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Name: Jhemon
Location: California, United States
Gender: Male


Interests: Asian American organizations, improv comedy, acting, computer geek stuff
Expertise: Not killing people, making people laugh unintentionally
Occupation: Radiologist
Industry: Medical


Message: message me


Member Since: 3/22/2003

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Thursday, December 24, 2009

Jhemon's End of the (Two) Year(s) Letter 2009

I meant to write an End of the Year letter last year, but…I procrastinated to the point where it's now time to write the End of the Year letter for this year, so…you now have an End of the Two Years Letter for your enjoyment!

 

Work

 

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My private practice group, Los Alamitos Radiology Group, has continued to grow in terms of "volume" (number of cases to interpret), because even in a down economy, people still get sick. Our group took on its 7th partner, Denis Bolton, in May 2008, which has meant more PTO (paid time off, i.e. vacation).  We cover one medium-sized hospital, Los Alamitos Medical Center, and although I'm "on call" every fourth night and every fourth weekend, that mostly means staying late at the hospital and being available on beeper call if the "nighthawk" service goes down (after 11 pm, we send our cases out over the Internet for preliminary readings by a "nighthawk" group of radiologists that work overnight).  But there are plenty of half days and PTO (vacation time) to make up for it!

 

House

 

I still live in the same 4 bedroom 2.5 bath house in Cerritos. It's been holding up well, needing only the occasional minor repair, and replacing the motor for the built-in spa in the backyard that I never actually use (what can I say, I'm not a Jacuzzi kind of person).  I did install a 58" plasma TV over my family room fireplace just in time for Super Bowl 2008, which has since served me well for watching Lakers games.

 

I still live by myself, unless you count the northeast corner of my back porch roof, which is a favorite spot for birds to nest and raise broods. House finches nested there twice in 2008, and mourning doves nested there twice in 2009:

 

Picture 192.jpg DSC06447.JPG

 

I even set up a webcam to take movies of the baby birds; you can see many of the videos on my YouTube channel (yes, I have a YouTube channel!):

www.youtube.com/jhemon

 

Asian American Organizations

 

If you know me at all, you know how super-involved I am with Asian American organizations. (That's why there are so many Asian faces in my photos! Plus, I live in Southern California, where there's a lot of Asians).

 

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I was co-chair of the NAAAP (National Association of Asian American Professionals) National Convention in Los Angeles in 2008, which next to med school and radiology boards was the hardest, most intense thing I've ever done in my life, since it was three days of gala events, 800 attendees, scores of corporate sponsors, and 50 workshops, all done over eight months by a skeleton crew of volunteers, many of whom I had to pull together myself. Planning a wedding will be easy after that. (That's what I tell my girlfriend; more about her later)  The event weekend itself was exhausting, since I'm the type of person that frets about how the event is going, and would wander around looking for glitches and not surprisingly finding them.  Despite constantly putting out fires behind the scenes, it was a seamless, professional production from the attendee perspective, and I'm happy that we were able to pull it all together. I got to be honored on the field in Dodger Stadium, set up a Friday night reception at Fox Studios and got to help emcee the NAAAP National Awards again.

 

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Since then, I've helped with the founding of the Orange County venture of NAAAP, and I'm still heavily involved with the Orange County chapter of OCA (which I restarted 5 years ago), and have been Board Advisor for both. I'm proud of how much both groups have grown, and that we've developed a multi-Asian-ethnic, multigenerational group of officers for both. Highlight events for me this year included moderating a "Shift Happens" panel on job hunting and career development as well as NAAAP-OC's Inaugural Gala, which included miracle berry tastings, a performance by Kaba Modern Legacy and the debut of the NAAAP-OC 30 second commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFE7eb40VOc

 

(It was shot at my house while I wasn't there (I was at the APAMSA National Convention at UCLA) and directed by Misa Nguyen (more on her later), but yes, that's my monotone narration at the beginning.)

 

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After years of fundraising, OCA National was finally able in 2008 to purchase its own headquarters in Washington, DC, the "OCA National Center for Asian Pacific American Leadership." I was happy to contribute a large enough sum to the building fund to earn naming rights to one of the rooms (the kitchen area on the top floor), which I dedicated to my parents.

