2024 Recap

My version of a photo-dump

One thing I’ve learned this past year is that change begets more change. To put it differently, everything becomes lower stakes after major life events.

Here’s an example. If you’re ever on the fence about moving across the country to start a new life, just go through a big break up first - the move will feel like a walk in the park. I’m speaking hypothetically of course.

Given how eventful the past year’s been, I wanted to do a recap of my 2024, which I’ve grouped into a few major themes.

New York City

New York City is my favorite city in the world.

Its public transit is better than any city in America. And amongst cities that do have better public transit (Tokyo, Paris, Singapore), New York has substantially more culinary and ethnic diversity. You can get Filipino balut in Woodside, Bangladeshi biryani in Astoria, Jamaican jerk chicken in Bushwick, Caribbean tostones in Jamaica, Yemeni coffee in Williamsburg, etc.

On top of all this, New York’s high density makes every social activity more robust. In San Francisco, there were two competitive levels I could sign up for in my soccer league - competitive or recreational. In New York, there are five.

Similarly, for dating, there are just so many more people to meet here, so it didn’t take too long for me to settle down. After a few months, I met A who I really wasn’t supposed to meet to begin with.

Bumble, a dating app, allows you to see people between one and a hundred miles away. I chose something like eight miles, but also specified that I’d be willing to be matched with someone further out than eight miles if it seemed like a good match.

On our first date, I learned that A lived over fifty miles away - two hours away by train or an hour away by car without traffic - and yes, there’s always traffic.

But after our first date, I learned that distance, like time, is relative.

With A, 50 miles isn’t 50 miles.

Candies

A lot has happened with the West Coast branch of the Francia family.

This April, my youngest brother Josh started a candy company from our parents’ house. And somehow, in the span of less than a year, he has a commercial kitchen and it’s one of the top candies listed on Etsy, despite the vast majority of his sales coming directly through his own website.

While it is Josh’s company, it’s also turned my family’s schedule upside down. John packages hundreds of orders every day. Dad handles shipping logistics. Mom runs customer service. Josh, meanwhile, simultaneously the CEO and bunso, puts in 70+ hour weeks.

I’ve been joking with my family that we got the whole Asian stereotype upside down. Traditionally, Asian immigrants will come to the States to start a small business (nail salons for Vietnamese people, laundromats for the Chinese, etc), have their kids work onsite, and then send their kids to medical school or law school.

My dad, meanwhile, is a retired doctor who’s now working on the small business that his son started. It’s all a bit out of order relative to the Asian stereotype, but so far, things seem to be working out just fine.

Writing

One thing I learned last year is that a highly volatile life makes for good writing.

Observing subway denizens on the M line at 3:00am, going on a date with an influencer, getting into a fist fight on a Wednesday night on Canal Street - all these experiences are fertile ground for seeding a story. It almost feels like cheating.

Also, thanks to New York City having a functioning public transit system, I’ve been able to read a bunch on the subway, especially when I lived in deep Brooklyn where it seemed like it would take nearly an hour to get to most places. I’ve probably read hundreds of short stories in 2024, thanks to all the idle subway time I have.

The best thing about writing this year though was how results have started coming in. Before I started sending out my stories to magazines in 2024, I really had no idea if my writing was any good or not. Sure, friends and family would say that they liked my work, but that kind of praise is about as valuable as sand in the middle of the Sahara.

So for me, getting published at Catamaran and Eclectica, being nominated for a Pushcart, and doing a reading of one of my stories at the Mechanics Library in San Francisco has felt really validating.

Honestly though, I’ve still got a long way to go. As a stats guy who likes attaching probabilities to just about any event, I’d say there’s a ~5% chance I can get a book deal that’s substantial enough to get me to ditch my tech job.

It’s not much, but I’ll give it my best shot.