While I spend most of my days working as a website designer, I’ve neglected my own personal blog for some time now. I’ve done very little upkeep aside from the two or three entries I post each month. The addition to photos to some recent entries has been a nice change, and I hope to keep at it. This blog still runs on WordPress 1.5, which is exactly what I first installed when I started blogging back in 2004. I really do need to upgrade at some point.

I took some time today to adjust a few things on this blog. Most are not very noticeable, and some are on the backend, so I’ll point them out:

• No More Categories – I found the list of categories to be useless so I got rid of it and turned two items, the PK Photo Album and Short Stories into graphic links. This should have been done long ago – I’ve kept the photo album fairly up-to-date, but it was near impossible to find before because the link was lost among the other categories
• Un-2.0 – I took out Twitter, the Technorati link, and the unseen Statcounter code from the side bar
• Anti-Spam – after two years of being bombarded by spam bots, I installed Spam Karma which promises to sift out all the ED and violent porno links from my comments

I’ve also decided to discontinue PK Eats and PK Cinema. In less busier times, having these three constantly updated would have worked, but I have enough trouble keeping just one afloat. You can, however, find my writings about New York restaurants on Gobbl, our foodie blogging community. I miss writing about movies, so I’ll continue doing that on this blog in the future.

I have a few other things on my wish list for this blog that won’t happen for some time. I’m hoping that once I upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress, I’ll be able to have a better system for archiving older entries instead of clumsily listing out every single month since April 2004. Gosh, has it been that long already?

Unrelated, just wanted to say some quick things about recent reading activity: I finally finished Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a very trying two-month process but one that was clearly worth the effort. The book left me with a number of different thoughts and ideas, some which I whole-heartedly agree with and others I’ve easily dismissed, but one thing (and this is very anti-intellectual) that disappointed me was how Dagny so easily discarded Hank Rearden for John Galt. That ice queen! I’m now breezing through Paul Auster’s Mr. Vertigo, and it feels great to carry a book only a few hundred pages long. It’s reminding me how much I missed first-person narratives.

1 We cheered on as Reggie raced in his triathlon race at Treasure Island.
2 Delicious congee from Chinatown.

3 Beirut at a house party.
4 Our hot ride for the trip: a Chrysler 300 from Thrifty.
5 Congee as the antidote to the next day hangover.

6 A walk along the waters on our way to Fisherman’s Wharf
7 Hotel des Arts was pretty gross, but came out nice in photos.

The most expensive sneakers I ever owned were a pair of Converse Larry Johnson basketball sneakers back in 5th grade. They cost a little over $100, and I think the only reason I was able to get them was by asking my Dad instead of Mom, who would never have sanctioned such a purchase.

Among my group of mostly Korean American friends in elementary school, sneakers were important status markers. I remember my fresh-off-the-boat Worldcup (it was one word on the shoe, I think) sneakers from Korea with no shoelaces and two strips of velcro – they made me an instant target of ridicule in 2nd grade. When we all became crazy about the NBA, kids started wearing fancy basketball shoes to school. Air Jordans were by far the most popular, but since I was a loyal Knicks fan, I never came close to owning a pair. I did own a pair of Shaq sandals one summer, and it was probably the most useless pair of shoes I ever owned.

The $100+ Converse LJs, for at least the first two weeks I owned them, made me feel like a superstar. My friends inquired about how my feet felt, and I could swear I played more aggressively on the basketball court after school.

As much as I reveled in owning my LJs, I soon became careless and the pair became incredibly dirty and worn out. My Grandma threw it in the washing machine once and the shoes never felt quite the same again. I eventually moved on to other fancy sneakers endorsed by players such as Penny Hardaway, Grant Hill, and Tracy McGrady, but none of these surpassed the $100 mark (mostly because I bought them on sale).

Fast-forward more than a decade, and I find myself at Steve & Barry’s in Manhattan Mall shopping for basketball shoes because there’s a pickup game happening in Midtown, and I don’t have the proper shoes. So I buy myself a pair of Starbury low-top basketball sneakers. For how much? $14.98. Yes, $14.98 – and there is no tax on shoes in New York City, amen.

I remember reading about Stephon Marbury and his mission to market and sell affordable sneakers – a very noble and business-savvy effort which seems to be paying off: I was lucky to find a pair of 9.5 basketball sneakers since almost everything sizes 8 through 10 were sold out. And judging from the sample of people I saw waiting in line with Starbury boxes – there were middle-aged men with large bellies, European tourists, and children of every shape, size, and color – it felt as if the low cost had made the shoes a sensible buy for those who normally would never have considered sneakers endorsed by an NBA player. The lowest I had paid for a pair of sneakers prior to the Starbury was about $50 for a pair of black Reebok cross-trainers that was on sale at a Foot Action. That could have bought me three Starburys and at least two pairs of socks.

It’s no secret that sneakers are cheap to make. I’ve read that a pair of Nike sneakers costs less than $5 to produce, and yet they can easily charge more than a hundred dollars because such demand exists. We’re paying, of course, for the brand name – for all the superstar athlete endorsements, cool commercials, sexy graphics, and inspirational soundtracks that have come to define Nike over the years. They’ve earned it, so I don’t think Nike, or any other athletic shoe company, is doing anything terrible in charging what they sometimes do. But I like what the Starbury has done. It’s made cheap a kind of cool thing, and, thanks to its exclusive distribution at Steve & Barry’s, not an easy shoe to get. So kids who’re in 5th grade, who could be comparing their hundred-dollar sneakers, can now walk around in $15 sneakers without feeling insecure. How refreshing is that?