 

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Consistency has been the watchword for my role as co-chair of the APAMSA (Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association) Advisory Board.  The APAMSA president changes every year, and the officers cycle out every 1-2 years, but I'm always there, year in and year out. This year the Advisory Board was more active with monthly conference calls, and I took a more hands on approach by pulling together an entire track of programming (geared towards residents and young physicians) for this year's APAMSA National Convention in Los Angeles. (Too bad the residents and young physicians were too busy working to attend :P)

 

At the physician level, however, there hasn't been a united voice advocating for Asian American communities and health issues at the national level, since most Asian American physician organizations are local and ethnic specific (e.g. Chinese, Korean, Filipino, etc.). This has been sorely missing for years, and with healthcare reform on the forefront, it was important for Asian American communities and health issues not to get left behind. Last year and this year, we've been able to create the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians (NCAPIP), a coalition of the numerous pre-existing APA physician organizations, to serve as this unified voice.  I'm glad that I was able to serve as part of its Steering Committee and now its Executive Council as the organization's Secretary.

 

Acting and Improv

 

You'll recall that I got started on my right brain (vs. left brain) performance kick five years ago when I started taking classes with improv comedy troupe Cold Tofu, and managed to work my way up to its "Advanced Team" level.  I've been on "hiatus" from improv and Cold Tofu (I really do hope to return in 2010!), but this is in large part because I've been taking acting classes with East West Players, the local premier Asian American theater, which has been a tremendously enriching experience. The "Studio Lab Projects" have culminated in an actual student production of a full-length play – "The Laramie Project" in 2006, Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" in 2007. Last year, we did Chekhov's "Ivanov":

 

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As you see from the photos, I even got to don a beard and mustache (which I'd never be able to do naturally).  This year, our class created from scratch an Asian American version of "Tony n' Tina's Wedding," entitled "The Marriage of Cruz & Chu: Our Big Fat Filipino-Chinese Wedding":

 

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It was partly scripted, partly improvised with audience interaction mixed in.  It's set during a staged wedding ceremony and reception, with food, drinks and wedding cake, and I'm happy to say that we really crammed in a lot of stuff – lots more jokes, plot twists and musical numbers than Tony n' Tina's Wedding :). We performed it twice this summer, and if all goes well, maybe again in 2010.

 

I've also been starring in a webisode series called "Miss Mah Poo."

http://www.funnyordie.com/search/a?q=miss+mah+poo&commit=Search

 

(in playing the sidekick in the series, Karen Huie told me to "just be myself."  That's good – I have a lot of experience playing the role of myself.)

 

I've also had fun performing in staged readings (all of the fun of performing without having to actually memorize lines) of Paul Kikuchi's "The Long Arm of Stanley Matsui" and Andrea Apuy's "Criss Cross." I love the bohemian-ness of hanging out with working actors. I've even gone on a few "real" auditions, which if anything have made me more thankful than ever that being a physician is my real day job.  You spend days working on and preparing a monologue for the audition, stand around waiting nervously for your turn, and the after delivering your 1-2 minute monologue to the director…that's it.  "Thank you," and you don't hear from them again.  Too much like dating, no thank you.

 

Travel

 

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Every year I travel quite a bit, but mostly within the United States (and occasionally Canada) for conferences (for radiology or more commonly for Asian American organizations – I consistently go to the OCA, NAAAP and APAMSA conventions every year). A major highlight of 2008 was a two week trip in the fall to Egypt, my first truly international trip and my first two week vacation since going to China in 2000.  I'd always liked Egyptian archaeology as a kid, so I was quite interested when a travel agent friend, Amy Tan (not the author), wanted to pull together our own tour group for this and asked her friends to spread the word and invite friends to come. It ended up being a group of 24 people where no one person knew everyone, but because all of us were friends of friends of friends of friends, we got along surprisingly well.  We toured the cities and monuments up and down the Nile River from Cairo to Aswan, including the Pyramids, the Sphinx and Abu Simbel.  Even though I really dug (no pun intended) the monuments to the point of being a surrogate tour guide at points, I must admit that the most memorable segments were when we were "roughing it." Since the tour was less expensive and a bit more adventurous than the standard Nile River cruise ship tour, this included spending two days on a felucca sailboat on the Nile without toilets or showers, climbing up Mt. Sinai at 3 am to catch the sunrise, wandering around the city of Alexandria one day without a tour guide, and bumming around on the beach (and scuba diving) on the Gulf of Aqaba.  What was most amazing though was that I totally didn't miss my cellphone, e-mail or the Internet the whole time.

