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itsaphanlife

Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Mary Oliver Story

19 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by itsaphanlife in Uncategorized

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Tags

books, Mary Oliver, poetry, reading

Here is a Mary Oliver story for you.

One summer many years ago, when I was starting my first year in college and trying to figure out who I would become, my mom and I stayed in Cape Cod for cheap at the home of a friend of hers from medical school.

Our first morning there, my mother woke up at dawn for a walk on the beach and asked me if I wanted to come. I groggily, grumpily, told her no, preferring to sleep in. I was at the age when one gets angry at being pulled along to family vacations, when there are more important things to do than take a morning walk with your mom. I had brought some paperbacks that I wanted to get through and had stayed up late the night before reading them, in part to not deal with possible conversations or forced chatter with my mom’s medical school friends.

An hour later, just as I was waking up from slumber, my mother came in, all smiles and sun happy.

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A motorbike ride to Vung Tau

19 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by itsaphanlife in Saigon life, Uncategorized

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Halfway on the road from Ho Chi Minh to Vung Tau you turn from highway 51 onto Hoang Sa road, and the land opens up on both sides. You come upon salt marshes, with their mixture of sky, island clusters, waterways, briny sea and pungent drafts of dried fish. Views here are expansive: tufted grass, mangrove clumps, an occasional boat docked next to makeshift homes, become dots upon a larger canvas of sky and marsh water.

It took two hours to get you here on motorbike. Two hours splitting the road with careless cars, packed buses, delivery trucks loaded twice their heights with wood, metal shutters, construction sand and pebbles that bounce out their useless tarp covering and pelt you and motorbike the entire way there.

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The sabbatical year, half way finished

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by itsaphanlife in Saigon life, Uncategorized

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2016
was… a sad year of losses. In music, in civility and grace, in sanity. 2017, may you be just a little bit kinder to this world.

The flip side of this gruesome year in politics and the arts, is that I had a chance on my year off to be with family. I was able to hang with my father in Vietnam, a place where he is his most amusing, generous self. I got to spend valuable time with my mom, who is halfway across the world but always a skype call away. I got to see my brother and his lovely wife marry under the awning of colorful autumn leaves in college town, New England.

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Could I have been an entrepreneur?

20 Thursday Oct 2016

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I

t’s funny that I sometimes write for Vietcetera.com, which often has interviews with some of the most promising entrepreneurs in Vietnam. I’ve always harboured dreams of heading a startup, but I’ve never seen any of my numerous inventive, highly practical ideas come to their fruition. 

macbook-selfie-stick-moises-john-yuyi-tom-galle-30.jpg

Here are a few of those ideas. Again, shockingly, none of these have made it to the real world, because of a lack of funding, because they were ahead of their times, or because… well, for some I still hold out hope… 

A website ahead of its time: whathepho.com Continue reading →

A few pieces for my brother’s wedding: a toast and a translation.

10 Monday Oct 2016

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My mom found a Vietnamese poem online for Will & May Elise’s wedding by Toan Tam Hoa which seemed so fitting with their love story. I translated it into English (taking some liberties with the original in the process). We read it together during the wedding service, my mother the original, and I, the translation.

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Celebrity encounters part 2

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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A beautiful day in lower Manhattan, early autumn, cool enough for sweater vests, not sweaters, a sprinkle of rain in the early morning, the air windswept and sharp… just. Cool, diffused, leaf-dappled October light on the ground.

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Image

On Celebrity Encounters

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Is it possible for a man having a mercilessly, unrelentingly bad day, to suddenly turn it around after he encounters his favourite celebrity? Can the latter positive negate all the negatives that came before?

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Posted by itsaphanlife | Filed under Uncategorized

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Augmented or virtual reality, which do you pikachuse?

17 Saturday Sep 2016

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imgres.jpg

Recently, I had the good fortune to be shown the virtual reality playroom in the Google offices in New York where my brother works. My brother and I spent about an hour and a half trying out some incredible virtual reality hardware, testing out zombie shoot em ups, plane landing games, fruit ninja games (the controller becomes a three dimensional sword in your hands and the fruit sprays bucketloads of colorful juice onto your eyes!) and most wonderfully, a 3-D painting game that was a much cooler, more permanent version of light painting. Continue reading →

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  • Through Caverns Measureless to Man: Exploring Quang Binh Province
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Still life with 4 books I read in America over this long winter break (vertical) and 4 books I bought there to bring back to Vietnam (horizontal). Loved Bliss Montage, All That's Left Unsaid, and many of the stories in Afterparties, liked/appreciated Useful Phrases for Immigrants. Wrote a longer review of All That's Left Unsaid that'll be on @weare_dvan soon. Trekking round Manhattan #bigapple New York City continues to be the best city for reuniting with old friends. #nyc #brooklyn Trekking around Boston, Harvard, Boston Commons, and showing my wife my old hometown in winter. I actually missed feeling this level of cold! #winterinboston Fun with our niece Alanna on our last days in Florida. Can't wait to have our own...we think... #funwithbabies Beach hopping and night market shopping around Sarasota and Venice, Florida #beachesoflorida In spite of the fact that Trump and Desantis both reside in this state, Florida's been A-OK with us! #florida #summerinwinter Back in America. For this visit, our family has expanded by two! #floridayrusocold #florida

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