⚡️ By Kevin Huynh ⚡️
I don’t read books.
May 19th, 2013
Until the beginning of this year, I didn’t read books. When envisioning the quintessential 21st century gentleman, amidst the brogue boots and well sculpted scruff, I’m convinced the man reads. He’s read classics, he reads regularly, hell he’s read his favorites multiple times because every go-over he “learns something new.”
My mother is a voracious bookworm, tearing through a couple crime novels on the weekend, working her way through every free book the Kindle library has to offer. You’d think the genes might have been passed on, but my unfortunate personal truth was that as of January I hadn’t read a book recreationally (excluding Harry Potter) in nearly five years.
I read a handful of classic novels in high school and college as part of English requirements but at the end of the day, me-time reading was a hobby that never stuck. But when 2013 came around, my fear of the “What’s your favorite book?” question came to a head. My feed of blogs and long-reads were beginning to bore and spending enough time around a few habitual readers moved me to take on the embarrassing lack of books in my life.
Five months in, I’m proud to say I’ve finished seven books and enjoying numero eight. It’s admittedly a funny mix of fiction and nonfiction, following my fickle interests of the month.
Here’s the lot:
Shape of Design by Frank Chimero
A short read by a fellow studiomate. Loved his anecdote on putting a little extra “love” into your work.
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Best-seller by last month’s CreativeMornings/NYC speaker. A whip-smart dude, helped me make a few business decisions as of late.
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
Also felt guilty about the state of my personal finances. On Bekka‘s recommendation, Ramit got me up to speed. (And I got to meet him at SXSW!)
Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds by Ping Fu
The remarkable life story of another NYC speaker.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
A Second-Life like world, language viruses, futuristic pizza delivery. My brother raved about this scifi classic ten years ago.
The Hunger Games TRILOGY by Suzanne Collins
Boom.
Born to Run by Christopher Mcdougall
Didn’t exactly inspire me to run a 100mi ultramarathon, but close.
Currently reading – Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang
Food, hip hop, Asian culture. What more can I ask for?
They might not all be gentleman-worthy American classics, but I’m damn proud to say I’ve read these books. Here’s to new stories in the new year.
My Mother, In Her Zone
May 13th, 2013
A few weeks ago, my mother announced to the family that she was nominated for Employee Of The Year at her hospital. My initial thought was, “Whoa mom, that’s a pretty big deal.” From past conversations I knew her hospital was one of the top in the state, maybe even the country. And though there was no guarantee she’d be one of the final 25 selected for the title, having her name bubble up among the some 6,000 employees was already a substantial accomplishment.
She asked if I would fly in to be her young, hunky escort at the awards banquet. So last week I trekked from LGA to DIA to catch the event. After working from home (and by working I mean alternating between staring at my inbox and the refrigerator), my mother and I got dolled up and sauntered over to the Marriott Ballroom for an evening of red wine and healthcare industry inside jokes.
The senior management took turns describing accomplishments and recanting stories as they announced each of the official winners. After two hours of some seriously heart-warming tales and 24 recipients had walked the stage, a voice from the microphone started “The last selection for Employee Of The Year definitely knows her charts and graphs. Please welcome our final winner tonight…”
My mother’s name boomed over the loud speakers. Number 25 of 25.
There’s something disconnected about trying to comprehend your parents’ professional lives. Maybe it’s because I always saw the after work, non 9-5 versions of them. It’s difficult just to imagine how they operate in their work. What are they known for among their coworkers? How do they act during meetings? How do they deal with stressful situations?
My mom handles infection control, that means preventing disease spread in the hospital, prepping epidemic readiness plans, doing the hand-hygiene-WHO-CDC-decontamination-Purell-stuff. Hearing her managers describe my mother’s work, her quick thinking, her cool head under pressure was nothing short of humbling. It also was a little like attending a friend’s dance performance or hearing a buddy’s band play, that awe of seeing someone do something you’ve only heard them talk about. Though watching my mom walk the stage wasn’t exactly like seeing someone perform, just the context gave me a bit of a better grasp of “her thing.” This was her zone.