 

Other Interests

 

After coming back from Egypt, I was inspired to take two correspondence courses on Egyptian hieroglyphics through the University of Chicago over the past year; you work your way through the textbook, send in your homework every two weeks, and get corrections back. Upon prompting from my girlfriend (I swear, more on that later!), I'm now taking a class in beginning Vietnamese with a room full of elementary school kids, which I must admit I'm not terribly successful with; I think I do better with dead languages than live ones since I'm horrible with pronunciation. I won a free course to University of California Irvine's Extension School this summer, so I took a for-credit class on "Integrating Social Media Within Your Marketing Campaigns" – which was more fun that it sounds, since it was all about Facebook, Twitter, etc. I even got my first ever A+ on the transcript, so I still have my academic mojo going (at Harvard, you could get A-'s and A's, but not A+'s :P)

 

Still cooking and baking…I've been keeping an Amish Friendship Bread starter alive since Labor Day 2007, and finally after over two years, I've decided to put it into the freezer instead of feeding it regularly every five days. My biggest baking triumph this year was making a Red Velvet birthday cake and frosting from scratch with a recipe I'd never tried before for my girlfriend's birthday party last month.

 

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You know I've been busy when I can't seem to find "quality time" to play video games.  But I'm still the first person on the block to get the latest installments of "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero," so come on by whenever you feel like rocking out on plastic guitars and drums. And like many of you, I'm mildly addicted to Facebook games, although I draw the line at shelling out actual currency on them.

 

Family

 

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My family's doing well. Last fall my brother Wymon had his second child, a daughter named Mei, and my sister Won tied the knot to Dan Chandler in May 2008; she's now expecting, with their first child due in May 2010. My dad retired at the beginning of 2008, and now gets to wake up late, work on the garden and read the newspaper whenever he feels like it. He's trying to think of ways to sell his book, "Where Are the China Boys?", a mildly fictionalized version of our family history (I appear towards the end as a minor character)

http://amzn.com/1430320958

(Yes, my dad would be pleased that I'm pimping his book here.)

 

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My mom came out to visit me for New Year's 2009; she's been an avid fan of the Rose Parade for decades and always watched it on TV, and she wanted to finally come out and see it live. Seeing it live meant waking up at 5 am and freezing your behind off on the stands even with "premium tickets," but it was worth it to give my mom a once in a lifetime experience.

 

Parties

 

I'm not much of a partygoer myself, but I do like to host parties since I do like to entertain. My birthday is a big deal to me, so last year I had a theme birthday party – "James Bond," where everyone dressed up as Bond or a Bond Girl…and I dressed up as Dr. No (i.e. Dr. Evil, without the baldcap):

 

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This year's birthday party was more conventional (and simple) at a local Italian/pizza restaurant.  I've hosted Super Bowl parties, "Rock Band" parties and more seriously, committee meetings, volunteer thank you parties and board retreats for both NAAAP and OCA.  I've even hosted birthday parties for other people.  Which neatly segues into what you really want to know…

 

My Girlfriend

 

November 2008 I hosted the 30th birthday party for my friend Diana Nguyen (an ultrasound tech at my hospital) at my place.  One person I met at the party was Misa Nguyen (no relation).  She said that she first noticed me because I was busy working during the party (specifically, trying to heat up Bagel Bites from Costco in both the oven and the microwave) instead of just standing around and drinking/talking, and I managed to bore her with 350 photos on my iPhone from the Egypt trip I'd just returned from.  Although we kept in touch, we didn't start dating until April of this year…and it's been going really well ever since.  And in a neat bit of symmetry, I hosted Misa's birthday party at my place in November 2009 (NOT her 30th, she would want me to tell you).

 

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(I don't miss being "single" one bit. I remember asking my friend Max Yang which was worse – the overall miserable experience of "dating," or medical school. We both had to think about it.)

 

Despite being the Marketing/Communication chair for NAAAP-Orange County, Misa is a somewhat private person, so she would ask that you get to know her personally rather than me writing all about her here. So if you haven't done so, I hope you'll have the chance sometime soon!  I know I'm biased, but I think she's wonderful!

 

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By the way, this is her dog, Dexter:

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Random Bits and Pieces

 

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  • I was groomsman at Max Yang's wedding the day before my trip to Egypt in September 2008.
  • My acting teacher at EWP, Leslie Ishii, is a small recurring character on Lost.
  • I received an award for community leadership and involvement from the Asian Business Association of Orange County during APA Heritage Month in 2009 – it came with a nice plaque and a thick stack of proclamations from local elected officials. I need another room just to hang all of it up.
  • Movies I liked most in 2008: The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, Quantum of Solace, Bolt, Gran Torino; movies I liked most in 2009: Star Trek, The Hangover, (500) Days of Summer, and the Julia part of Julie & Julia.  I'm tempted to give G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra a special award for best action/dumbest plot, but I haven't seen Transformers 2 or 2012 yet.
  • I'm still a huge Los Angeles Lakers fan – mind you, I'm the type of fan that politely claps instead of jumping up and down yelling and screaming (Kobe! Kobe! Kobe!), but the Lakers blogs are the first thing I read every day.

