Thomas Jiang

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2022 Retrospective

12 January 2023

It must have been early 2020 or 2019. I would blame COVID for warping my awareness of time, but truth be told, time and I were fickle acquaintances pre pandemic. At any rate, it was in the Lupine house. We were chatting about hair styles, which prompted my roommate to say to me, “You look like a noob”. Not maliciously and not jokingly. Just simply and honestly.

I have long had mixed feelings about my appearance, especially my hair. It is typical east asian hair - tough and thick. When I was younger, some friends would run their hands through my hair, likely because it was deeply reminiscent of a Bob Ross chia pet. It was easy to cut that way - slap a guard on a trimmer to do the sides and slap on another for the rest - and I told myself that Indiana Great Clips hairdressers didn’t know how to cut asian hair any better. There were specific angles, under specific lighting conditions, only replicable in my vanity mirror, where I thought my hair looked fine, or even good, even if that feeling was lost in any and all photos. It was easy to maintain and familiar and I think that all left me in a state of complacency. And I was not sure I could do much better and did not really know how.

Of course, that changed with COVID, which brought limited outside exposure, which reduced my ability to get haircuts and increased my willingness to experiment with my hair. Coworkers, after all, never saw the back of my head on VC, and if I angled my camera right, I could hide any major imperfections that Comcast’s spotty internet didn’t already downscale away. And over the course of the past few years, I’ve learned about my own hair through trial and error. It is not substantially different from before, but the little changes add up and I’ve been happy about the process. There are still patches that I am not exactly sure how to fix and unflattering angles that I try to avoid thinking about but I think I can play with it.

It is strange.

When I started to think about what to record for me to recall, I didn’t feel like I had much to say. I didn’t want to point to my slight change in hairstyle as the totality of the year. After all, I changed jobs in the past year, spending hours preparing, interviewing, and stressing. I accomplished a long held squat goal and reformed my deadlift form. I started and kept simple, but moderately more healthy, skin and vitamin routines. But time for me still blends together in the comfort of familiarity. I play the same games, climb the same grades, and think the same things and talk to the same people, mostly.

One Friday dinner, someone sat down with me at the company cafeteria. I returned the favor at a lunch after the new year and our conversation, perhaps inspired by their recent visit to the de Young museum and having watched Coco, turned towards death and leaving a legacy. About the difference between ashes being scattered to the oceans and buried in the ground. About the difference between anonymous and pseudo-anonymous charitable contributions. About writing a book or creating a new formula.

Perhaps because there’s no routine, no normal, no inside joke to fall back on but one off conversations like these tend to stick. I had a similar one a while ago, predicated by a complete stranger reading something I wrote. It could also be that those conversations pull me from reliving the past and stressing about the future. I think I’ll try more of that this next year.