I think, makes Christian hip hop so interesting.  I may be biased, because I like hop hop as a musical genre.  But if you're not into rap, you should give Christian rap a listen.  Because it is meaningful to listen to (and, admittedly, I don't listen that often, so the knowledge I'm drawing on here is very, very shallow) artists in this genre take hip hop's innate glory seeking posture and point it not to themselves but to God.  (Click here for some samples, from the Desiring God blog.)

This goes to what ought to be the big line of demarcation for Christians of all professions and persuasions.  We're all made different, and becoming a Christian does not mean that everyone becomes the same; rather, it means God reroutes our uniqueness in a way that glorifies Him.  So hip hop heads who follow Jesus needn't necessarily renounce their hip hop ways if instead they take that part of themselves and use it as a conduit to draw attention and honor to God. 

The link (and photo) above is not unintentional.  The perspective of Desiring God is that we are all about glory seeking.  In that sense, hip hop is just one of many such channels, albeit a unique and compelling one.  The question is: whose glory are we seeking?

Say I’m a hedonist I seek my pleasure
Not in sex, nope He’s much better
Not in wealth, nah He’s my treasure.
Pursuing anything else will just upset you.
“Satisfaction (Hedonist)” - Trip Lee 

The Traveling Homebody

I was going to post a running diary of my day trip to New York City yesterday, but realized it would be pretty short and boring:

Megabus to NYC.  Walked High Line Park.  Subway to Yankee Stadium.  Caught up with friend during long rain delay.  Took bus home before game even started.  The end.

Instead, let me post something even more boring and insular: a musing on why I enjoy both traveling and being at home. 

Seems inherently contradictory, right?  You can't be a homebody and a world traveler at the same time, can you?  Either you like mixing it up among the masses or huddling up in your own little slice of the world; surely it can't be both.

And yet.  Maybe those of you out there who are both introverted and social understand where I'm coming from.  You enjoy being out, absorbing new stuff, even engaging in heavy doses of interpersonal contact.  But you also enjoy getting home, putting on your bum-around clothes, and puttering around the house with a bowl of cereal and the newspaper. 

Why am I bringing this up?  Because yesterday's trip to New York City encapsulated this dichotomy in me.  Despite the fact that I saw zero baseball due to the long rain delay, I still found the trip fun and invigorating.  I got to navigate the New York City subway system, catch up with a friend, and walk a lovely urban park.  Not bad for a Thursday in August.

Perhaps it will come as a surprise, though, that the most enjoyable and restful part of the trip was reading business magazines on the bus to and from NYC.  There's something about reading by yourself on a moving vehicle that is just perfect for me: alone, absorbing information, and yet on the move. 

And perhaps it will come as no surprise that the best part of the day was coming home.  Partly because I could kiss my wife, recharge my dying phone, and scarf down lasagna and pie.  But mostly because of what home represents: a place where I can finally exhale and feel safe. 

Importantly, home also feels good because everything I need is here.  I'm not at all a hoarder, but at the same time houses can contain a lot of objects in them.  Pretty much everything I own is within these four walls, which means that I have ready access to it.  Obviously, when one travels, you have to make choices about what you take with you, and hope that you didn't forget anything or that something doesn't come up that you didn't expect and if only you'd known  you would've packed it.  It's always a source of anxiety for me, when I'm packing or when I'm away, is that I have something at home and should've brought it but didn't.

And yet that is actually one of the things I like about travel, which is that you strip down to the minimum.  I actually enjoy packing, because it's fun to think that I will be away from my house and everything I need can be contained in one bag.  There's something freeing about having your existence boiled down to that few possessions.  (It's a like a game, too, to pack as little as possible and see if you can get away with it.)

Maybe this is making no sense, or is mind-numbingly boring.  Maybe I've shared too much of my crazy.  I just think it's strange that I'm all these things.  I wonder if others can relate. 

Musings of an Urban Tech Entrepreneur

This article from the LA Times about the conspicuous wealth of newly minted Silicon Valley area millionaires has so much going on it makes me woozy.  So apologies in advance if this post is a little rambly.  But consider all of these angles:

First of all, how fascinating is it that rents have gone up and restaurants have popped up around the locations where shuttles run by Apple, Facebook, Google, et al stop?  I'm not aware that the world has ever seen this form of transit-oriented development, which usually happens around fixed investments or at least transit hubs that carry large volumes of people rather than a relatively small albeit rich crowd.

Second, the gentrification story is at its hottest in San Francisco, because it is there that the rich-poor divide is most noticeable, and also because it is the part of the Bay Area that is richest in history and culture and so there is more to lose from the takeover by the techies.  I can't say I'm particularly fond of SF myself, but I do hold it in high regard as a beautiful and gritty and iconic and important city.  So it will be interesting to see how it responds and what it becomes.

