••●•• dots in progress ••●••

I decided to connect my Substack link to a custom domain. I bought it about a year ago, when I was building my personal website. I built it in 2 days while I was staying in Jeju Island with my dear friend, Aliona. At the time, she was working remotely for a Russian tech company as a salesperson, and I was taking a short vacation from work, building my website. I have this distinct memory of us going on a day trip to this beautiful flower garden, and Aliona had to join a meeting. So we sat down in the middle of the garden with our laptops and just randomly started working on our stuff. We did that throughout our journey, in a cab, on our way to a sashimi restaurant, on our laptops, or at a random café, slurping matcha frappuccinos.

It’s such a fun memory that was burned into my brain. Most of my life, I tried to live according to a plan. In order to pursue a master’s degree, I had to join a lab and publish a paper. To join a lab, I had to take a course that was taught by the professor who was leading the lab and get noticed by him. I had these five-year plans on Notion with to-do lists that I had to accomplish every year. In the back of my mind, I always thought, “When will I finally be happy in the present instead of living for the future?” I don’t have that many memories of just having plain fun without worrying about the future. But that memory, that moment, I wasn’t doing it to show somebody or to leverage it in the future. I was making that website because “why not, it’s fun,” and I had great company while travelling around the Island.

That personal website is now unreachable because I didn’t maintain it. But I had fun making it. I mean, it’s just a great memory to have. Completely useless, but I learned that I could have a little fun while doing things I’m passionate about, instead of doing things because I had to for my future success.

I have a half-removed lettering tattoo on my arm. It’s a book called When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It’s a pretty well-known book about a neurosurgeon who gets diagnosed with cancer and looks back on his short but impactful life and on his imminent death. What I love about the book is his positive take on life and death. He double majored in biology and English literature in college, and pursued a masters in English literature before getting into a med school and becoming a neurosurgeon. The theme of his life was to understand humans and our lives. Studying English literature was his way of studying how people think and express themselves and becoming a neurosurgeon was his way of trying to learn the physiology of how people think and express themselves. To a lot of people, he was wasting his time doing his master’s when he could have become a surgeon right away. However, to him, he was drawing his dots that would later be connected in his book.

Connect the Dots is a popular puzzle game where you connect the numbered dots and it becomes a meaningful picture. With a number of dots, you can create images and stories behind them. That’s basically what zodiac signs are. But in order to have these stories, you need those dots. Sometimes you carefully craft them like the creators of the Connect the Dots game, and sometimes you’re just a random set of constellations where people decide to attach meanings and stories.

That was a long story just to introduce you to my new custom domain, haha. I believe my twenties and thirties are where I draw the big and small dots, whether it’s curated or random, or even a mistake. I bought the dotsinprogress.com domain a year ago with a lot of meaning, like I just told you. But I didn’t maintain it, and it was just a dot, not connected to any bigger picture. A year later, I’m planning to use it as my custom domain for my blog on Substack. I might or might not be writing on here consistently, but every log here is a tiny dot in my world. And I’m glad to be sharing that with you!