COMPLETELY SKIPPED THE LINE to get in bc I didn’t realize there was a HUGE lineup and I went behind a couple of Asian people so I think the security guard just thought I was with them. my bad.
Got inside and lined up for terrible quality merch… please don’t use Hanes. The zip up hoodie was see through…
REGRET NOT GETTING THE BASEBALL CAP IT WAS SO
Met these two dudes in line who were so nice and they gave me merch advice. Never saw them again.
Got center pit area when the floor becomes flat, not bad at all. Plenty of space AT FIRST
The opener was a DJ called Sophie Gray? It was like a Top 40 remix I didn’t like it at all.
I then waited in place for like 40 minutes until he came on… and it was beautiful.
He sounds the same live which is always amazing. Stage presence was also pretty good and he was very beautiful.
WHAT WAS NOT BEAUTIFUL WAS THE DAMN CROWD. Never in my life have I ever seen such a terrible crowd. None of these people wanted personal space it was BAD. Lots of cuties there though if u wanted a new man / woman
The girl in front of me FILMED THE ENTIRE CONCERT. I MEAN THE WHOLE CONCERT. Didn’t even take a break AND SINCE I HAD A FRONT ROW VIEW OF THE SCREEN SHE DIDN’T EVEN RECORD IT WELL. LIKE SHE WOULD DROP HER ARM EIGHTY TIMES AND THE VIDEO WOULD BE LOPSIDED. WHAT WAS THE POINT!
ALSO, I WAS RIGHT AT HER CAMERA LEVEL AND SINCE WE WERE BASICALLY TOUCHING EACH OTHER (MY HAND GOT TANGLED IN HER HAIR EVERY MINUTE UNTIL I STEPPED BACK LIKE 10 TIMES) IM 100% SURE MY SINGING IS FEATURED IN EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE CLIPS.
ALSO SHE KEPT PUSHING BACK INTO ME!!! USE UR WORDS GIRL
She also would not let go of her friend, which is understandable in a tight crowd. However, her arm was jutting out to take more space GIRL LET GO
Everyone behind me was super short, and so was everyone in front of me. This means that I got a good view, but I also saw a lot of cameras. Kinda crazy
My personal goals for this concert were to not BUY merch (failed), and not record more than two videos (failed), but I know next concert I won’t buy merch so it’s okay!
Songs I wanted to hear:
Make Me a Better Man (✅)
Who’s the Fool (✅)
Doll (✅)
Lying (✅)
Walk to Class (✅)
Concrete (✅)
Cheer Me On (✅)
Earrings (✅)
Roommates (✅)
On My Shoulder (❌)
Thailand (❌)
RODRICK RULES (❌)
Rockstar Boyfriend (❌)
HOT IN NEW YORK!! (❌)
Overall LOVED MALCOLM TODD UR THE BEST, did not even remotely like the crowd except for the two people in the beginning. I have never really cared about concert etiquette until this concert, I do want to say this concert made me so aware about HOW bad people can be.
Also, please play more SWEET BOY it’s so lyrically beautiful and I love all of the songs on there
Friend of girl’s point and shoot (she actually filmed like parts of it and held it up correctly the entire time so no issues
Every year, on a weekend in May, a plethora of random people walking down your local sidewalk can be seen in hundreds of cities across the world. Jane’s Walks (named after Jane Jacobs) are free walks around neighborhoods, where neighborhood historians (or just randos) highlight neighborhood culture, societal issues, and opportunities for civic action.
Note: All of this information comes from my interpretation of the Jane’s Walk and previous personal knowledge, and as a result references are not provided. A list of links to learn more about East Chinatown is located in the index.
Tucked away east of Downtown Toronto lies Chinatown’s much smaller, more traditional Chinatown, the aptly named East Chinatown. Centered around the intersection of Broadview & Gerrard, the community is a T-shaped microcosm of Chinese grocers, restaurants, hair salons, and many elderly Chinese people who call this area home.
Broadview Avenue, East Chinatown, Toronto
The community first began to sprout in the early 1970’s, with the displacement of Toronto’s original Chinatown (now Toronto City Hall) leading to the creation of two distinct Chinatowns, West Chinatown (what we typically associate with Chinatown today), and East Chinatown.
The community’s heyday took place in the 70’s and 80’s, and eventually slowed down when a new wave of Chinese immigrants moved to the more affluent suburbs of Scarborough, Markham, and Richmond Hill. By the end of the 90’s, the majority of Chinese, including a large surge of wealthy Hongkongers escaping the Handover of Hong Kong to China, had established a stable community in the suburbs, reducing the number of people who needed to come down to Chinatown for Chinese services.
Community life in East Chinatown, Toronto
Today, East Chinatown has shrunk significantly, although a strong base of Chinese-owned businesses continue to thrive along Gerrard. The community remains as a bastion of cultural spirit in East Toronto – continuing to build on the neighborhood’s Chinese spirit to reflect on the community’s multicultural population.