I helped my mother boot up Excel and Powerpoint for the first time years ago. When she went back to school for her Master’s Program, I was a bratty high-schooler. I showed her how to launch programs on her PC, navigate Windows Explorer, and eventually build presentations and plot graphs. I didn’t think much of it back then, and my hormone-induced snappy demeanor didn’t make it any easier for her. But thinking back, I’m glad I could play a tiny role in helping her make an impact today.
Mother’s day was on Sunday, which is merely an appropriate coincidence. But since it’s timely, Happy Mother’s Day and congratulations, Mom. You’re doing great work.
I’m proud to be your son.
What’s your favorite thing to do on the weekend? Explore.
April 29th, 2013
If you asked me to describe my dream Saturday, I’d immediately tell you that after breakfast tacos it’s all spent exploring.
Any type of exploring is fine. High fives if you’re out in the world, seeing new things, and boosting your Vitamin D. But personally, when I think exploration, I’m not envisioning a trip to that one Chicken & Rice cart and back. I’m not talking about hopping in a cab en route to one of those places that Thought Catalog says you have to check out in your twenties.
My best days in New York have undoubtedly been the ones that started without a list of places to go. Whether we set off in the morning or in the evening, I wandered in good company. And without fail I found myself in quaint shops, on new islands, in beautiful parks, and amidst impromptu dance parties. When you skip the plan, you remove the pressure of judging how “worthwhile” an experience was.
If you want my opinion, I say explore without the maps.
I say explore until your hands feel fat because you just started walking and never asked where to.
Explore with friends who vow not to look at their phones.
Explore new shops, streets, alleyways, and neighborhoods.
Explore by foot and don’t forget to look up.
Explore until you stumble upon that obscure barn museum of Civil War miniatures.
Explore with a confidence that eventually you’ll find your way back and until then anything is fair game.
Explore where you’re sheepishly checking if doors are *actually* locked and until you find yourself trying to explain in broken Spanish that you wanted all of that food plus the Chicharrones.
Explore by saying yes more than no.
Explore with people who are always game.
Explore until you’re lost and then celebrate because that was always the intention.
A Simple Way To Better Stay In Touch With Your Family
December 10th, 2012
My family is spread out. With work, travel, and varying timezones, it’s difficult to stay in touch. I think it’s easy to say that all you need to do is try a bit harder, but it’s trickier than that. Even if you do manage to consistently give (each of) your folks a call, conversations always seem limited to just highlights and none of the “just because.”
I’ve honestly pondered this for awhile. How can you help families, no longer living in the same household, better stay-in-touch? Well, I’m glad to say that a recent simple solution has really helped my family out.
Just put everybody on a group text message. If you’re a brood of Apple elitists, even better. You can add Mom’s iPad, Dad’s iPhone and everyone else on iMessage and create an ongoing conversation that even works overseas.
For me it’s been about making it so easy just to pop in and say hello. Making it natural for your bro to check-in on you, making it a no-brainer to ask mom for that Asian salad dressing recipe, and making it dead-simple for dad to share an embarrassing baby pic of you he stumbled upon.
A couple text messages obviously can’t replace a lengthy catchup. But, if you limit your contact to just a couple meaty blocks of time a month, my hunch is you might miss out on a host of the small things that make family… family.
Respect and The Art of Rap
December 5th, 2012
Ice-T: Why do you think that rap music … doesn’t get the full respect of jazz and blues?
Marley Marl: I think it’s because we’re not banded together like jazz and blues artists. You know, you’ll see reunions with jazz and blues artists. I mean it’s starting to happen now. We’re starting to realize it now. But you see blues artists, they have love for each other…
Basically when we start respecting ourselves and showing homage and getting up there and winning awards and saying “I’d like to just thank Grand Master Flash. I’d like to thank Kool Herc for even starting this so I could be here getting this.” Once that happens and we start showing compassion for the people before us that’s when we’re gonna have respect like that.
I sat down last week and carved out some time to watch Ice-T’s ambitious hip hop documentary, “Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap.” For some reason this short clip with influential DJ and producer, Marley Marl, was what really stuck out to me. It’s just a minute excerpt from the two hour film, but in it he argues this lesson–you need to give respect to get respect.
Extrapolating a bit, I think Mr. Marlon Williams strikes a chord with the idea that it’s not until we respect ourselves enough to recognize what we have been able to build on–whether it’s the roots of hip hop or the foundations for our own work–that we can demand the same respect of others.
