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.
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.
New hosting plan, new WordPress installation, new attempt. Usually one of the first housekeeping items in a new WP install is to delete the “Hello world!” post along with the Hello Dolly plugin, but something in me is responding to it this time around.
Between finally allocating effort into building a personal website & blog again and the disruptive migrations happening across the social networking environment, it really does feel like a digital clean slate for the masses, an opportunity for many to “start over” in a sense.
I started drafting this after I’d attended the show in Inglewood, CA on 09/02/23 at SoFI Stadium, but between other responsibilities and time constraints, along with the developments detailed below, I hadn’t been able to get it to a “finished” state until today.
Beyoncé & Me, a Brief History
A member of the Beyhive I am not. For the majority of her career, I’d been ambivalent about the Destiny’s Child singer gone solo. In my high school days of the 2000’s, my tribalistic association of music with personal identity had me turning my nose up at music artists whose style didn’t require them to actually play live instruments. Pop and R&B were trite manufactured genres for competent singers without the actual musical talent to not need to rely on teams of songwriters to do their work for them. As I aged into and through my 20’s—and my sexuality as a gay male—my musical palette expanded. Real-world experience allowed me to start being able to better recognize the amount of time, energy, and labor that actually goes into things, doing away with that snobby simplistic delineation between “real” and “trash” music and assessing more on merit as best as I can gauge it without having any formal education in music theory myself.
And throughout the 2000s, I liked Beyoncé well enough. Her voice was undeniably great, but her output was wildly hit-or-miss for me. I liked 3 or 4 songs off B-Day; I yawned at all the alter-ego nonsense popular at the time including I Am Sasha Fierce & “Single Ladies”; 4 had me back to liking a few songs and entirely disinterested in the rest.
And then Beyoncé happened. I’d experienced “visual albums” before from Japanese musicians I followed long before 2013, but seeing it done domestically with such unrivaled production value was impressive. As for the music itself, it lyrically and sonically offered a balanced mix of rawness and refinement that felt different from her prior output. The comparatively tinny youthful voice got replaced with that of a grown woman’s delivering her most polished poetry yet, no longer bound by the rulebook of optimization for top radio airplay. It was as thrilling as it was mind-boggling that only a year after becoming a mother would find Beyoncé at her boldest, embracing sexuality and expletives with elegance. As much as I appreciated it, it still wasn’t something I actively listened to on my own. It was my best friend/roommate that was truly captivated by the spectacle, yet no matter how many times I got dragged along for the ride, I never got tired of it.
I didn’t become a fan of Beyoncé until 2016. That year when she unexpectedly dropped “Formation” on the Super Bowl Halftime show, I didn’t care enough to bother watching. It was in the coverage/outrage following the performance I learned that the highly curated and uncontroversial pop songstress had presented Black figures and history with music that eschewed mainstream accessibility in favor of message and meaning. This admiration would only grow when the music video for the song was released, reinforcing the unapologetic Blackness that had been served in the middle of America’s most-watched televised sporting event. It wasn’t the superficial girl-power feminism of “Single Ladies” or “Run the World (Girls)”, but the urban edginess of “***Flawless” dialed all the way up to Black power anthem. That was not the direction I would have expected her to go in immediately after earning all the accolades and prestige from her self-titled digital drop. To establish herself so forcefully as one of the best creator-performers in the world then pivot to ambassador for Black excellence was inspiring; she could have just as easily stayed apolitical and private, continuing to chase an AOTY Grammy by catering to broad mainstream and white audiences.
In the time since then, through Lemonade, Homecoming, and Black is King, I’ve admired the astonishing amount of merit behind those works on multiple levels, all the while aware that it’s not going to resonate as completely as it will for the intended recipients of the message. If we were able to step sideways into a parallel universe where Selena lived and had a 2018 Coachella headlining show giving her best performance to date and serving the finest representation of Mexican-American culture to the masses while being widely recognized as one of the greatest talents in the industry, my veins and arteries would be bursting with cultural pride. Not being Black myself, I recognize that it’s a level of personal resonance that lies outside my capability to experience…until Renaissance. In essence, her latest work is another love letter to the Black experience, this time around to its queer community. Yet, because Black queer culture so strongly informs the general LGBTQ+ culture—which itself champions acceptance and inclusivity—or that the New York ballroom scene & house music being paid homage to are history joint creations of both Black and Latino queer communities, I finally qualify to be a part of group that can really get that “this was meant for me & us” feeling.
