19 Photos for 2019
Writing these yearly reflections is sometimes challenging, especially when my life is in transition. I feel a need for a strong, clean narrative like "I began there, and now I am ending here"; as I am learning, life is rarely so clean. Practicing acceptance was something I tried to work on in 2019, and it continues into 2020 with me accepting that my life is still in transition.
To summarize 2019, I spent the first 4 months of 2019 in Myanmar before moving back to the US to begin retraining for a career in data science and machine learning. My work in Myanmar had become less fulfilling for me, and while I do miss living there, coming back to the US and refocusing on a career where I can do math regularly has continued to be the right decision. As I write this, I am fulfilling my millennial dreams of living with my parents (in St George, UT) while finishing up a contract machine learning project. Hopefully, as I am starting to apply for full-time jobs again, something will materialize. Now, onto the photos.
I began 2019 in Nashville, TN visiting my close friend Curtis who was dancing with a dance company there. Pictured is our dinner at Bolton's Spicy Chicken where I got my chicken as hot as it comes. As tears and snot ran out my eyes and nose, I devoured that chicken with a big smile on my face.
After nearly missing my flight out of Nashville, I landed back in Myanmar to continue working for Yoma Micro Power, a company building off-grid solar powerplants. On weekends or when I would wake up early enough before work (not very often), I would have breakfast at a local teashop near my apartment. The picture shows my table for one morning with my paper, jasmine and milk tea, and rice bread and samosas. Sitting in a tea or coffee shop and reading the paper was one of the simple pleasures I enjoyed on weekends.
For my job, I managed engagements with the villages where we planned to build our solar powerplant, so I was fortunate to spend a lot of time driving around rural Myanmar and hosting town-hall meetings to try to explain and gain interest and trust in our electricity service. The villages were always interested in, though some were skeptical of, our offers to provide electricity to them. The picture shows one of our larger meetings in northern Myanmar. The unpredictability of navigating rural Myanmar is one of the things I miss the most.
In the villages, any people were curious about me as a foreigner, and the children were often much less bashful about approaching me and playing around during the idle time when my teammates and I waited for a village elder to return from visiting another town or being in the fields.
During an event to celebrate the Water Festival, which is the new year's holiday and the most important holiday in Myanmar, different companies and teams inside the business conglomerate that Yoma Micro Power was apart of were invited to perform a song. My colleagues invited me to sing the song that they were performing a dance to. Memorizing the song took me a few weeks since it was in Burmese, and the performance went off without hitch! A few weeks later when I was having dinner with my Myanmar colleagues at a bar, I was asked to perform my song again. I think I could have had a side career singing Burmese songs!
I definitely picked the best-looking pictures to highlight my 2019 for this blog, so I wanted to put this next photo in to provide some contrast. Like with Facebook or other social media, my natural inclination is to show the happy moments, and I think focusing on the happy moments is generally a good strategy for life, though it does not fully represent the challenges and harder times I experienced in 2019. The photo above was from me clowning around with my camera, which was one of the many ways I found to distract myself or get a reprieve some of the duller or more painful moments as I re-established myself and identity after getting divorced from Natasha. The transition out of my life in Myanmar and the traveling around the US was very rewarding though with any transition and instability comes some amount of uneasiness.
In mid-April near the end of my time in Myanmar, I met my little brother Davis in Indonesia, and we had a fun week traveling around Bali and the Gili Islands.
After returning to Myanmar from the trip in Indonesia, I quickly packed as many of my belongings as possible into two carry-on suitcases and made a trip to Chongqing in southwest China to visit my friend Peter from my master's course in London. I had a great week visiting Peter and his friends in Chongqing. As a parting gift for our host, who ran a coffee shop, Peter and I found two big coffee cups in the dumpsters outside of another cafe and strapped them to a little taxi to take to our host's coffee shop. Shown in the right picture is Peter (left), our host (right) and our host's dad in the background.
After the week in Chongqing, I flew to New York to stay with my friend Jon for about two weeks, and in between those two weeks, I drove up to New Hampshire for my 10-year high school reunion, which is where this picture was taken.
