It’s quiet here in this subdivision where my parents live, about 20 minutes from Atlanta in a rapidly developing town called Lawrenceville. Even though I’ve removed myself from New York, I’ve been attached most of the time to my laptop, working on various client projects, browsing websites, and chatting with friends. The family highlights of this trip have been a movie outing to watch Live Free or Die Hard (my grandma fell asleep during the movie) and a trip to the Korean shopping center for cold buckwheat noodles and some sweet pastries. Time moves slow here, and yet, my time here is almost up, and I will be back in New York tomorrow afternoon.

I wouldn’t call this trip a retreat, but it’s close. I did get a few hours here and there to spend at the nearby Starbucks, where everything, including the bathroom, was impeccably clean and the baristas actually said goodbye to every customer that walked out. I got to finish Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach – a clever and compact book about a newlywed couple on their first honeymoon night (Melanie called it “silly” and “self-indulgent”) – and I really enjoyed reading some of the essays in The Best American Travel Writing 2000, which I picked up sometime last year at Strand’s for a dollar. Travel writing intrigues me – not so much for the obvious reason of being paid to go to cool places and report on them but for the challenge of going beyond the observations and facts and weaving together a distinct and personal experience that leaves a lasting impression on the reader – it’s not so easy.

For exercise, I tried to go for a little jog in the neighborhood but this “neighborhood” turned out to be little more than a few cul-de-sacs that only had one outlet to a big road unfit for pedestrians. I rounded every single dead end and am sure it was still less than a mile. To call the place of your home a part of a subdivision gives it an industrial ring – a place that sounds more fit for Transformers than for human families. But running around in dead silence (it was very humid out) save the occasional squirting of sprinklers, I felt a lot like the last person on earth. I’ve stayed indoors since.

My dad’s getting his fishing rods ready for our family outing to Buford Dam, where he’s had much luck catching trout each week (more than a dozen). We had a Korean fish soup dish the other night with the trout my dad caught only a few days ago. Delicious, farmed freshwater trout – and all it cost him was the price of a fishing license ($14 annually), bait, and the gas to drive there and back. My sister, staying at my parents’ for the summer, is painting in the corner – a small plate of broken lychee skin. We’re all silently going about our business, and when my grandma, bored and lonely, comes out to socialize, we throw her menacing looks and force her back to the Christian radio and Bible. My mom is probably watching downloaded Korean dramas on the computer, a recent trick she learned that made me jokingly (but with some seriousness) call her an addict.

I’m trying to feel relaxed, but I’m a bit impatient and it’s hard to let the anxiousness subside. There are a million things zipping through my mind – the mounting work, the bills, the accounts receivables, the books I can’t finish, the stories I’ve given up on, the move, my diet, all sorts of envy and insecurities, and other annoying pulses of stress. I could probably use some hard liquor. I’ll ask my dad. I’ll need to let the quiet extend beyond my ears.

Being “green” is cool these days. Whether it’s marketers touting the benefits of green to consumers or friends telling other friends about how it’s the right thing to do, environmental awareness, and efforts of undo many decades of damage, has become a cultural phenomenon. You can hug trees and nobody will make fun of you anymore.

The other day, I contemplated ways to make my small business more eco-friendly. We have one computer that we have on 24/7 that does nothing more than play music all day. I thought perhaps a less power-hungry machine could take its place. We’re still exploring options. I also did some surfing to see if we could maybe buy a stationary bike that could generate power for a printer or even a computer. From what I’ve seen so far, though, there’s not a easy out-of-the-box solution for such a product just yet. For now, we turn off monitors, the air conditioner, and lights when we leave the office.

I then thought about growing up with my parents and my grandmother back in New Jersey. One thing that I always noticed at home was a used piece of paper towel near the sink. It would either be wet from drying something or partially stained from wiping sauce dripping. I knew that the presence of this piece of paper towel meant that it still had a ways to go before it would find itself in the garbage. I knew this from the multiple instances that my mom caught me haphazardly using a paper towel to wipe away spilled water and reaching to throw it out. “Are you crazy? You barely used that,” she would tell me. Then she would take the piece and put it next to the sink for later use. My mom made sure she got the most out of each Bounty roll. I was certain that the same roll could last more than a couple of months in our home. In fact, I learned over time that paper towels could only be used to wipe away sauces or to absorb grease from bacon. Otherwise, it was the ragged cloth towel that had the faded name of a Korean church on it. I sometimes feel pangs of guilt when I see how fast my roommates and I go through a roll of paper towel at our apartment.

My mom was also strict about using the A/C and heater. In the summer, she would give me and my sister rough tweed-like Korean blankets to use as cooling agents (“lie on this and you’ll feel better”) before finally turning on central air (and making sure to wake up around 3 or 4am to turn it off). I remember a few times I had to sneak downstairs and stand in front of an open fridge for temporary relief. In the winters, it was just the opposite. We all wore thick sweaters and walked around in fluffy big slippers. Going to bed was sometimes like an outdoor camping trip – at least three thick layers of blankets were piled on top of my fleece sweater covered body. I found relief in college when the unlimited access to air conditioning and heating allowed me to behave recklessly; I sometimes blasted the A/C and crawled under my thick comforter not because it was unbearable outside, but because I could.