The Concert
We had tried getting tickets when they first went on sale, but never got an invite code from the Ticketmaster lottery registration to buy one. At some point, my roommate had logged into his workplace employee benefits portal looking for discounted prices on movie tickets, and noticed they were featuring tickets to Beyonce’s show. Being able to buy tickets at face value months after we’d given up on the possibility on attending the original more limited tour schedule was thrilling, and made this the first time I found myself eagerly counting down the days to a concert event since my early 20’s. However, that face value ticket cost translated to our seats being up in the bloodiest of the nosebleeds, literally the highest and final row in the venue. Visually, it wasn’t much of an issue, given the nature of stadium seating and the set design. Sonically, however, it left something to be desired. The venue isn’t completely closed, but it is covered by a large arching ceiling, which caused a considerable amount of reverb that made it near impossible to discern any talking, such as the calling of categories in the closing ballroom sequence.
Despite the issues with sound quality and being in the highest seats possible, it was still the best show I’ve ever been to. Renaissance is already an unimpeachably brilliant album musically, but the additional elements of the live show were just as awe inspiring to experience unawares, me not having bothered to keep up with the updates from each show along the tour and thus having no idea what to expect. Everything across the board so top notch it felt like I was watching the unreleased visual album performed as a stage production. I feel like I have to be the only Renaissance fan that has been so blown away by the music that I have no hunger for the music videos, which I’m glad were not released before the tour. Without all those videos for people to dissect, analyze, compare, and otherwise post online, all discussion on Renaissance has stayed focused on the music and the collective experience. And the fashion, of course.
It was the first time I’d taken myself out to go see Beyoncé live in concert, and I enjoyed it as much as I expected I was going to. The one part that got my hyped beyond expectations was the on-stage performance of Blu Ivy. I didn’t even bother listening to Beyoncé’s music back when that kid was born and was totally unconcerned with the surprise pregnancy announcement leading up to it. However, having that child that’s been kept out of the public eye as much as possible suddenly shared with the world as an 11 year old pull off the job of performing in front of massive stadium audiences to the most stringent standards in the business felt special. So did being able to reciprocate the tremendous love Beyoncé has extended LGBTQ+ PoC and women with this latest work by adding to the cheering putting expressions of happiness and pride on both their faces. The lyrics and subject matter of Renaissance are adult in nature, but having Blu Ivy dancing on that track from The Lion King movie companion album was a nice way to include children as part of the grand LGBTQ+ PoC celebration we were all there to have, since many of us were kids who were not given the support and acceptance to express ourselves freely.
The Aftermath
The week following the concert, I kept thinking about it: how much I enjoyed it, how much of a cultural statement it is, etc. the more I kept reflecting, the more I found myself curious about how much it would cost to experience it again. By week’s end, that curiosity turned into a fully fledged effort to price shop the remaining the stops in the tour to find out which would yield the best seats at the lowest total travel cost, leading to the decision to take a solo trip to catch the tour finale in Kansas City, MO. Even after I had identified the optimal show to attend, I had my reservations as I’m not a long-time super fan that would make that investment without a second thought. I had already gone to the concert, and would be better off saving the ~$1.5K I was staring at and hewig to my budgets & savings timelines. Despite my best efforts to talk myself into abandoning the idea as a passing fantasy, everyone around me—including people I didn’t expect to encourage spending so much money on a concert—told me that I should do it.
Looking at it under a larger lens and not just the Beyoncé concert, it started to feel more and more like something I needed to do. I’m as old as I am, and I haven’t really done much traveling, and never on my own. My limited travel history amounts to:
A winter break spent in Mascota, Jalisco, deep in the heart of Mexico as a teenager
Two week long trips to Tokyo back in the mid 2000’s that were phenomenal life-changing experiences
Volunteering as a travel buddy for a friend visiting family for a weekend in the middle of Arizona
San Francisco and Las Vegas with friends, a few times each
Along with the allure of being the final show in the tour, the Kansas City show had the unique feature of being somewhere I would otherwise have never expect to have a reason to visit, compared to Houston or New Orleans. All of this, and the disastrous state of the world—fires concurrently ravaging more places than ever, hurricanes battering and flooding both sides of the US, the tragic earthquake in Morocco—convinced me to take the approach that tomorrows aren’t guaranteed, and to chase after an experience that has already been so personally fulfilling for me and take it to the next level by turning it into a 4-day adventure of my own.
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.