Stories of East Chinatown
When I first joined the walk, I was expecting to be paraded around East Chinatown and shown the sights of a neighborhood gone derelict. What was highlighted instead, were a collection of stories, jokes, and gossip about the community’s spirit, all in the lens of Kaitlyn’s grandma, who owned Dunhuang Books 敦煌書店 (one of Toronto’s first Chinese bookstores).
Learning about her family’s story of resilience, with East Chinatown’s characters in tow was a delightful and enterprising story of the power of a community. Like a gaggle of sheep, all 200 of us (unofficial numbers provided by one of the Jane’s Walk staff) wandered around East Chinatown and learned about various stories including
The controversy around the Sun Yat-sen statue in Riverdale Park and why the Chinese community built another one in West Chinatown (TLDR: it’s ugly and he’s short?)
Broadview Library and how it became the first library in Toronto to provide Chinese language literature
Toronto’s controversial Paifang 牌坊, welcoming visitors to a internationally recognized parking lot
The Seven Wonders of the World Scavenger Hunt (have you found all seven murals scattered throughout the neighborhood?)
The story of Dunhuang Books, and how it became a literature hub for Chinese living abroad (who mostly agreed with the Communist viewpoint)
East Chinatown and how it managed not to look like a cartoonish Chinatown (which I love by the way, San Francisco Chinatown!)
Charlie’s Meat and the rumors that he shared more meat than socially acceptable…
Weaved along all of these stories, I really began to sense a soul embedded into East Chinatown. My knowledge on this area, while shallow, was embedded in its role it played in the past, and not the continuing role it plays into the future of this area of Toronto.
A faded out Lotto sign marks the last remnants of Dunhuang Books in East Chinatown, Toronto.
Today, East Chinatown continues to play a role in the community of East Toronto, with Chinese grocers serving multicultural communities, and serving as the home to multiple small Asian-Canadian businesses that have revitalized the area’s youthful spirit (Oji Seichi, Issho Bakery). Kaitlyn provided a local perspective on the energy that multiple cultures shaped in East Chinatown – a perspective difficult to grasp from the cover of a webpage.
Being Your Neighborhood Advocate
What I ultimately found great about Jane’s Walks though, is how important it is to foster local knowledge to improve your own community. Our places are woven with stories of people past who have contributed in their own way to make each neighborhood what it is.
As someone who lives in a neighborhood, you have the ability to work to shape the impact of your place. Local change is important because it impacts people directly where they live, work, shop and play. I appreciated this walk for what it did to East Chinatown – created a story of resilience, and cemented a role for itself in today’s Toronto. If you have the ability to see how your own story can impact your neighborhood, this is a gift that you can use to spur civic action and inspire change.
Short Sun Yat-sen – a controversial statue amongst Toronto’s Chinese community.
Perhaps it was ultimately shortsighted to mourn East Chinatown’s role in Toronto’s Chinese history, and instead choose to welcome it as a spirit of the community it continues to shape today. If you’ve never been to East Chinatown, I truly welcome you to explore it – check out Que Ling, or enjoy the sights of the Toronto Skyline at Riverdale Park.
“How’s your day? Great! I went to work, came back home, made dinner and got ready for bed.”
So many people I know are going through this mundane experience of life that comes with growing up and starting careers. Countless “wellness gurus” proclaim the benefit of a good routine, a stable base to build your day (unfortunately I read a lot of self help books last year), but have you ever wondered how uncertainty can help you live a more fulfilling life?
Commuters ascend an escalator in Glen Park, San Francisco.
It’s dawned on me recently that what made school very interesting for me is the ability to be in an environment where learning and self discovery is encouraged. When you’re forced into the “real world”, we take all of this creative time and attempt to anchor our lives towards a stable routine, in this effort to build a similar stable structure that school provided us in our youth. While there’s nothing wrong with a great routine (you should probably go to the gym regularly, or touch grass every day), working some whimsy into your life can provide some great benefits to re-centering discovery and wonder into your life.
How I’m embracing uncertainty and discovery into my life
One of the key ways that I work “awe and wonder” in my life is to set simple, easy goals that work to create discovery in your life. The goals aren’t necessarily meant to be hard to fulfill, but rather blend into your daily life to build whimsy and something interesting. Keep these three principles when creating your goals:
Is it effortless?
Have I done it in the past year? (hopefully no)
Is it short and sweet (1-2 hours at most)?
The goal of these three principles is to ensure that you can incorporate something simple, easy, and novel to you! Easily getting exposed to new ideas is what really makes your life more exciting and more interesting.
Here are some of my goals:
Pick a new drink that you haven’t tried (I mostly stick to the zero sugar sodas, and mostly Coke Zero. Next time that I’m at the store, I’m gonna pick a new soda that I’ve never tried and see if I like it!)
Use my backyard to read or work (idk about y’all but my backyard is not interesting and I never use it… so might as well use it once and see if I like it or not)
Go to a workout class (I already workout so I might as well try a new workout!)
Stroll down a new aisle in the supermarket (see what products are new instead of just sticking to my list!)