My grandmother also behaved in ways similar to my mom although she never tried to impress her ways on me. She was a constant recycler. She would take an old comforter cover or curtain and turn them into dresses or hats. She wore my old sneakers when doing work around the garden. She used very little store-bought fertilizer and found ways to take waste from our house and use them to grow her many plants. She even collected rainwater in big pots to save on water use from the hose. She hand-washed laundry whenever she could and air-dried as many pieces in the backyard. There was something very charming and old school about the way she rarely needed energy from outside sources. Since she stayed home most of the time, she was free of any carbon gas emissions from driving or even being a passenger. Together, my mom and grandmother made a formidable low-energy team.

My mom once complained about how wasteful baby diapers were and proudly told me that I had been raised in “luxurious wool diapers.” “You mean I would poop in them and wear them again?” “Yes. You know, not everyone got to wear such diapers,” she said. My grandmother told me she was the one who had to wash the diaper by hand each time. “Your poop was so small and cute,” she recalled.

Over the years I grew up at home, I was often irritated by the way my mom and my grandmother seemed to be so frugal with everything. I would sometimes see my mom cutting napkins along their folded lines so that the stack of 200 would become 400. “This is America! Everything is abundant,” I recall thinking from time to time. My dad thought and behaved more along these lines, and I remember the few instances I came out to our photo store with him while my mom rested at home. “Since your mom isn’t here, I guess we can turn on the A/C,” he would say with a sly smile. Even at the store, my mom struggled to make sure every bit of material was used down to its smallest possible state while my dad was quick to overstock on supplies. It was a battle that was waged until the day the store went out of business. Looking back, I wish my mom had a bigger say in the way the store was run.

The things that I observed with rolling eyes and even a bit of embarrassment back then now seem smart and even heroic. My mom and grandmother may not have had the grand visions of saving the world through their habits or of embracing a environment-loving lifestyle. In fact, they were probably more concerned with saving an extra dollar or getting one more wipe out of a paper towel. Whatever their reasons, they left a lasting memory in my mind of what it means to live green. I may not be ready to take my lifestyle to such a disciplined level, but it’s good to know that there’s a model to which I can aspire.

Lots of development in the two weeks since my last post. My mind’s been everywhere, so posts have been infrequent. But I know I’ll spare some of the regret later on by jotting down pieces of life’s happenings:

Sei-Wook graduated a couple of weeks ago, and we finally set up our Barrel office. Details of this in our new Fish & Monkeys blog. Lots of energy in the air for the things we’ll be doing, but, as expected, some anxiety as well.

Reggie, who also just graduated, has been kind enough to provide for me and Wook a diet and exercise plan. In the past week, we’ve eaten a lot healthier (salmon, tilapia, chicken breast, veggies, etc.) and actually put ourselves through the agony of barbell lunges and squats at the gym. Last night, I helped him put up his own blog, The Sweaty Guinea Pig.

Two excellent New Yorker articles that you should read together, in no particular order: a piece from a few weeks ago on Obama called “The Conciliator” and a Adam Gopnik piece on Lincoln called “Angels and Ages”. Two politicians from Illinois with law backgrounds and many other similarities. Perhaps too early and unfair to hold Obama to such a comparison, but then again, would we revere Lincoln as much as we do today if he had not been assassinated (remember how his successor Andrew Johnson fought bitterly with Congress, a fate that could well have been Lincoln’s had he lived). And as a big fan of the doctor as hero (see here), I was pleased to read how these two men had doctor-like qualities in their detached demeanor. Here’s a paragraph from the Obama piece:

…Obama’s detachment, his calm, in such small venues, is less professorial than medical—like that of a doctor who, by listening to a patient’s story without emotional reaction, reassures the patient that the symptoms are familiar to him. It is also doctorly in the sense that Obama thinks about the body politic as a whole thing. If you are presenting a problem as something that they have perpetrated on us, then whipping up outrage is natural enough; but if you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back

And a longer passage from the Lincoln piece:

The bulk of his legal work- which took up the bulk of his professional life – was the predictable work of a small-town lawyer with a wide practice: property disputes, petty criminal cases, family arguments over money, neighbor at war with neighbor, bankruptcies, and, oddly, libel suits where local women defended themselves against charges of prostitution. His practice was the legal equivalent of a small-town doctor’s, treating head colds, lice, scarlet fever, and a rare case or two of venereal disease.

What he learned was not faith in a constant search for justice but the habit of empathetic detachment. “When we look closely,” Dirck says, “we can see Lincoln the President trying hard to apply a lawyer’s grease to the shrill machinery of war.” Dirck insists that Lincoln’s magnanimity, which was real, should not be “sentimentalized as a form of kindliness. . . . His magnanimity was also a function of his lawyerly sense of distance from other people’s motives, and his appreciation – honed by decades of witnessing nearly every imaginable form of strife in Illinois’s courtrooms – of the value of reducing friction as much as possible.” The lack of vindictiveness that Lincoln displayed (his favorite expression, his secretary John Hay once explained, was “I am in favor of short statutes of limitations in politics”) was the daily requirement of a small-town lawyer. Lincoln believed in letting go; his magnanimity was more strategic than angelic.

With temperatures reaching ninety degrees and the muggy humidity of summer starting to make un-A/Ced movements uncomfortable, there are still more things to look forward to than to dread in the coming months. For one thing, I’ll be giving one more go at a Weekenders type of program with friends, hoping to gather up a mix of people for outings such as Shakespeare in the Park, Bohemian Beer Garden, indie flicks, and trips to the beach. If you’re interested, shoot me an email! I also love how cold white wines become more and more desirable each day as summer nears. I highly recommend a Picpoul, a crisp-tasting white that goes incredibly well with greasy foods.

Fun!