After visiting New York, I then went to Memphis, TN to see my brother Daryn and his husband Jacob. Luckily, my brother Davis was able to join us as well. Playing Risk late into the night has become a ritual of ours, and this photo shows us mid-game. After visiting Daryn, I headed to Nashville again to see my friend Curtis again, and then went onto North Dakota.
I came back home to Watford City, ND for a few weeks, and during one weekend, my sister and her three kids came and joined us. The picture above shows my mom, dad, Davis and my niece Megan paddling canoes around the pond in our backyard on a beautiful summer day.
Around the beginning of July, I headed to Bozeman, MT to visit my sister and her family, and then drove to Seattle to visit my high-school friend Adrian. We had a fun time camping in the mountain around Seattle. I think this photo was taken around Baker Lake, which is a few hours outside of Seattle.
From Seattle, I made a few days stopover in Portland, and then drove onto Reno, NV to stay with my college friend Garrett for two weeks. Garrett runs a bike-powered residential composting business, and this selfie shows me with the bike trailer holding the bins I would put the customer's compost into as I made a collection round one morning.
After Reno, I headed to San Francisco for about a week, or so, to see some more friends and look for jobs. Then, I headed to St George, UT, where my parents moved down to in August.
This photo shows my parents, brother Davis, and niece Megan at a production of the Sound of Music.
Following the wedding, I returned to St George to do a 3-day hike through Zion National Park with my dad. Since returning to the US in May, all the while I had been traveling around seeing people, I had been taking courses in machine learning and working on projects to help me get a job. After seeing most of the people I wanted to see in the US, I decided to be a bit more stationary, and luckily, my friend Garrett had a free room in his house in Reno, so to Reno I went.
This picture shows Garrett and his girlfriend Francis as we embodied Francis's mantra of "front porch chillin". From mid-September to mid-November, I continued my studies in machine learning and started a contract-work project in natural language processing. I really enjoyed settling into a groove of going to Bikram yoga in the morning and studying at the University of Nevada library during the day. I like libraries :)
During my time in Reno, we made a few trips out to Garrett's parent's house, which is about 30 miles south of Reno. I always enjoy visiting his parents because we get to play Pinochle together! This photo is from a Saturday when his dad rented a wood splitter to chunk up the big logs his parents had. In exchange for our youthful labor, we got to share in the chunked spoils to fuel our fireplace.
After two months in Reno, I thought it a good enough time to get a change of scenery (maybe I don't like being in one place after all...), so I used an airline voucher to fly to New York for Jon's birthday.
Curtis had recently moved to New York, so I got to see him for a few days before he left to tour with a production company performing the play Waitress.
A week before Christmas, I flew back to Reno for about a week. At this point, I had sufficiently exhausted my savings and couldn't afford to live any place where I needed to pay rent, so I moved all of my things from Reno back to St George to live with my parents. My sister and her family came down to St George for Christmas. This photo shows me with my two youngest nieces Lauren and Maddie as we explore some of the canyons around St George.
I am very grateful for all of the places and things I experienced in 2019; it indeed was a busy and adventure-filled year! I am most grateful for the friends and family I got to spend time with. The hardest part about being in Myanmar was being so distant from the people I cared about in my life, and so I tried to take advantage of this unstructured time to connect and re-connect.
While I still have yet to land a full-time job, my persistent effort throughout the last 9 months has borne fruit as I feel confident in my technical skills and abilities as a machine learning engineer. I am being contacted by a few recruiters a week for machine learning positions, so I am hopeful that my next round of job applications goes smoothly. And at the very least, I continue to delight in acquiring new skills and honing existing ones, and so as long as I don't piss my parents off too much, I have a low-cost place to live while biding my time until some corporation is willing to exchange money for my labor.
If you have read this far, I am very grateful for your time! I sent you this reflection because I care about you and wish to continue to invest in our relationship. Thank you for taking the time to read about my last year, and I hope to interact and ideally see you sometime in 2020!