One of daily routines (using a trash can when needed)
As you can see, most of these things I already do! But the novel part is implementing my “routine” in a slightly different way, and that exposes me to new things. There’s so many other ways to do this; maybe take a new route to work, or if you already do a workout class, try it at a different location.
Take the privilegeto live live
It’s a privilege to be alive right now, and although it may seem hard in so many different ways, you have the power to ensure that you’re living, not just surviving. This wasn’t meant to be some self-help post, but to encourage others to embrace being silly and in awe. The world is so big and I’d love to learn as much as I can from it while I still have the ability to.
If you’re content with the everyday routine, more power to you! Not everything will work for everyone, and I’m glad it helps you.
I implore anyone who reads this to develop their own four “silly goals” this month, and feel free to share them with me! I’d love to see how being silly makes your life more interesting.
If you’ve ever been on Muni’s fare page, you’ll notice a very strange fare rule.
Daly City BART Transfer– A free round-trip transfer is provided to all customers transferring from the Daly City BART station to Muni lines serving that station when using Clipper.
The 28 & 28R – A bus route I’m too familiar with, and one of the routes that qualifies for this free transfer
But why? It’s strange that this BART station (which isn’t even in San Francisco) is the only place in the entire system that offers a free transfer between BART and Muni. As someone who has a lot of spare time, I decided to do some investigative journalism.
Firstly, I did a quick Google search with “reddit” in the tagline, but couldn’t really find anything except for people confused with the system. So I went on ChatGPT, which stated:
“Daly City Station is just outside of San Francisco city limits (it’s in San Mateo County), but many San Francisco residents use it, especially people in neighborhoods like the Outer Mission or Crocker-Amazon.
To support these residents and encourage public transit use, San Francisco actually pays BART to cover the cost of Muni transfers at Daly City Station.
This agreement allows BART riders exiting at Daly City to get a free Muni ride (on lines like 14R, 28, 54, etc.) to get into or around SF.”
While this statement is mostly true, it doesn’t really justify why. Just because San Francisco residents use the station doesn’t mean Daly City’s riders should receive two free trips – the City’s eight stations don’t get the same treatment. With this information, I stumbled onto Daly City’s Station Access Plan document from December 2002, which finally gave me the answer I was looking for:
Muni’s Fast Pass (monthly pass) system has an option that covers unlimited BART rides between stations in the city.
Note that BART has no monthly passes except for this particular section
Daly City, being outside of the city, is not covered by the Fast Pass.
This leads to a disproportionate amount of riders who take Muni to Balboa Park (the next station on the line) instead, overcrowding Balboa Park’s limited parking facilities and connecting bus routes
As a result, BART and Muni extend this fare benefit to riders as a way to lure San Francisco residents who live nearby to use Daly City, spreading out traffic towards each station’s design capacity.
Vintage MUNI Fast Pass designs over the years. Source.
But why not extend Fast Pass’ station coverage to Daly City? The same report mentions that Daly City’s parking lots would not be able to absorb the extra ridership, and would impact SamTrans ridership to the station. The study ultimately concluded to not extend the benefit to the station – a decision still in place today.
What does this even mean to me?
Not much. It would save me money if I made a trip between Daly City and BART, but that’s a trip I’ve only made twice in my recollection. However, it ultimately does represent how terribly our transit systems interact with each other here in the Bay Area.
I took this photo the one time I took advantage of this fare rule back in 2023! Absolutely love these raw concrete commemoration plaques scattered through all eight stations that opened during this phase of construction.
The Bay Area’s fare system may be easy to use, but difficult to understand. The 27 transit agencies across the nine counties of the Bay Area all have different fare structures, and none of them mesh well enough to understand the mish-mash of fare discounts and transfer rules. Clipper 2.0 is supposed to fix many of these problems (like the inability to provide discounted BART transfers), but we need to eventually create a unified fare system that equitably distributes cost between riders and most importantly, is easy to understand for riders.
When in Tijuana, go party. When in Taipei, go stamping?
Something that I found super cool in Taipei (and Taiwan) is that every single station has their own stamp! When I was in Taipei last year (and this year), I decided to collect all of the unique station stamps that I came across.
Taipei Metro Map. All stations in green are stations that I collected a stamp from!
Why I LOVE stamping – and why you should too
Stamping is a really great way of participating in “collection culture” without actually accumulating anything you may not want five years from now! I personally carry a journal with me, and that’s where my stamps go. It makes a fun souvenir of the events of the day, and it’s not heavy and won’t take up space in your luggage. Each station design has a unique stamp, reflecting the surrounding area’s unique characteristics. I love looking back at them after a trip, or even just on a random Wednesday! Most importantly, it’s FREE. Most tourist attractions in Taiwan and Japan will have a stamp as stamp culture is very prevalent in these places, so you can go beyond the Metro and collect stamps from museums, hot springs, and parks!
My Stamp Collection
As of February 2025, here are the list of stations I’ve collected a stamp from:
