The Chexican

Category: Personal

Stuff I could have saved for my private journal but decided to post online instead

  • Preoccupations

    Preoccupations

    Time really seems to pass a lot quicker the older I get. I’ve been meaning to push an update, but with everything that’s been going on over the last few weeks, even my private journal hasn’t been seeing much action.

    Last month’s points of distresses ended up being a massive time-sink for me. In the end, I followed through with attending San Diego State University and accepting the federal student loan being offered, finally entering the world of student loan debt after having successfully evaded it all this time. When it came to registering for classes, I enrolled in 16 units across 6 different courses. Using the university’s degree audit feature, I noted that my 69 units of transfer credits had me starting the equivalent of my third year at 58% completion towards my Bachelor’s and leaving only 51 required for completion—meaning that at a full-time clip of at least 15 units per semester and some infill during the summer/winter intersessions, I could potentially be done and ready to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree at the end of the Spring 2026 semester.

    Getting used to having an academic workload again was a bittersweet transition, glad to have the opportunity to keep advancing my studies while at the same time resentful that my celebratory freedom from homework, exams, and that awful Canvas platform had to end up being so short-lived. It was a very “back in the car” a la *Jurassic Park* feeling.

    Screen capture of the car from Jurassic Park at the end of the tree fall scene
    Well, I’m back in Canvas again…

    It also didn’t help that the first few days of the semester were lost towards preparation for my evidentiary hearing in my Civil Harassment Restraining Order case. That didn’t play out as it should have, with the letter and spirit of the law upheld. Instead, I found myself at the receiving end of even more judicial misconduct and failure to uphold the law. I have follow up actions planned, some of which I’ll be forced to move on fairly soon, but for the moment am dedicating all my care and focus to my studies first. I have a lot of vested interest—personal, financial, and opportunistic—in at least maintaining if not elevating my cumulative GPA and finishing my Bachelor’s degree with a high academic standing.

    Beneath all of these short and long term goals is the pressure to self-actualize, and the anxiety of having a timeframe imposed on it. If all goes according to plan and I do complete my Bachelor’s in under two years, I’m under no illusion that it’s going to be a golden ticket to a prosperous happily ever after; even professionals with graduate degrees are having difficulty finding employment. And with everything going on socially and politically, I don’t even have the assurance that the student loans that afforded me this semester will still be around in the ones to follow. All that in mind, I have it in my head that it’s not finishing the degree that’s incumbent upon me, but also optimizing myself for life afterwards.

    In these short two years I’m going to have at SDSU, I’m going to want to make the most of the resources available, from simple things like making connections with faculty/students to the more involved effort of venturing on campus to attend networking and career-focused events. Both of these simple actions, like so many other personal plans and projects, require moving past my hermetic state of being. To bring this long era in my life of keeping a reserved low profile and focusing solely on the required work in front of me to its end. To start assembling an online presence, including fleshing out this blog. To start building a real professional network. To polish my personal elevator pitch and overall image.

    Feels like a daunting additional set of things to do, given how much my academic workload is taking up the vast majority of my time and I’m admittedly struggling to keep pace with. But it also feels like I’m still only starting, like there’s still so much more I can get out myself. The closer I get to that ideal personal state, the easier and more manageable things should start to feel, until I’m able to once again live in a confident state of flow I remember having in adolescence.

  • Distresses

    Distresses

    It’s hard to believe we’re already almost two weeks into 2025—time’s been flying by, and already bleeding together on account of all perpertual stream of bad news. The state of reality as a whole seems like a sick bizarro joke, a satirical take you would have seen in a 90s or 00s movie and brushed off as far too ridiculous to ever actually happen, yet here we are in a timeline where Idiocracy proved to be depressingly prescient. And just as the National political farce capped off a first-week-of-the-year with a preview of the chaos and farce we’re all slated to endure over the next four years, the current Los Angeles wildfires started.

    via Time.com An aerial image shows smoke from wildfires including the Eaton Fire and Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 8.Patrick T. Fallon—AFP/Getty Images

    I’ve known the fear of uncontrollable wildfires for a majority of my life now, having endured the various ones that have occurred over the years since the “first” one in 2008. For as many as San Diego has seen, they’ve pretty much occurred on the county level, never within the limits of the city proper. Yet it’s not lost on me that it’s really only been a matter of fortunate timing—had the current Santa Ana conditions had been in effect back in November of 2024, the fire in the canyons along Fairmount Ave would have potentially turned into a situtation not unlike the one in Los Angeles presently.

    Admittedly, I’ve had a hard time with the balancing act of trying to maintain composure and focus on the pressing matters of my personal life, having very familiar sympathy for everyone affected by the fires, and the fear of both the potential aftermath up in LA and the active awareness it could easily happen to San Diego.

    In my recent fledgling attempts to start engaging with social media again, I’ve made mention of the ongoing legal issues I’m contending with. This, along with a frantic job search in an extremely competitive and post-holiday slug environment in tandem with a soon-to-start Spring semester that isn’t financially feasible on offered aid alone has really hampered both my private journaling and blogging efforts.

    To the former, I’ve been playing it close to the chest the entirety of its duration. Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to get a head start on opening a can of First Amendment over the situation. But each time, I talk myself out of it due to the nature of the details and the active status of the case. To that end, January 29th can’t come soon enough. As far as everything else goes, it’d be really nice if the flow of time could slow itself down, especially in these last days before the incoming Federal Executive Adminstration. Not only is there the time crunch related to vocational and academic matters, but also the delay in other efforts & projects on the personal front.

  • Beginning Anew

    Beginning Anew

    So many times over the past two decades have I tried to start a personal website. Some with grand statements of intent, others with introspective rumination over how to try to find an online voice in an ever-changing internet landscape that is so vastly different from its original form and rampant with data leaks, content scrapers, and the evolving dangers of AI. And each time, they’ve all ended the same way: abandoned over the need to prioritize other obligations in life and the doubts over self-expressing online; that’s even circumstantially been the case presently.

    But as 2025 begins with the expectation of it being a harbinger year of challenges, from the global levels all the way down to the personal, it also comes with a certain confidence to be had from all the lessons learned and ridiculousness endured throughout 2024, from the national stage all the way down to the individual. 

    I’ve long joked that I need to find the way to start living life with the unearned confidence of those small breed dogs always willing to scrap way above their weight class. Better and simpler I’m finding it to accept and step into my earned confidence, and committing to leaving the footprint I’ve always wanted to make.

    There are already at least three personal essays waiting to be extrapolated from the above, but all in good time; self-patience is an understated key part of operating effectively. 

  • What’s In a Name? Change.

    What’s In a Name? Change.

    Earlier this month, I initiated the process of a legal name change. As far as the what and why behind it, the easiest way to explain is to go name by name.

    Jimmy/Jimmie

    Throughout the entirety of my lifetime, the clerical error made by whoever filled out my birth certificate once upon a 1986 by defaulting to “Jimmy” instead of my father’s “-ie” spelling. Aside from technically making me not truly being a “Jr.”, that small misspelling has proven to be a fairly inconvenience when having to verify my identity within certain systems since I became a legal adult: government, medical, and banking. However, the $500+ it typically takes to pay for the court fees and the required newspaper publication of the court order were a high hurdle for someone trying to get a work history going right before the great recession of 2008. Seeing it as a very costly spelling correction, I figured it would be something that I’d get around to later on in life.

    As I moved through early adulthood, the notion of having a nickname variant as a formal legal name began to irritate me. Every so often, I’d get asked if “Jimmy” was my “actual” name, to which I’d begrudgingly answer in the affirmative. Even once I did get that spelling error fixed, I’d still have a diminutive form a name as my own proper one. When 2012 rolled around and my relationships with my family started dying off, getting rid of this name became a decided part of my exhaustive parental separation.

    Still, I avoided getting it done. Partly due to the costs involved, but more so on account of my own psychology. At first, the hesitation of making such a definitive move and forfeiting what I’ve known all my life—would I even be able to get used to being called a different name? Would I end up regretting it a few days after hearing myself addressed by a new name? And the more I slid down that depression spiral all that time ago, the more it became undesirable to have my name changed. I felt perpetually mediocre and insignificant, a letdown to myself worthy of bearing the name “Jimmie Jr.”. To get the name changed would have to be preceded by getting myself changed, something that only felt more impossible as the cycles of progress and relapse reinforced themselves over the years.

    But as I’ve entered and moved through my 30’s, I’ve found those long-sought senses of calm clarity and collected confidence. Most notably throughout the COVID pandemic, finding myself largely unaffected by the sudden halt of all social life, and have been making my biggest improvements to the point where I very much do feel like a wholly different person from the self-perception I’ve long known. And because COVID’s impact, the conditions aligned in order for me to initiate the process without having to pay the court fees or make the courtroom appearance typically involved to finalize it. At 35 and feeling like a now-or-never deal, I’ve gotten it done.

    Khan

    My discontent with my middle name is as intense and long-running as the one with my first name. Being the big nerd I’ve always been, my younger self investigated my middle name as soon as the knowledge of the internet opened itself to the world. It was then that I learned “Khan” isn’t even Chinese at all, it’s of Mongolian origin. I was a Chinese-Mexican American with a diminutive nickname for a first name and a Mongolian middle name. Never mind the fact that most popular Khans in history were invaders that murdered and subjugated Chinese people.

    That contradiction was an internal conflict with the name for me. The far more influential external one was the Asian racism in the world. Very few people who know me know what my middle name is, as I avoid disclosing it to the point of refusing the question when asked upfront. The only times I’ve ever told it to someone without having it jeered and laughed at has been with another Asian, only if they have at least one non-American name themselves. Otherwise, sharing it always ended up being an open invitation for mockery, all over a name that doesn’t even ethnically fit me.

    Lew

    It remains untouched, but not without consideration. “Lew” lends itself to being pronounced as “Lou” by English tongues, when the actual name is better captured by the primary “Líu” transliteration.

    But when I reflect on my paternal history, I skip my father and am immediately drawn to thoughts of my grandfather. Even though we didn’t have a close bond or much of a relationship, I always had an immense quiet admiration for him. He was this quietly graceful and masculine mystery to me, one that evokes that Asian desire to honor ancestral roots to rule out my maternal “Rodriguez” alternative. “Lew” is as it reads on his grave, and so would I have it read on my own.

    Jr.

    This suffix neatly resolves itself with the change to my first or middle name; I did both.

    The Change

    With my first name, making the change from diminutive from to proper variant was always my go-to. James is a name I’ve always liked and coveted for myself even before learning it’s what “Jimmy” is a substitute for.

    As for my middle name, I remained inclined to keep the “K” initial. Since it isn’t a naturally occurring letter in Spanish, it ruled out putting a Latino name in the mix to reflect my mixed ethnicity. But since my name and the shape of my eyes are the few connections I have to my Chinese side, I decided to get the “Khan” swapped out for an actual Chinese name—hopefully one that could also double as a given Chinese first name. I deferred this to one of my closest friends, such that we regard and address each other as family. I gave her my dad’s given Chinese name of 辉子刘 as a starting point, and after some conversation over desired meaning, Mandarin/Cantonese variations, and desired name count (settling on one instead of two), she circled Liu Kai Cheng ultimately concluded with 开刘: Liu Kai.

    So it was determined that I’d file my court papers, leaving behind “Jimmy Khan Lew Jr.” and moving on as “James Kai Lew”. No suffix.