Tidbits
Cool things I've done — little stories from the past few years. Click a photo to read.
I arrived in Hanoi, traveled out to the coast, took a bus to the north, then rode a motorbike all around the mountains close to the border of China, then back down. I went through the lushest greens of Ninh Binh to Hue. In Hue I got my own bike and did the Hai Van Pass driving through Da Nang to Hoi An. The anxiety I had trying to keep up with the Canadians I was riding with that day… knowing full well I was not experienced enough to be riding that fast on such curvy roads. God allowing, I lived. I'll never forget the feeling of the world dropping away as I made the final pass and the view in front of me opened like the pages of a book falling straight down the spine and unfolding to reveal all the city sitting on the coast below. From Hoi An I went to Dalat and had the best 36 hours before I finally made my way to Ho Chi Minh City. 30 days total, by bus, foot, motorbike, hitchhiking, and ferry boat.
Gili Meno is an island about 1.6 kilometers wide. No cars, no bikes; you get around via horseback or your own two feet. I had been traveling a week or two with a friend, island hopping our way through Indonesia. I had been teaching yoga in California for almost 6 months and had started to miss the practice. Also I was running out of money quicker than I had been expecting. I went on Google Maps, searched “yoga near me”, then went through and messaged every place that popped up in a 20 mile radius. A resort on the tiny island of Gili Meno next door got back to me. I sent over my yoga Instagram and credentials. We had a call, and I took a boat there the next day to chat with Ayu, the manager of the resort. It just so happened that their current resident yoga instructor was leaving at the end of the month (in 3 days) and they had an opening.
All worked out amazingly well and I started my first yoga teaching residency July 1st, 2024. I got my own beautiful little villa and breakfast at the resort each morning. The money for the classes went back to the resort and I got to keep the tips. It was a wonderful experience, teaching people from all over with greetings in Bahasa, poses in Sanskrit, and cues in English. Classes ran every sunrise and every sunset in the most gorgeous shala. In between classes I spent reading and studying and swimming and scuba diving.
Also worth mentioning is that Gili Meno is a Muslim island and this was the first time I was properly living and working in a Muslim country like this. Definitely offered me a different perspective, seeing the way in which life works there and habituating to the mosque's call to prayer going off all day every day.
The first time I went snorkeling in Indonesia was in Nusa Penida. I remember people at the dive boat kept saying “I hope we see manta rays!” and I kept thinking “yeah sting rays are so cool!” imagining a dinner plate sized animal scurrying along the sandy ocean floor. When I saw the SUV-sized animal gliding beneath me I screamed. It was shock and awe and feeling so stupid to undermine the beauty of this beast and a humbling feeling that I was just this little mammal blowing bubbles at the surface.
The second time I snorkeled I was with one of my friends I'd been traveling with for a while. Things had been tense and bitter for a while– as what happens when you're in close quarters trying to survive long travel days and shitty hotels for over 5 weeks together. It was our last day before she went to Thailand and I would go to the other island to start my yoga residency. We decided to split a magic smoothie (iykyk) and rent snorkels.
The next three hours I swear to god I was on the set of Nemo. Live action. It was beautiful—and the colors. Unbelievable. I learned more from the turtle I was swimming with than all the wisdom my own parents ever tried to impart upon me.
The first time I went scuba diving I was so nauseous I was not having fun. When I surfaced and got back on the boat I spent the ride back to shore throwing up. Then I did it another couple times and I fell in love.
The way you peer into the little lives of these fish and corals and sharks and octopus, it's not something I know yet how to describe. You have to witness it with your own eyes. And I urge you to!
Luckily I had made good friends with the guys on the island who ran the dive shop. We'd go out every other day and I was able to do my PADI Open Water and Advanced certifications plus a million fun dives for a hundredth of the cost had I done that amount of diving in the US for example. Regardless the price being $200 or $8,000 USD, scuba diving was absolutely the most beautiful experience and I am so grateful. And not even about the things that you see or how far down you go, but the meditative nature of the activity too. Breathing and regulating your breath even when you're cold or scared or staring eye to eye with a literal shark.
For my Advanced dive I did a shipwreck dive, buoyancy, deep dive (went down 43 meters and got nitrox poisoning which was hilariously funny), and a night dive (otherworldly—this experience will probably get its own post one day in the future).
Like so many. And not only massages. I had my energy adjusted, my chakras aligned, I went to a qigong master who prescribed me sound baths every morning, followed by a massage of the diaphragm for 10 days straight to correct my breathing that was much more in my chest than in my belly. Of course I obliged.
I've studied more or less the mind-body connection since the age you get to decide what you want to study. As an adolescent I devoured the pop psychology of Malcolm Gladwell and Sam Kean, wetting my feet with Yuval Noah Harari by the time I was 15. By the time I was in university, I was taking classes in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, etc. More or less I was trying to sort the threads that connected the body to the mind, the mind to the world, the world back to the body. My last year in university I took a class with the nondescript title “China”. The whole semester was spent studying one single book: The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine by Manfred Porkert. All exams were take home essays to be written by hand. At that time in 2024, the book was niche enough that it had not made it into any AI data training sets. You can read more about my ideas on the teaching here.
Not that I am any expert in any subject, but years of studying cognitive science, coupled with an introduction to the theoretical foundations of Chinese medicine, along with the empirical experience one gets from having 200 massages over the course of 6 months traveling in Asia, leaves you with a sort of understanding that yes, it is true what they say: the body in fact keeps the score. And it is crucial every once in a while to work through your past not only mentally, but physically too. Through movement, through yoga, through massage, through cleaning. This practice is something the West has not yet adopted even though we KNOW that consistent exercise can treat mild depression better than pills, we know that massages release cortisol, we know that adrenaline is stored in the muscles and you cannot be free of your trauma lest you release the tension in the muscles.