Drop the entitlement and spend the time to better understand where you come from. It’s not like we’re really doing anything for the first time.
Pro-tip: If you’re interested, Art of Rap is currently available on Netflix Instant.
What It Feels Like To Drown
February 8th, 2012
I drowned once.
There wasn’t a white light, and there wasn’t a tunnel. In fact, it was all purple. Purple, purple, purple… dark and light shades of purple as if I was swimming in a sea of Kool-Aid. Chest ready to explode, I still couldn’t breathe. My stomach rocked up and down, twisting and turning, like I was strapped into a rollercoaster, and all I wanted to do was scream. I kept stretching my mouth wide open over and over again, but I couldn’t make a noise. Everything was silent.
I’ve never felt so helpless.
I was young-ish, at that amazing mid-pubescent phase in the 7th grade where the girls get taller and the boys look increasingly more awkward. I was chubby, had a bowl haircut and a nice set of buck teeth to complement my overbite that was yet to be fixed by the modern marvels of orthodontics. At the time, I wore these killer dragon T-shirts every day with sometimes ornately matching cargo pants with the extra large velcro pockets.
My mom had wisely enrolled me in a local “swim team” at the athletic club (the kind that sort of competes but not really) to get me some much needed exercise and lay the foundation for a solid beach bod that is still yet to materialize. So every Tuesday and Thursday, I’d slip on my jet black speedo just under my slight pudge, tighten my blue Tyr swim goggles and flop around in the pool for an hour and a half with a host of other kids.
We sometimes did what we called “under-waters.” You’d swim as far as you could without coming up for air and inevitably the unofficial goal (especially for the slightly older kids) would be to make it to the end of that 25m indoor pool. I’d done it before, and I knew how it felt for me. By the 3/4 mark, you start struggling. At that point, my chest would start to kind of pump up and down desperately looking for air, but I’d just concentrate, stare forward at that marble plus sign at the end of the pool and push straight to it. You hit the end and explode out of the water gasping for air.
One day after practice, this kid named Cliff dared me to swim a full length of the pool plus a quarter of the way back without breathing (for twenty bucks). I was a couple years older, felt like I had something to prove and quickly agreed without a second thought.
I stretched out at one end of pool and started with a series of deep breaths. I’d basically hyperventilate, take a big gulp of air to fill out my lungs, drop quickly into the water, and push off the back wall as hard as I could. Stroke after stroke, I remember reaching that 3/4 point. It hurt, and I even took in a tiny bit of water, but I was determined. My moves quickened until I slapped the cold cement of the back wall, flipped my body, and launched right back in opposite direction.
The water was especially murky that day. I can recall turning my head around to try and spot the flags that marked my quarter finish line but couldn’t see a thing. There was no way I was going to come up for air a couple feet short of the goal. So, I clenched my teeth, pumped my legs, and pulled with my arms. But then… it stopped.
You know that feeling when you’re being chased by a monster in a dream and all you want to do is wake up? You try to pinch yourself, and you try to yell, but it just doesn’t work.
Everything was purple and I was jerking my body grabbing for air. My stomach jolted left and right, disorienting me. I wanted to scream but nothing would come out.
A line of swim team kids had been watching from the deck. I had swam the full length of the pool plus half the way back when I stopped moving. Cliff eventually dived in to pull me up but wasn’t strong enough to lift me out of the water. The swim coach and my mother nearby quickly walked over to see what the ruckus was, and they would soon fish me out onto the concrete poolside.
My mouth was still tightly clenched shut as if I was gritting my teeth mid-swim. But my mom, who’d been a registered nurse for twenty years, pried my jaw open with two hands thanks to the grip provided by my overbite. She inhaled deeply and gave me two breaths of life.
I started coughing up the chlorine water.
When I began waking up, I would slip back and forth between the cold cement pool side and that purple hell hole. I woke up screaming and thrashing with a giant burst of adrenaline trying to escape.
An ambulance rushed me to the hospital, and I spent a night being pricked and prodded (still in my wet black speedo) as they drew blood each hour to check my oxygen count. I eventually discovered that I’d lost control of my bodily functions while unconscious, so before that lovely revelation I had spent hours in the hospital bed sitting in my own stew. Talk about adding insult to injury. There was a little bit of worry about brain damage but I was fine, just weak, asthmatic, and a little more cautious in the pool a few weeks later post-recovery.
