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|Stumbling with words| Recommendation N.15

This is an unexpectedly cold spring. I finished all my coursework and finally have room for a small collection. Here is what has been sitting with me lately.

Things I Watched

The Drama (2026, A24) caught me off guard — and I mean that in the best way. Directed by Kristoffer Borgli, who already proved with Dream Scenario that he is obsessed with how quickly we judge and cancel people, this one stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as an engaged couple whose wedding week unravels from a single unexpected event. Ari Aster produced it, which tells you something: the discomfort is intentional.


What stayed with me isn't the plot twist. It's the question underneath it: does one act undo everything that came before? The film doesn't give you a clean villain. Whoever made "the mistake" probably had reasons. And reasons don't erase consequences. What Borgli is quietly doing is showing how social performance makes private failures so much harder to navigate. A wedding is the most public declaration of a private feeling. When something breaks in that space, everyone has an opinion. The line I keep returning to: there is a difference between forgiving someone and trusting them again. The film lives in that gap. And sometimes, second chances are given not because the person deserves them, but because you need the closure.


I also watched Straight to Hell a Japanese film that stayed with me for different, darker reasons. It's feminist in the way that quietly unsettles: a portrait of women's lives in the aftermath of war, with stunning imagery and cinematography that made every frame feel deliberate. What disturbed me most was how honest it is about human nature under conditions of powerlessness. The film seems to say: given the right circumstances, anyone can become the one who inflicts harm — the person who was once on the receiving end can become the one dealing it out, once they are finally given a chance. I saw different faces across different men, and multiple faces folded into one woman. That multiplicity felt true to me in a way that more straightforward stories about good and evil never quite do.


And then Queen Maker, a Korean political drama I watched purely for the pleasure of it, and it delivered. Politics here is exactly what it looks like from the outside: full of tricks, scandals, and the people who manufacture them. It is not a show you watch to feel good about the world. But it is a show you watch to understand the machinery, and sometimes that understanding is its own kind of satisfaction.


One more, smaller: a YouTube video that I can't stop thinking about:



I grew up knowing Đạo Mẫu as something my grandmother practiced, a thread of folk belief running alongside official religion. Watching it now, as a documentary, made me wonder things I never thought to ask: whether my grandmother also had to hide something of herself, or whether the queer dimension of Đạo Mẫu lived mainly in the men who served as Cầu đồng. I still don't know the answer to that. I am not sure I ever will. Watching it, I felt that complicated mixture of sadness and pride that comes when you learn that a community you belong to has been carrying something for a long time without being able to name it openly. The Cầu đồng hold something sacred precisely because they exist at the margins.


Things I Listened To


This episode of Deep Questions with Cal Newport — featuring Brad Stulberg and his book The Way of Excellence — quietly challenged something I had been letting slide



The trap of hobbies. We treat them as rest, so we never build real skill — and then wonder why they stop feeling rewarding. That landed directly on me. I have a few things I do for pleasure that I have kept deliberately easy, because I told myself I needed the break. But the ease stopped being restful a long time ago. It just became stagnation with a nicer label. Stulberg's point is that discipline isn't only for work. A hobby practiced with intention grows into something meaningful; one practiced passively stays stuck at the same level forever. The other thing Newport points at is how abundance of choice — streaming, podcasts, feeds — is its own form of undiscipline. Consuming without committing. Browsing without arriving anywhere. I recognize that in myself more than I would like to admit. The question I left with: what hobby am I keeping comfortable when it could actually be stretching me?


Things I Just Learnt


At a conference this semester, I sat in on a presentation on Korean and Japanese linguistics that surprised me. Although the two languages look quite different, the presenter showed that their sounds and underlying structures often align closely—so closely that speakers of one language can sometimes predict the right word in the other from how it sounds. It made me think about how easily we infer distance from surface differences rather than shared roots. That’s probably why my husband’s follow-up felt so resonant: he sent me a video about translation and what gets lost between Japanese and other languages.



What struck me is how Mandarin and English sit differently inside Japanese - each carries its own cultural weight when used to depict modernity, and the gap between them reveals something about what any language can and cannot hold. Since I started learning Mandarin, I keep finding myself tracing the roots of Vietnamese back through the Sinosphere - noticing the architecture underneath the sounds. The more I understand, the larger the whole system becomes. Not intimidatingly larger. Excitingly larger.


Things I Used


Merlin Bird ID has quietly become one of my favorite little apps. It does something simple: it helps you identify birds by sound or photo. I’ve started learning bird names, and it’s unexpectedly changed the way I walk—now I look up, listen, and notice birds instead of just moving from place to place.


Song of the Post


A friend sent me a Lou Reed song a few weeks ago with no explanation. I fell back into him slowly, the way you fall back into something you forgot you needed. There is a particular quality to Lou Reed that I have trouble naming: it is not comfort exactly, but it is company. A voice that doesn't try to make you feel better, just sits beside you.



And then my sister suggested I finally watch the Waitress musical. I had listened to the songs many times before — Sara Bareilles's melodies have a way of sticking — but watching the full film was different. The songs landed differently when I saw what they were attached to: a woman finding her way out through small acts of creativity and stubborn hope. I think that is why my sister sent it. She knows me well. Two very different musical worlds this month. Both felt like being seen by someone who wasn't even looking at me.


 
 
 

|Note to Self| How to do a conference No.01

There are things I keep learning, forgetting, and having to learn again. Note to Self is where I write them down — not as advice for anyone else, but as reminders to the version of me who will inevitably forget.

I am a PhD student, a teacher, and someone who is still figuring out what kind of scholar she wants to be. These notes are part of that figuring out. They are practical, personal, and sometimes embarrassingly specific. I'm sharing them here in case they're useful to someone else who is also in the middle of becoming.

This is note No.01

You used to leave conferences feeling like you had survived something. Drained, overstimulated, and vaguely guilty that you hadn't networked enough. Slowly, you've learned to think of conferences less as events to endure and more as things to design — around your own work, your own energy, your own goals. Here is what you know now. Don't forget it next time.

Before

  • Read the program before you arrive — not skim, actually read it. Mark the sessions that interest you. Write down the names of two or three people you want to meet and think ahead about who you might ask for coffee. Going in with a short list makes the whole thing feel less like a crowd and more like a series of intentional encounters.

  • Book accommodation right next to the venue. It sounds like a small thing, but being ten minutes from a nap is a completely different conference experience. You can step away, reset, and come back without losing half a day. Protect your energy as seriously as you protect your time.

  • Bring your business cards. They still come in handy, especially with people who prefer an instant exchange over pulling out their phones.

  • Writing a detailed script first helps enormously: once the words exist on the page, they find their way into your mouth more naturally when it counts. Word choice, sentence construction, anxiety in the moment — these are things I'm still working on. I'll update this note when I've figured them out more.

During

  • Develop a note-taking strategy before you sit down in the first session. I take fleeting notes and snapshots on my Remarkable during talks, then transfer anything that matters into a reflection note afterward. The transfer step is where the real thinking happens.

  • On asking questions: a good question is not a comment in disguise, and it is not a chance to prove you've read the literature. The best questions do three things — they show you were paying attention, they refer to something specific the speaker actually said, and they ground themselves in a shared framework so the speaker knows exactly where you're standing. A colleague of mine asks brilliant questions at every panel he attends. When I asked him how, he said: just make sure the speaker can tell you were listening. That's it. Refer to the exact line. Ask what it implies. Then let them think out loud. Let the speaker shine. One well-placed question will make people more curious about you than a hundred words of self-promotion. Ask well, then step back.

  • On compliments: if someone's work moved you or shifted how you think about something, say so specifically. Vague praise puts the burden back on the other person to guess what you meant. Specific praise — this line, this argument, this reframe — lands, and it stays.

After

Send a follow-up email, but only to the people who genuinely impressed you or whose work you want to stay close to. Keep it short: one sentence on what stayed with you from their talk, one sentence on why you're reaching out. That is enough. Most people don't do this, which means the ones who do are remembered.

Conferences don't have to cost you a week of recovery. They can leave you energized — if you go in with a plan, protect your rest, and treat each conversation as something worth showing up for properly.

You will get there!


 
 
 

In the making of a half-human, half-machine scholar

I have a complicated relationship with productivity. I do not want to become a machine — but I have started to think that the best version of myself is somewhere between fully human and fully mechanical. Emotion and unexpectedness are where discovery comes from. Discipline and system are what let you actually do something with that discovery. This post is my current attempt to hold both: what I have learned, three years into a PhD, about building a life that makes good work more possible.


Body: staying in motion


I used to treat exercise as something that competed with work — time I had to carve out, justify, and defend. The gym meant logistics: changing clothes, getting there, getting back, timing it against my schedule. I admired people for whom it became an anchor. For me, it mostly became something I avoided. The shift came when I stopped looking for the ideal solution and started looking for the frictionless one.


The walking pad was the first answer. After seeing a lot of people doing their walk while podcasting, I think that I might do the same to ensure I exercise at least 15 minutes a day. Answering emails, attending lighter meetings, reviewing slides, listening to a podcast: none of these demand the fixed posture I assumed they did. The walking pad lets me blur the line between moving and working. Whenever I feel very drawn in sitting still, having a walking pad is my semi "break." It also dissolved the guilt I used to feel about "not exercising" — because I was, quietly, all along.


Ice skating was the second answer. I signed up for lessons mainly because seeing people skate on Lake Mendota was so cool. And also because I had noticed something unsettling: I was becoming more timid as I got older. The fearlessness I used to have was quietly receding. Learning a physical skill as an adult — one where your body occasionally goes out of control — turns out to be genuinely useful beyond fitness. It forces a different kind of attention. That enforced presence, that contact with something completely outside my usual world, has been more restorative than I expected. And because learning a new physical skill still counts as learning, it quietly dismantles the guilt that exercise is stealing time from something more important.


Mind: a system for thinking outside your head


Academic work generates a particular kind of cognitive clutter. There is always more to read, more to write, more to track. I have come to believe that the mind works best when it does not have to hold everything at once — when it can offload, externalize, and see. My note-taking system has three layers, moving from immediate to permanent to digital.


