Thoughts from May 2025

Thoughts, Links, and Life Updates from May

Last Edited: May 31, 2025

Welcome to my May post!
I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a Substack and switching over. However, I don’t expect people to manually check my website for new posts, while dm’ing links to all my friends requires too much effort on my end. The middle ground I’ve settled on is finally utilizing the subscription feature, so I will email you whenever I post something new. Add your email at the bottom of my About page, and you will get updates starting next month. Send me your email address if the subscribe button doesn’t work (the subscription feature isn’t super reliable, it doesn’t work on certain devices).
This post isn’t particularly long or weird, so there’s only one version. No unabridged version this time!

Micromanaging acts of kindness

- Recently, I was taking the bus to school, and the back door was broken. The convention in Seoul is to get on from the front door (and back during rush hour) and get off from the back door. The bus driver sits right next to the front door, and many would greet the driver as they get on the bus. But nobody says thank you to the driver as they get off, which is natural since they would all stand around the back of the bus. With the back door broken that day, however, people had to get off from the front door, and a lot more people thanked the driver as they got off. I consider this to be a pretty good act of kindness in everyday life. It makes the city a little bit warmer! It would be cool if people could come up with small bits of infrastructure change that make people a little kinder.

Gap semester ideas?

- After I finish up all the US + Korea + UK college admissions stuff by the end of December, I’ll be free from school all the way through September (I may end up going to a Korean college from March to July, I hope to take that semester off though). I’ve been looking into gap year programs that take place around December 2025 - summer 2026, and so far the recommendations I’ve received are The Apprentice Program at Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund, Tilting Futures Take Action Lab, living at a Zen temple, and traveling around Europe/US. I may try some of these, but I’m down for receiving more recommendations before application deadlines come up. Ideas?

Music

- I’ve been listening to KYUL on repeat this month. I would consider him to be a pretty underground indie artist, and he’s a singer-songwriter who produces all of his songs. He also has a blog which is pretty cool (sadly it’s in Korean without translation). As for specific music, the official Spotify playlist is pretty good. I’m not sure why but a lot of the lyrics hit hard, they are just the right amount of poetic. Personal favorites: Someone You Used To Know, Still the Same, Little Things, and Feel Better. Five of his songs were on my top 10 most listened songs in May.

- Two of Ethan Eckenroad's songs were on my top 10 list as well. I stumbled upon his performance on YouTube, from a clip of NBC’s The Voice. One of my guilty pleasures is watching clips of reality TV shows on YouTube (it used to be America’s Got Talent/Britain’s Got Talent until middle school, and now it’s The Voice and reality TV show reviews). Ethan Eckenroad was recently on The Voice, and he reminded me a lot of Noah Kahan. Noah Kahan is inarguably my favorite folk pop artist. I’m not sure if Ethan Eckenroad’s songs are superior to Noah Kahan, but the way he sings the songs with raw emotional vulnerability (especially in live clips) is perfect for folk pop. His first EP, released this year, is quite good.

- And finally, Korean band music! Car, the garden, who is a famous Korean indie artist, has a YouTube series called School of Rock (same name as the 2003 film). He, with a different guest band every episode, goes around middle/high school bands, listening to their performances, and giving advice. YB was in one of their episodes, and after listening to them I realized how deep and vast the world of Korean band music is. So now I have a playlist. Feel free to drop recommendations!

Math on whiteboard

- I don’t think I hate math, but enjoying every bit of math is a challenge when preparing for exams. Recently I’ve made the process more enjoyable by solving math problems on a whiteboard. I used to do this a lot in middle school but have stopped ever since. Picking the habit back up made me realize that I’m able to visualize the problem-solving process better, so I can do more calculations in my head as I go on. It’s easier to spot where my mistakes happen, which is great. Words aside, paper vs. whiteboard pictures may help. For context, all of the problems are calculus; if you want to try the problems yourself let me know. All the problems are in Korean but I’ll translate the problems for you! And I need tips for getting cracked in math, the kind of multiple-choice math with hard problems solved in a time crunch.

Nice Links

- On the first day of Computer Systems class this year, someone mentioned a YouTube video of building a 16-bit CPU in Excel. I was mildly confused upon first watching the video because I didn’t completely understand what was going on. A week or two ago, after finishing my final project, the video finally made sense! We were doing the exact same CPU simulation for the final project, except it was on Java not Excel. Almost the same, except we used the Y86-64 ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), had a less fancy GUI, and did not have the clock and display (and a few other things that are less relevant). The video gave me a newfound appreciation for my CS class. It would be cool to look more into software engineering and networking (and read the rest of the systems textbook), and if anyone has specific recommendations that would be great.

- The past three Korean presidential debates have been hilarious but very low-quality (I couldn’t bear to watch the whole thing so I just watched the highlights). Election night is going to be quite fun, except I have a mock exam the day after so I will not be able to stay up very late. Broadcasters will be working hard to make polling night worth it, and BBC has an article covering it. A short teaser from SBS may give a nice sneak peek of what it’s going to look like :D

Enthusiasm levels

- I’ve come to realize that I’m bad at controlling my enthusiasm level during social interactions. I often find myself in school getting into the ‘college admissions talk’ with friends, but I remain pretty high-energy and the conversation revolves around that topic. Your enthusiasm during a conversation is usually a pretty good indicator of how interested you are in the conversation, and it works as a good sign to other people. At least, that’s how I interpret it. In that sense, the fact that I give misleading enthusiasm levels during conversations is bad. This applies to basically everyone I talk to, including people who are reading this post: my lack of enthusiasm doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the topic! Either I’m really tired from school, or I just can’t seem to control my enthusiasm level. Maybe this is why I feel more passive in driving conversations in a direction that is to my liking.

- The same applies to choosing friends who I talk to every day, especially in school (but not limited to school, essentially everywhere). At times, I feel like I don’t care enough for friends I really want to care for. Too often I find myself with people I don’t like as much as my close friends, but I can’t walk away from them and I kind of ignore my ‘closer friends’. It’s weird that I always have the energy to talk but I never have sufficient energy to be more intentional in conversations. Or maybe I’m attempting to be too intentional, and instead I should just go with the flow.

Thanks for reading!
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