Third, note the growing awareness of the tech millionaires that they need to engage with and not thumb their nose at their less well-off urban neighbors.  The article references a series of blog posts by local entrepreneur Chris Tacy, whose blog should be called "Musings of an Urban Tech Entrepreneur."  Tacy drops the knowledge on the boors whose newfound wealth has translated into some really ghastly behavior.  He also (going back to my previous point) laments what has happened to San Francisco as a result: "San Francisco used to be weird. And we were proud of that. Now it's shockingly vanilla and suburban and conformist. It once felt like a city. Now it feels like a suburb. And that's sad."

I'll be sure to keep my eye on my old haunting grounds on this particular issue.  There's so much going on and I am curious to see what happens next.

Happy Birthday, Baby

Beautiful.  Hard-working.  Caring.  Persevering.  Smart.  Tough. 

These are all ways I can and do describe my wife, to others and to her. 

Today I can add: birthday girl.  Happy birthday, baby!

My Buddies and I Are Glad to Have Grown Up Before YouTube Existed

Just saw this video (below) on Jeremy Lin's YouTube page. Made me think of the dumb stuff my high school buddies and I used to do on the weekends. We filmed it all. And, given that a lot of it was all kinds of dumb, I'm glad YouTube didn't exist back then. Because if it did, we'd all have a lot of 'splainin' to do. As it is, we're all bound by the desire to never have these videos ever see the light of day. Sometimes it's good to be older.

Facebookshelf

Just got back from two weeks in California.  In addition to seeing some sights (Disneyland, beaches), we met up with lots of family and friends.  And when I go to someone's house, my favorite thing to do is look at their bookshelf.

For people of my socio-economic status, the bookshelf is the thing that defines your interests and values.  You'll find it displayed prominently in the house, showing off family photos, cherished honors, and the kinds of reading material you want people to associate with you.

Being an avid Facebook user, I could not help but wonder if there was an interface in social media, whether within the Facebook walls or on another site, that was the virtual equivalent of the bookshelf.  In other words, what can I curate and then show off to others?  And what can I go to in order to learn about my family and friends in such an intimate way?

Online, you can even amp up this experience.  Photos and honors could have commentary, comments, and links attached to them.  Books and magazines could come with reviews and with an easy way to drag items into a shopping cart for purchase now or later.

You're telling me you wouldn't spend at least 15 minutes making sure your virtual bookshelf was just so, or that you wouldn't want to snoop around on the bookshelves of your family and friends?  I tell ya, if I had even an ounce of tech savviness and an inch of guts, I'd follow through on this idea - assuming it doesn't already exist.  Zuckerberg, are you on this?

NFL Predictions Guaranteed or Your Money Back

Are you ready for some football?  I sure am.

I'm also ready for my annual predictions post.  Seeing as that I will not have any time to read the thousands of prediction columns that will come out over the next two weeks, I figure any predictions I make later this month won't be any more informed than now.

In other words, proceed with caution.

NFC: N Lions-2 S Saints-1 E Cowboys-3 W Rams-4 WC Falcons-5 Bucs-6
AFC: N Steelers-3 S Texans-2 E Patriots-4 W Broncos-1 WC Colts-5 Chiefs-6
WC: Cowboys, Falcons, Steelers, Colts
Div: Saints, Falcons, Colts, Texans
SB: Falcons over Texans

New Website, Same Warm Welcome

There's no substitute for a friendly face when you walk into a church building on Sunday morning. Well, the online equivalent is your website. I'm happy to report that my church recently refreshed its website. It looks great! (Shameless plug: check out the link to my sermon on July 28 while you're there!)

Fragile China

I recently caught up with a friend of mine who live in China with his family. He told me horror stories of pollution and contamination all throughout China. So I read this article in the New York Times with great interest, on proposed market-based solutions to controlling air quality.

Even as a cold-blooded capitalist, I understand that life is full of trade-offs. Economics and the environment must be held in balance; externalities do exist, necessitating some form of intervention; and market-based solutions can align incentives more efficiently.

Climate change, environmental awareness, and massive urbanization in developing countries is nothing new, of course. But, based on my friend's experience, China is at a particular make-or-break moment. Let's hope we can look back on this moment and say things got better from there.

Re: Cycle

I'd like to pick up on my post from earlier this week about what it really takes to make the choice to bike to work.  The underlying context there was that for someone living in, say, Newtown Square and working in Center City, the choice to bike to work really meant moving into Philadelphia, rather than simply giving up four wheels for two.