The white board is my immediate layer. It holds whatever matters this week: goals, floating ideas, urgent tasks, questions I have not yet answered. What I value about it is that it is not precious. A notebook implies you should fill it with considered thoughts. The white board has no such expectation. I can write badly, erase half of it, draw arrows that make no sense, and start over. It gives me permission to think in draft, even when my only audience is myself.


The flip chart is my permanent layer. I think of my PhD as a kind of living journal, and I want the large ideas — the arguments I am building, the skills I want to develop, the research threads worth following — to be somewhere I can see them at scale. A notebook page is too small for that kind of thinking. So is a laptop screen. Standing at a large sheet of paper with a marker, writing big, stepping back to look: this is how I see structure. Macro-level thinking is harder to access when you are always working at the sentence level, and the flip chart forces me back up to altitude.


The Remarkable sits at the boundary between physical and digital, and it has done more for my reading life than almost anything else I own. Reading PDFs on a laptop is, for me, a losing battle. One tab becomes five. The Remarkable is separate — it has one job. I can read, annotate, take notes, and stay inside the document. It has the quality of paper: gentler on the eyes, better for sustained attention. For academic work, where reading is constant and annotation is necessary, that separation has been worth a lot.


Obsidian and VS Code handle the digital layer. I had tried Obsidian before, but the sync was unreliable and it never fully stuck. I returned to it when I finally accepted that my notes were too scattered to rely on memory alone — a second brain had become non-optional. What made it work this time was using VS Code alongside it, integrating with Claude Code to reorganize old notes, maintain folder structure, and reduce the overhead of the system itself. I have come to believe that a note-taking system only works if maintaining it does not become its own project. The less I have to think about the system, the more I can actually think. This post, in fact, was co-written and refined with Claude Code — using it to bounce ideas back and forth, tighten the argument, and make the writing more coherent. It is one more way the same principle applies: the right tool removes friction between thinking and expression.


Inner life: getting professional support


In Vietnam, therapy carries a stigma. You go when something is seriously wrong. I did not think I had a serious problem — just the ordinary stress and occasional anxiety of a PhD student living far from home. But I was curious, and I did not think I had to be in crisis to benefit from understanding my own patterns better.


My therapist approaches emotion with a scientific rigor I find genuinely useful. He has given me frameworks for understanding why I respond the way I do, and concrete techniques for when anxiety spikes — grounding exercises that engage the five senses, breath practices I can use in the moment. What I practice now has measurably changed how I move through difficult days. The peaks are lower. The recovery is faster.


My wellness coach does something different. Where therapy tends to look inward and backward, coaching looks forward and outward. She listens carefully, reflects back what she hears, and then asks questions that lead me to my own answers — the goal is not to give me solutions but to help me find them. The effect is that I now set goals for myself that are specific and achievable rather than vague and aspirational. One of those goals, which is how this blog post exists, is to read something outside of academia every week and write about it. That idea came partly from listening to Ocean Vuong and Terence Tao talk about what it means to create in the age of AI — the argument being that we need to cultivate the conditions for uncommon serendipity, for the unexpected collisions that produce something genuinely new. Disciplined curiosity, not just disciplined output. If you are reading this and have something you think I should read or watch, I would genuinely love to know. She also introduced me to Finch, a habit-tracking app I have found surprisingly easy to sustain, possibly because it is designed to feel gentle rather than demanding.



Both have changed how I relate to my own functioning. Not by solving problems, but by making the internal landscape a little less opaque.


What did not work


Not every tool or system improves life just because it sounds right in theory.


The gym never became sustainable. The logistics outweighed the benefit. Group fitness classes were worse: fixed schedules made me feel managed rather than supported, and missing a session produced guilt instead of momentum. I function better when movement fits around my life, not when my life has to schedule itself around movement.


The Fitbit taught me that I don't need data as a source of motivation. The device went from wrist to drawer within a few months. Also, it feels very cold and uncomfortable wearing it. It can't track my steps when I use my walking pad. So what's the point?


The iPad sat in an uncomfortable middle ground between laptop and notebook: too distracting to feel like paper, not capable enough to replace a computer. Every time I used it I felt slightly unconvinced. I gave it a genuine chance. It never stopped feeling like a compromise.


What I actually think


Looking at what has worked, the common thread is fit. I try my best to reduce resistance rather than adding it. What also runs through all of them is a willingness to stay curious, to try something unfamiliar and see what it turns into. That openness has brought me to things I would never have planned for. New apps (Finch), new skills (ice skating), and often those unplanned things have been useful. What failed, failed mostly because it added friction: logistical, emotional, or both. Not because the thing was bad in itself, but because it was wrong for me at this point in my life. That is the part productivity writing usually skips over.


The best system is not the most optimized-looking one. It is the one you can actually live with. And living with something, I have learned, requires that it not cost more energy than it returns. That is how I define productivity now. Not doing the maximum. Not proving anything through discomfort. Just building days where focus, clarity, and endurance are a little more possible. I feel like this PhD journey teaches me to learn to optimize under my own conditions.


I'm forever thankful.



 
 
 
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