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Still here?  That's it, it's The End of the End of the (Two) Year(s) Letter!  Go home!


End of the Year Letter...Almost There...

I meant to write an End of the Year letter last year, but…I procrastinated to the point where it’s now time to write the End of the Year letter for this year, so now I have TWO years to cover.  The good news is that I'm working on the draft of this letter as we speak, and I'm 85% there...so if all goes well, it should be up tomorrow :).  I would finish it tonight, but I'm about to conk out since it's 12:52 am PST and I'm still kind of on Eastern Standard Time.  Tomorrow!


Wednesday, December 31, 2008

2008 End of the Year Letter ... not quite ready

Sorry everyone - I'm only about a third of the way through my 2008 End of the Year Letter - and since my mom is visiting me for the next week and I'll be playing tour guide as a good son, I'll have to postpone the Letter for a couple of weeks.  Thanks for reading - until then, Happy New Year!


Tuesday, July 01, 2008

It's my birthday today

And it's business as usual for me - I'm working during the daytime, and then going to an OCA-Orange County board meeting tonight.  I thought about taking the day off today (and if I lived in Canada, I would have my birthday off EVERY year :)), but then I realized, what's the point?  I would just sleep in late, watch a matinee movie by myself, and putter around the house since everyone else was working :P.

That said, I'm sleep deprived today because I didn't sleep well last night. Mihály Csíkszentmihály, the researcher who coined the idea of "flow" in psychology, argued that the most productive/stimulated people changed their career approximately every ten years to stay sharp and avoid plateauing on their learning curve or getting stuck in a rut. Me, I've always known that since high school, I've moved approximately every 4 years (college in Boston, then medical school in Baltimore, then residency in Chicago, then a 1 year fellowship in Boston, then for work in Los Angeles) and essentially restarted my life each time, and that that sort of thing kept things fresh for me - new city, all new cast of characters, and a chance to be...different? better?

So...at the 4-5 year mark in Los Angeles, I was kind of surprised that I didn't really feel a need to move.  I chalked it up to the size and diversity of the city, that even after five years (and now, after nine) that there's still plenty of nooks and crannies that I still haven't explored of this metropolitan area.  But in retrospect,  my life did change at that time.  In 2004, I bought a house, rebooted OCA-Orange County from scratch, and most significantly I started taking improv and acting classes at that point.  So while my "world" hadn't changed geographically, it changed significantly in terms of what I was doing.  Work was the same, but I stopped going to most of the mixers and functions that I used to go to (as an indication of this, I was at someone else's birthday party a couple of weekends ago, and someone asked me if I was still single.  "Yes, why do you ask?" "Because we haven't seen you in a long time!"), because I was now spending much more time studying the arts and performing, and unlocking another side of myself that had only existed before in a rudimentary fashion. 

Well, now it's 2008, and I'm hitting the four year mark again.  As you know, I'm co-chairing the NAAAP National Convention in Los Angeles (www.naaapconvention.org) - and internally, I know that this is my "swan song" when it comes to Asian American organizations - kind of a last, parting gift to the organizations that have nurtured me and that I nurtured in return.  I'll still be involved, but certainly not to the same degree. I feel the gears of my life grinding, getting ready to shift again.  I don't know the full details...but somehow, I know that same time next year, my life is going to be very different.  If life is a series of books, then...I don't actually know the ending, but I can see from the page count that the end of this particular book is coming up, before the next book in the series begins.

"Things are going to change, I can feel it."


Jhemon's Secret Birthday Party

This past Saturday I had my birthday at my house.  For the past few years, I've been hosting my own birthday party because 1) I'm the only one that knows all of my friends and 2) if I don't, there's no guarantee someone will do it for me :P.

For the past couple of years, the idea of having a "James Bond" themed party had been percolating in the back of my head.  I loved the Bond series when I was growing up (my favorite was "Moonraker" - it was over-the-top hokey, but had the kind of action that kids love :)), and when I'd heard of this idea, I wanted to do it myself.  About a year ago I started collecting the things needed for one - an e-book entitled "James Bond Theme Party Secrets," knick knacks like authentic poker table cloth, etc. The hardest thing to get was a decent stone-grey Nehru jacket - the kind of jacket that Dr. No and Ernst Stavro Blofeld wore in the 60's Bond movies, and which was famously worn by Dr. Evil in the "Austin Powers" series. You'd think that given the popularity of Austin Powers that it'd be easy to find a "Dr. Evil" jacket...but surprisingly, the only ones out there were the cheap ones found in Halloween costume supply stores.  I spent a couple of months searching, and eventually found an eBay storefront for a clothing shop in England that actually still made "real" Nehru jackets - and I picked one up last October.

