IT MIGHT BE the Asian in me, but nothing motivates me like goals. If you know me, you know that I’m very organized. Whether it’s my course syllabi, my notes app on my iPhone, my revenue stream white board, my separate journals for writing, finance, & life, my travel itineraries and moving logistics, or my walk-in closet that’s literally divided into three color modalities and uses a docket organizational system to keep track of all my clothes (to make sure I wear everything and help me identify donation items), the fact is that I’m a very organized person and I have been for a very long time. Pretty much since I started my MFA where there were so many things I wanted to write and so many books I wanted to read and so little time to do everything.
I’m the kind of person who created two separate schedules (centering writing or content creation) during the past year even though my work as a remote academic consultant, freelance writer, investor, & options trader, only takes up part of my day. For several months when I was unemployed, I created an hourly schedule for myself. Now, my daily schedule involves running, going to the gym, meditating, writing, house cleaning, going for walks, doing yoga, applying to full-time jobs, & reading books by friends or about finance before bed. But in case it sounds like I’ve been infected by the (Asian) American virus of toxic productivity or that I don’t know how to relax, I promise, I’m very good at relaxing and besides walking too much, I rarely go overboard. I just feel better about myself when I’m working (on something) and I also know that the absence of work or movement or creativity makes me feel depressed. If you trapped me in a bunker for ten years, I would probably walk back into the world ten years later with three LPs, an opera libretto, five completed book manuscripts, & another five manuscripts I’m simultaneously revising like a Bach fanboy. That’s not a flex, by the way, that’s just how I see the world and how I participate in it.
One distinctly Japanese part of my identity comes from the concept of 生き甲斐 (romanji: ikigai), which translates roughly as “purpose in life” or “motivating force.” If you’re familiar with the French concept of raison d’être, then you get the basic idea. Ikigai also has a spiritual connotation in Japanese as well but I feel like that’s optional. For me, the psychological importance of having goals (both short and long term), the importance of having a life purpose or a force in my life that pushes me to create, can’t be overstated enough. I mean, there are so many things in the world I can’t do (like calculus and dividing fractions and writing commercial fiction best-sellers and folding LB’s t-shirts, though god knows I try). There are also many things I won’t do, but writing, traveling, & being in love are three of the most important things in my life and I do them well. They motivate me each and every day because they are—on one basic level— the same thing. After all:
When I write, I travel through time, memory, idea, space, & story
When I travel, I read what others have written about the places I’m going to visit. My traveling ends up in my writing. I try to study that country’s language if I have time. Furthermore, traveling is always a story about the insider meeting the outsider, about country and nation, about culture and religion, about the self and the other, & about the dialogue of history and modernity. Traveling is how I listen and witness to the ongoing cultural conversation taking place in another country. And traveling is often a type of infatuation for me.
When I’m in love, I always want to write about the human experience. I always want to travel with the person I love and talk about the places we have visited together. And I understand love not just as human connection, but also as the story of intersection and convergence. Love is an emotional voyage for the lover, the writer, & the traveler of the world and I think it’s impossible to love without traveling emotionally in this world and the next.
So, as I peer at the snow globe of 2023 from the top of Griffith Park for my last CFA session (aka “Church for Atheists,” my name for our Sunday hikes in LA), I do have some goals that will help me stay focused and motivate me as I pursue my ikigai for the New Year. And all of them are related in one way or another to these three things. Go figure!
My 2024 Goals
Finish my prodigy novel. I still haven’t come up with a name yet for this book (sometimes the name of a book comes to me in the very beginning and sometimes it doesn’t come until the end), but for the first time, I’m writing a novel without an outline. I’m 160 pages into it and I’m letting the book tell me where to go next, something I’ve never done before. It’s incredibly confusing and incredibly liberating to arrive at an intersection and not know where I’m going. Not only do I think (hope, pray) that this novel will be a big fucking deal by itself because who doesn’t love a book about mixed-race prodigies, but I also want to have another book ready if/when an agent writes me in the New Year about The Miseducation of Jessie Hayashi & His Cosmic Dictionary of Loss, my second short story collection. Hopefully 2024 is the year I finish my next novel.
Get a full time job and get that bag. I didn’t leave academia intentionally, I just returned to LA with LB so she could have the life she deserved. The life she couldn’t get in A2. I literally told her to be selfish and center her needs and not worry about my job because her happiness was more important and I didn’t want to control our marriage just because the academic labor market was brutal. After the pandemic, we moved back to LA together and I’ve never looked back.
But now it’s time to make some real paper and I don’t mean origami cranes.
I’m at the point in my life where I want to use my skill set to make real money for the simple reason that money gives you freedom no matter what your Marxist classmate from grad school tells you. Money lets you help those you love. Money helps relieve the suffering of those you care about and increase your life experiences and improve your quality of life (at least up to a certain point). And money can expand your existential vocabulary from the things you eat to the things you wear to the things you drive to the things you see to the home you live in. I’m glad I didn’t care about money for most of my life, especially when I was younger and more ambitious and idealistic, but now I do. Whether I end up working in IT, copywriting, project management, advertising/marketing, video games, or some type of professional writing, I plan to use my intelligence, work ethic, creativity, organization, research, & writing skills to live my best life in 2024.