I think I was too young (and preoccupied with raging hormones) to reflect a lot on what had happened at the time. Things would likely be different now, and I’m sure my family has their own account, but that’s just the way it is. I didn’t exactly emerge with some sky-parting, reinvigorating thirst for life. I didn’t drop everything after getting better (albeit I was in middle school) to go all Ryan Gosling and confess my undying love to the girl of my dreams. In the rain.
But thinking back, what might be most interesting to me is how it was all my fault, how I managed to keep myself underwater. There wasn’t an accident or a giant rip tide. I just kept swimming until I couldn’t anymore.
You don’t think about that all the time. You don’t think about how going your hardest in the right direction can sometimes lead you into a hole. And that’s been something to chew on lately.
But don’t worry about me. I’m not afraid of the water. I still wear the color purple. And my mom is still just as badass.
Note: I was interviewed about this experience in the July 2014 issue of Men’s Journal for an article entitled “In Over Our Heads.”
Breathing Life Into The Common Camera
December 2nd, 2011
A year ago today, we reached our fundraising goal for the Common Camera Project in 24 hours. I wrote this piece a few months ago as a short reflection on the whole ordeal. Thanks to everybody who jumped on board, helped out, assembled cams, spread the word, and provided general cheer. It really shook things up for me, and it’s been a wonderful adventure ever since.
There I was, sitting on my living room floor in a circle of highly capable soon-to-be Berkeley grads applying sticker label after sticker label to disposable cameras. We were only half way done, but already on hour five. My lovely roommate and longtime childhood friend, Sean, stood up amidst the carnage of paper bits and child-sized scissors to announce, “Man… Kevin sure is lucky he has friends.”
The Common Camera Project is a social art experiment that’s distributed over 300 disposable cams to be passed from person to person around the world. Each unique “Common Cam” comes in a nifty cardboard box and is labeled with a simple set of instructions:
1. Take a pic of something that inspires you
2. Pass the camera on to someone you trust
3. If you’re last, mail it back to us.
As of today, cameras have been “checked-in” as far as Alaska, Kenya, India, Brazil, Vietnam, Moroco and the Netherlands as well as all across the U.S.
This wasn’t what the project originally looked like to me. For me, it started as a curious question: What would happen if I gave a stranger a disposable cam and told them to take a pic and pass it on? That’s all. It was a silly question–that sounded more like a wedding reception or a photographic disaster waiting to happen–that I sat on, forgot about, and let simmer for over six months before doing anything about it.
What would change is that I eventually took this simple sideproject seriously. I didn’t’ start working on it because someone told me to, or as part of a job, or to find a girlfriend (for the most part). I started Common Cam and roped in some amazing friends because I wanted to create something just because I believed it was meaningful.
I think we search for reasons a lot to rationalize how to expend our efforts. I’ll read this because I need to know it for work or I’ll put this together to make some money. But as of late, I’ve come to believe that some of the most fulfilling experiences emerge from applying that same level of hustle, structure, critical thinking to a personal project just because it naturally sticks with you.
Things changed when I started pulling in my friends. I think it’s when you’re willing to solicit honest feedback, and bring in some relative expertise that your curious question or idea becomes something more.
And in the following months, Common Cam (which wasn’t even the name at the time), would transform to involve a Kickstarter campaign, a website for people to share their story, and a mass-mailing of hundreds of tiny packages at the Post Office. All of this was in large thanks to good people willing to make their mark and badass friends willing to spend a Saturday completing incredibly remedial tasks.
You should ask them, but I don’t think they did it for the free pizza. I think they helped out because they saw something worthwhile. It doesn’t matter if it’s an idea big or small (in fact I think starting smaller is better) as long it resonates with you and you’re willing to take it out of your head and ask someone else about it.
For us, we patiently await the return of most our cameras. Who knows how many we’ll get back, but the project has already given me so much more than I expected, most significantly an intoxicating taste of how it feels to work on something just because it feeds your soul.
I may not have any more cameras to send out right at this moment, but I’ll try my hardest to at least pass along that same infectious feeling to you in the meantime.
