2024 Photoessay: Rekindling the Inner Child

2024 through my lens.

2024 was a special year, and not just because I entered my fourth decade of life, but also my third year living in the desert. For the past three years, Tucson has served as somewhat of an oasis for me. A place where few distractions come out to bother me, allowing me to focus fully on my work, relationships that matter, and space to explore interests both new and old. But I’ve also done a significant amount of travel in 2024: trips to California, Hawaii, Washington DC, and New York punctuated the year, giving me moments of execution and celebration when needed.

Food was also a theme of this year, as it is every year. Being away from large urban cultural centers like the bay area, Los Angeles, or Taipei, most meals dining out ended in something to the effect of “you’re asking me to pay this much for food I can make better myself?” Luckily I found myself in the company of friends willing to experiment in the kitchen, making all sorts of gourmet delectables out of the sheer fact that we had no alternatives readily accessible. Chinese new year, random gatherings to make the quintessential xiaolongbao, and any excuse to eat had us pulling the flour out of the cupboard or browsing facebook marketplace for kitchen aids.

In March, I stepped off the Amtrak in Penn Station to find myself back navigating the underworld of New York City, a place I called home for three years fresh out of college but hadn’t been back to in over five years. Rushing to buy a new MetroCard and pulling the ideal swipe speed out of deep recesses of my muscle memory, I noticed our train on the platform getting ready to depart. As we sprinted with luggage in tow, the doors started to close. Making eye contact with a bearded gentleman on the train, he threw his bodyweight against the door, using his body as a muscular meatbag to force the door to stay open as we ran. The doors sprung back open, we made it in, and the operator came on the intercom to scold the man for holding the door open. I gave him a fistbump.

2024 was also the year for some big life decisions. Much to my partner’s dismay after a morning hiking, we made a detour to a mountain vista where I awkwardly fumbled through my pocket as well as fumbled my words asking the big question. She said yes!

In many ways, 2024 rekindled a lot of the interests I had when I was younger. Camping, fishing, film photography, to name a few. In high school, I found my mom’s old Pentax K1000 sitting in the back of a closet, and decided that I was going to start using it because they wouldn’t buy me a DSLR. In July, I took it to a camera repair shop to get it serviced, hoping to fix the light meter, the prism, and get the shutter calibrated. The repairman calls me regularly about his “project” running into issue after issue, needing to source parts from Japan, and I have not yet gotten it back. Sorry mom.

But in the meantime, I purchased a working, fully functional Canonet QL17 GIII from Japan to try my hand at some rangefinder film photography. There’s just something about holding a hefty, physical camera that reminds you that taking photos is an act of capturing things in the real world, a rebellion against our increasingly digital world. Eventually, I’d like to start developing my own film, but for now every roll gets mailed to San Clemente for processing.

2024 sent me back to Hawaii, the enchanting, magical place that I have not visited since Bush was president. As a child, I remember the dipping my toes in the warm ocean and consuming incredible barbecued meats, both of which remained true this time around. In Waikiki, we discovered a Japanese restaurant selling Oxtail Ramen, and I still dream about the rich, dreamy broth. Gotta learn to make it at home.

And then, Kona Coffee. I used to think that coffee beans were a good souvenir for friends back home, but then I realized that just about everyone has their own preferences when it comes to their cup of joe. Coffee is personal, and seeing it growing in a farm and learning about the processes involved for harvesting, filtering, and roasting certainly shed some light on the number of coffee trees needed to ensure I am a functional human being.

This old Audi. I talked about this car in my last post on this blog, and it still remains a car I spend a lot of time and money learning about, maintaining, and repairing. Ever since the first time I was in the market for a car as a high schooler, I couldn’t help but look at listings for cool, non-running project cars that I could get for next to nothing. I remember scrolling through pages of retired police V8 Crown Victorias for $1000, old BMW E30s, or anything else that was cool and fun.

I’m still no expert on cars, but I’ve stepped up to the challenge of figuring things out when needed. When a dead crankshaft position sensor caused the car to die once the engine came up to temperature, I spent weeks debugging before realizing the sensor I had just replaced a couple months back was bad out of the box. Having a project disconnected from business deliverables, the pressure of a manager, or deadlines has made working on this car almost meditative.

And to be honest, I really don’t think I even enjoy driving all that much. For me, being able to take things apart, learn how they work, and put them back together is fulfilling in all the right ways. It tickles the part of my brain that curious about technology and engineering, and that it’s really not too difficult when you really put in the effort to learn it. I’ve started an Instagram and YouTube channel in the process, which I hope to keep updated with little projects here and there. Or maybe they’ll never get updated again. Who knows.

If you know me, even before I was interested in cars I was interested in airplanes. As soon as school was out in middle school I would run over to the wood shop classroom, where the model airplane club would meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I would pull my project out of the cabinet and begin cutting and gluing wood before our mentor arrived. Mister Lou Young, a retired NACA (pre-NASA) engineer with thick glasses and a big nose that would graciously volunteer to help kids build airplanes out of balsa wood every week. From Mister Young I learned not only the craftsmanship of building an airplane out of balsa wood and tissue paper, but also how to calculate angles of attack, aileron angles, and the center of gravity.

Maybe one day I’ll take to the sky again, but until then I’m glad to have captured all these moments of 2024.