Get the right agent. I’ll be hearing from a bunch of literary agents in 2024 and Inshallah I get not just good news, but good news from the right agent who is incredibly talented at what they do and who has a good relationship with the NYC publishing industry. This would make a world of difference for me as an emerging writer.
Travel again. LB and I haven’t traveled since 2019 when we went to Belgium and Luxembourg. It was such a strange time to travel for us: We were living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Thai Town that didn’t have heat in order to save money, we were leaving LA, the city we loved, for good, in order to move back to the Midwest for my tenure track job, my short nonfiction piece had just come out the New York Times’ Modern Love section, & in the back of our minds, there was all that packing we would start once we’d returned for yet another cross-country move to middle America to follow a dream and abandon a dream at the same time. Our next trip in 2024 will have none of that baggage. There will be no veil covering our heads. My Japanese is gonna be hella rusty if we fly back to Tokyo. But traveling again means dreaming again. And fuck, we need to dream again after losing both our babies in the cold.
Tweak my sleep schedule. If you know me, you know that I’m an inveterate night owl. I don’t have to do anything, just leave me to my own devices for a week and I will start going to bed at 4am automatically. That’s why I created a schedule for myself because I know myself and I know my creative tendencies. The truth is, I like the madrugada, that time at night when everyone else is sleeping and the streets are quiet. It’s my favorite time to write fiction and create new tracks. In fact, I like the madrugada so much, I wrote a song about it when I was living in Buenos Aires (my band name is Mizu). I wrote this song—of course—during the madrugada. At the same time, I like the way my body and my immune system react to a regular sleep schedule and I like the deep sleep I get when I go to bed before 1am, so I’ve been waking up between 8.30am and 9am every morning for a while now. In 2024, I’ll modulate my schedule to a 7.30am-8am wakeup time. It might be a corporate schedule, but I plan to use it for creative projects until I get new job.
Get a Rolex. I know, I know, it’s kinda gross saying that out loud, but I don’t want one because I’m trying to act upper crust. Truth is, I really hate the crude materialism of it all. Even so, I still want one. I don’t care if it’s used. In fact, that’s better for the environment. I just want a tiny piece of personal achievement for myself where luxury meets craftsmanship. Ever since LB bought me an inexpensive watch case on Amazon, I’ve found it incredibly satisfying to store my watches inside. Most of them are Swatches, but I do have a Shinola watch I bought back in Ann Arbor that I love. That thing will outlive this republic! Anyway, it would be next level if I could put a fancy watch in that case for once but even more important, I think I will feel an incredible sense of accomplishment that only someone who has lived in poverty before will understand.
Go on short trips in California. There’s still so much we haven’t seen in this beautiful state. For years, LB was the only driver so our day trips were rare but memorable like the time we drove to Montecito to spend time with TC Boyle at his Frank Lloyd Wright house and drink wine and snack on olives in his backyard. When we returned to LA in 2021, it was peak COVID-19 infection season. Then we couldn’t leave because Zoe’s deteriorating health was too demanding to be left to someone else and traveling was too stressful to take her with us. Then we were in mourning after Gogo died while our i3 started falling apart after a Tesla ran into it, which feels like a perfect cultural metaphor. Truthfully there will never be a perfect time to leave. Even so, I hope that in 2024 we’ll be able to just hop in the car and go somewhere. I’d love to spend (more) time in Malibu, Santa Barbara, Ojai, Monterrey, maybe drive to Big Sur. California is a great state for lovers and its beauty helps me live in the moment.
Keep growing my investment portfolio. It started with crypto-the-gateway-drug and quickly morphed to boring old stocks, ETFs, options trading, dividend stocks, a Coinbase portfolio, a high-yield savings account, & finally a maxed out ROTH IRA for 2022 and 2023. While I’ll never become a financial analyst or a day trader and I honestly don’t want to either at my age, my investment portfolio has become an important part of my artistic, creative, & intellectual identity in ways that genuinely shock me. I knew back in 2021 that leaving academia meant forfeiting an academic pension plan, which was why I created my own retirement plan with the money I’d saved during the pandemic since I didn’t know where I’d be working next after my visiting writer gig was done at BG. But now, my investment portfolio is an exciting part of my daily life that I love geeking out about. Not only does it give me multiple revenue streams, which takes the stress off my job, but it also helps me sleep better at night. And my goal for 2024 is to contribute as much as I can to my portfolio and take advantage of the power of compound interest because that’s how you build wealth.
Get a pup. Even though Gogo! and Zoe have left a massive hole inside my heart, which is an obstreperous void for sure, I think that having a beautiful little pup in our house will also help us heal, calm LB’s spirit, distract us from the pain of being human, & give us someone else to shower with affection and love and mimos and appreciation. I’ve already told Gogo! and Zoe that they will never be replaced and that we will always love them. I’ve tried to explain to them that we just want the joy of having a dog in our house. That loving a new pup is not a zero-sum game with loving an old one. I think they understand. I’m pretty sure they’re not mad. After all, we have never stopped loving them. We just can’t see them anymore when they flitter in the multiverse. But we carry them in our heart wherever we go anyway like Gen X kangaroos.