Of course, there's another way I could've made this point.  Growing up in Silicon Valley and now living in Philadelphia, I can tell you that it's a lot easier to choose to bike to work when you live in a big city in the northeastern US than when you live in a suburban California community.

My dad actually biked to work.  Of course, he's a fitness buff (he started a fitness club at his workplace), lived less 5 miles away from his job, didn't go out for lunch (said it made him sleepy), and didn't have much need for out-of-office meetings (he was an electrical engineer).  Needless to say, I didn't know many other Bay Areans who rode their bikes to work.

I guess I could look this up, but I'm lazy, so I'll guess: I venture that the bicycle mode share in Philadelphia is at least twice that of San Jose's.  Which means that if Philadelphia had San Jose's bicycle mode share, there'd be thousands more cars on the road.  (Let's not even compare the walk mode share in these two cities; the difference there would probably be into the tends of thousands.)

I find this particularly delicious, and not just because I have a personal connection to both places.  Philadelphia is much derided for being not the fitness capital of the world; I seem to recall that we were voted "fattest city" by some magazine a few years back.  San Jose, on the other hand, is in the heart of an area in which fitness and exercise are king; and yet, the vast majority of workers there hop into their cars (which are stored inside their house!), drive to work, and hop out just feet from their front entrances.

Obviously, commuting isn't the only time you can get your workout on.  But that's not my point.  What I'm trying to convey is that it's easier to choose to bike to work in Philadelphia than in San Jose.  And since there are a lot of people who live in places like San Jose, it's going to take a lot to move the national needle on bike mode share.

Uphill Ride

This month's Grid Magazine (warning: shameless plug coming!), sponsored in part by my firm, is on bike sharing, which is coming to Philly.  I had to wince, though, when I saw this blurb next to this article on bike share programs in the US:

"The average American commutes to work 16 miles each way.  The average car gets under 23 miles per gallon.  That's seven gallons of gas per week to commute.  At today's prices - $3.68 per gallon on average - that's roughly $25.75 per week, or nearly $1,300 a year!"

Maybe others won't take things this way, but it seems to me the logical conclusion that is meant to be made is that we should switch to bicycling because we'll save a bunch of bucks.  Alas, if only it was that easy.  Not that deciding to ride a bicycle isn't a hard choice to make by itself, given that it involves physical effort, exposure to the elements, and the risk of injury.  But the harder choice is to put yourself in a position to even consider a bicycle as a suitable form for commuting.

Consider the first sentence of that blurb: "The average American commutes to work 16 miles each way."  So if the average American decides to get to work by bike (unless they're Lance Armstrong), they'll have to pedal over an hour each way!  I assume that 16 miles one-way is a non-starter for all but the most hardened cyclists.

In other words, for the average American, the harder choice is not giving up your car for your bike; it's making a fundamental shift in where you live and work.  What's unsustainable is less that too many of us drive and too few of us bike; it's more that we've organized our homes and our workplaces to be so sprawled out that it is impractical for the vast majority of us to even entertain using our bikes to get to work.

Maybe, 50 to 100 years from now, the average American won't commute to work 16 miles each way.  Maybe dearer energy prices and a profound premium on denser urban settings will result in less far-flung distances to get from Point Home to Point Work.  But to get there will take some big changes, at the individual and community and government levels, changes far bigger than one person deciding to hop on a bike instead of a car or than one government offering bike share for the first time.  Let's not forget that.

Happy 70th Birthday to My Dad

I'll be brief in this post because my dad would perish at the thought of me blabbing about him.  But earlier this month he turned 70, and my sister and I had fun making a slide show of "70 things we learned from our dad that we do ourselves now that we are parents."  We ran the gamut from serious stuff (roots, family, health) to funnier things (frugality, sayings), and our intention through it all was to honor our Bah and to acknowledge that we are living out his parenting of us in our parenting of our own kids.  

I think my sister does more of the same things as him than I do, but it must be said that I am really starting to sound like my old man each day, especially when I'm playing the role of parent.  I think my kids get a kick out of seeing their grandfather, since he sounds like me and says a lot of the same things.  What can I say?  I'm my father's son.  Happy birthday, Bah!

Huang Family Newsletter, July 2013

Amy and Lee continued to chug away at their demanding jobs.  Lee finished his summer class and will enjoy having his Saturday mornings back but will miss his brilliant students.  Amy's garden out front has blossomed into a wild and wonderful sight to come home to.  We had friends stay with us from Alabama; with four more kids in the mix, it made for a crazy and fun week.  We also rejoined the zoo, did a jaunt on Forbidden Drive, and celebrated Amy's dad's birthday and Amy's mom's retirement.