Now then, the only thing left was having a proper excuse to throw the party. And as my birthday was coming up this year, I figured, why not?

In the past, I conceptually had a hard time with the idea of spending a lot of money on my own birthday party.  After all, isn't the idea that you should be coming out ahead (with presents) rather than behind on your birthday :)?  And in the past, I've also had birthday parties where I didn't know half of the people there (it's one thing when a friend brings one of his/her friends, but when they start inviting entire tables of people you don't know :(?) and the party ends up becoming a random mixer, and you feel badly asking people to pay up their fair share of the restaurant bill.

This year, I figured, what the heck, I'll go all out and splurge - I went out and bought a bunch of appetizers (like shrimp and scallop brioches, yakitori, and mochi :)) and the alcohol to make martinis, including the ingredients for a Vesper martini as seen in "Casino Royale" - interestingly, the actual ingredients no longer exist, but the closest analogy involves Tanqueray gin, 100 proof Stolichnaya vodka, Lillet Blanc and a little bit of quinine to restore some bitterness to the drink.  Admittedly, buying booze at Costco and BevMo was a new experience for me :).  The quinine I ordered online from an herbs store - I figured that I could use the leftover quinine in the future to experiment with making "real" tonic water :); either that, or as a treatment for malaria and leg cramps :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinine

Part of the fun of a "James Bond" party is that people dress up - not as rare an event on the East Coast, but quite rare (unless it's a formal banquet) on the West Coast.  But to reinforce the "spy" theme, I wanted people to try their hand at "spy" type things - which gave me an excuse to make puzzles for people to solve.  There's a part of me that delights in games and puzzles - not just playing them, but making them as well off the top of my head.  You can see the puzzles I made and picked in a separate Xanga entry.  Did I make them too hard?

Some classic Bond activities (e.g. car chase scenes) couldn't be replicated, but thanks to the great Nyko Perfect Shot attachment for the Wii (and "Ghost Squad" loaded up), we could do a reasonable facsimile of shooting :).

http://www.nyko.com/Nyko/Products/?i=124

And I felt that we needed door prizes for the winners, so I got a bunch of nifty gifts (including edible notepaper, rear-view sunglasses, invisible ink pens, and a bug detector) from the International Spy Museum store and ThinkGeek:

http://www.spymuseumstore.org/
http://www.thinkgeek.com

Admittedly, I have a tendency to over-produce my own parties - i.e., I tend to set up too many things, which end up not getting used.  No thanks to procrastination on my part, I was still setting up the party during the first 90 minutes of the party itself, and the following items I set up got left out:

  • Several selections of cheese. I was planning on setting out a wide array of cheeses and crackers for appetizers, but didn't get around to it.  I'll likely serve the cheeses at the next NAAAP volunteer function.
  • 4 CD's worth of spy music (basically: all of the James Bond movie theme songs in order, and a series of 60's spy TV show theme songs) and jazz that I burned the night before - I played the first CD, but forgot to queue up the rest :(.
  • A playing card version of the "Assassin" game - I figured that people were busy enough with the puzzles and just eating/drinking that I didn't bother trotting this out.
  • Unused puzzle ideas - some of the more technically elaborate ideas I had (including an underwater puzzle, a puzzle involving a searchlight, a puzzle involving a remote camera, and asking people to lockpick a simple lock) I ended up discarding - but they would've been cool :).

Since I was splurging (alcohol and decent party gifts don't come cheap), it was a reason for me to limit the party guest list this year.  That way, I could think of the birthday party as a "thank you" of sorts - to my better friends and acting classmates from this past year, to people that needed to be thanked for their help this year or in past years, etc.

Even though the party was hectic at the beginning (since I wasn't really ready on time :() and quite a number of people no showed (some things about Los Angeles never change :(), it was fun for me to host.  I believe people had a good time, which is what makes me happiest as the party host. Thank you especially to Rob Lee and Billy Wing for bartending throughout the night, and sticking around to help clean up.  Rob was right in guessing that people would be much more interested in apple martinis than the more classic martinis. Since it was a dress up party, I let everyone wear their shoes inside the house, which meant I spent hours the next day mopping, Swiffering and vacuuming to clean up the footprints :(.

I've uploaded the pictures onto Facebook already; when I get a chance, I'll upload it onto a photo-sharing site for those of you who aren't college aged (or pretending to be college aged :)).

Tomorrow never dies,

Jhemon



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