friendship gardens at the end of the world

no i am not becoming a travel blogger

i spent a few days visiting portland and san diego. the trip was full of surprises. for instance, i didn’t expect that my two favorite places in portland would be the airport terminal and the portland state university school of business:

i didn’t expect that hostel noise and bug bites would limit me to three hours of sleep each night. i didn’t expect to finish intermezzo in one sitting at a bookstore. most of all i didn’t expect that i’d be frantically trying to squeeze work into the space between travel and sleep, around 6am-10am and 7pm-1am most days. somehow i was still able to visit most of the places i'd wanted to visit, i guess through a combination of luck and well-planned logistics

funemployment has been very liberating - i love that i can visit other cities, work on my own schedule, go to grocery stores and dance classes in the middle of the day. but i’ve also been incredibly stressed from solo travel and helping my friends launch a new ai non-profit and doing some policy reading and thinking about what to work on next and applying to schools and planning more travel (projecting to be away from sf for 8 of the final 10 weeks of the year >_<). these are all pleasant activities on their own but a lot to balance in aggregate

the best part of the week was the japanese friendship garden in balboa park. it’s part of a sister city program between san diego and yokohama, hence the name

i miss tokyo. in some ways it was rock bottom, subsisting largely on convenience store food and injuring my achilles in both legs and feeling lonely and wasting away in my room for hours every night. but it was also where i began putting my life back together after the disaster that was fall 2023

one observation about the san diego airport is that it is directly adjacent to both downtown and the san diego bay, so there is only room for a single runway - highly unusual for such a large city (for reference, similarly busy airports like nashville and philadelphia have four runways). this means every flight that lands in san diego has to descend along the exact same path, so every few minutes an airplane passes over balboa park, quite close to the ground and quite visible as a result (i estimated an altitude of ~200 meters)

if you get lucky, everything lines up and you find yourself in the shadow of a plane, though i wasn’t able to take a picture quickly enough

i love the attention to detail that goes into japanese garden design. lots of good decisions around visual aesthetics and balance and asymmetry of course, but also lots of good engineering decisions around the manipulation of water, eg. to set up this bamboo kakei such that water flows out one drop at a time:

in the case of the friendship garden, i also appreciated that the path branching was minimal, so that there was more or less only one route through the garden. path branching is annoying because then i have to plan my routes, backtrack, remember which branches i have and haven’t visited, and so on

is it a character flaw, that i like for paths to be simple and linear, that i am afraid of complexity and choice and missing out, that i prefer closed settings where i can exhaustively evaluate all the options over open settings with infinite choice? funemployment was supposed to be good practice for dealing with openness, but as usual i signed up for too many things and now everything is closed again

there were several ponds filled with koi fish, and i watched them for around half an hour. i had not previously realized that koi symbolize love and friendship, or that they occasionally rise above the surface of the water to get more oxygen, or that they enjoy bumping into each other

the fish spend all day swimming in circles at a glacial pace. it felt like such a different way of life, and as i watched them i started crying

i like walking around sf and i like the house i live in and i like the friends i have here, but i just keep feeling that i don’t belong? there are approximately three people that i have ~zero boundaries around and all three of them visited sf this summer, which i’m very grateful for, but they also made me realize how much worse everything here felt in comparison. i can’t shake the feeling that my friendships are dependent on doing interesting work or being smart and ambitious or knowing things about technology. i can’t shake the value judgment that life must be optimized for speed and value, that writing is only worthwhile if it teaches something to readers, that funemployment is only worthwhile if it leads to finding the next big thing

what if i just wanted to be a koi fish? would people still take me seriously, respect and value me, continue to be friends with me? or would i lose everything and have to start all over again?