Unfortunately massages cost a million dollars in San Francisco. Nonetheless, I've found my no frills place I go to once a month that is so far from a spa, and really just a dingy bed in a suspect room where a little Chinese lady walks across my back while I stifle screams, but come out a new woman.
“You know you have no relevant experience here at all right? But you have a nice face, so let's see what we can do, you cheeky cunt” was I believe what the manager of The Atlantic had said to me as we closed out our interview. Maybe not exactly, but it encompasses the nature of the short bald English man– though I'm pretty sure that's what it had been.
It was a boujee seafood restaurant right on river in Melbourne, one of them that sold $300 bumps of Caviar as well as equally expensive shots of whiskey. We had maybe 50 tables between the main dining room, the terrace and the private tables in the back. There was also a speakeasy down in the basement. We'd serve around 400-600 people on a weekend evening, running from the open kitchen to the tables until well past midnight.
I had never worked too hard in my life. Maybe I never worked that hard again. And I absolutely had the easiest job there was to have, I could barely handle a three plate hold, so all I had to do was smile and seat the people coming in.
One night, the owner of the restaurant closed the place down for our normal hours in honor of his best friend's 50th. I was told to come “bare face” that day, that “hair and make up” would be taken care of when we arrived. OK. Also we were told to bring nude heels for the night. Typically we wore white sneakers with our 2 piece elegant silk suits the owner's wife picked out for us. I didn't fucking own heels, I had been living out of a backpack for 6 months. One of the other girls lent me a pair.
The whole restaurant had been transformed. There was a lounge where the dining room had been, another bar out on the terrace. The whole place was decorated to the Great Gatsby theme. Where there were usually the private dining rooms people could book, the glass doors had been opened and the windows drawn: now there was a floor to ceiling pole, and next to it a life sized martini glass with a girl inside. All the tables and chairs of the main dining area had been removed overnight and a stage took their place.
It had to have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for just that night, and I was all dolled up in my little outfit with hair and make up. I got there maybe around 11am. I didn't leave until 8:30am the next morning. That was my first nearly 24 hour shift. There's something you learn though, when your feet hurt so bad and you are so tired and the hangover is creeping in from the 5 shots you had taken with the customers at midnight, and you want to go home so bad, but there is no use in even thinking about it, no use in complaining, because everyone feels the same but shit needs to get done. I guess it's like when you're hiking and everyone is tired and the sun already set and you have no idea where your next water source is or where you're going to set up camp and it's all shit but you just have to put one foot in front of another (yes this is referencing a very unplanned hiking trip I took in Yosemite).
Going into the job I definitely, definitely had some preconceptions about the people working there. I had just graduated from Berkeley. I was making $65 an hour tutoring kids who were getting perfect scores on their SATs. We were going to grow the business even bigger, and this was just something I was doing to make friends, on the side. I was a fucking pretentious prick was what I was. These people worked harder than anyone I had ever met before. The way we ran the restaurant, we were the pieces and parts of a beautiful machine. Have you read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential? Read it, he'll do a better job explaining what it's like to work in this world where you don't ever get a weekend off and you're settling into the busy hours when the rest of the world is clocking off. You ever need to hire someone that knows how to get shit done? That doesn't hesitate, that doesn't wait or put it on this list, but just sees it end to end? Hire someone from the service industry. Chances are they'll have a good personality too.
My beautiful wonderful genius friend Deven had started Next Level Education while we were in college. I was one of the first tutors he brought on to mitigate the influx of student requests he was getting. We worked together for three years, I was doing more of the teaching, working with the students, planning the sessions, developing the company's own curriculum and worksheets, while he did more of the conversing with the parents overseeing the operations, etc. He was a year older than me in school and as he was getting ready for graduation he had a job offer lined up to start that summer. However, at the last moment, the firm rescinded his offer and so he decided fuck it let's take Next Level full time. I was still teaching and working directly with the kids, but I was also taking on more administrative things too. We decided to start running outreach to other companies similar to ours, but without the test prep— for example maybe a company who focused only on the application & essay writing. We'd offer white labeling or partnerships. This was done in the most scrappy, inefficient way of me manually searching for companies like ours, checking if they had the same offerings, then adding them to a messy little Google Sheets file.
The next year when I graduated I decided I would keep working alongside Deven while I spent a bit of time traveling abroad. My “bit of time” quickly turned into 11 months and our side hustle had grown into a proper business. It was when I was in Thailand that I realized I was spending more time working than enjoying my travels, and my balance didn't make sense anymore. So I bought a flight, leased an apartment and moved to Los Angeles where we would open up three student learning centers for the students who used to be entirely remote. We were managing over 30 tutors across time zones from around the country, and had over 200 students by the end of 2025. We had expanded from only offering SAT prep to tutoring in every subject from elementary through high school, plus the entire college application process: essay coaching, activity planning, summer class advising, and finding (or running our own) scholarships. We also helped students already in college who wanted to transfer, and students applying to law school. Our tutors were no longer only other college students or recent grads our own age. We employed school teachers, people who specialized in English second language teaching, writers and medical school students.
The best part about it was when one day I checked my phone and saw a message from a student I had the previous year. She texted, “Hi Leah! I got into Michigan! It was my dream school! My mom and I want to thank you so much for all your help with everything!!!! Go Blue!” It was sweet.
Decided it was incredibly lame that I only knew English, so I spent way too much money enrolling in an intensive 20 hours/week course to learn Spanish. I did it with Enforex, a private language school in Spain with campuses in all the major cities, so I also got some travel out of it as well with a couple weeks learning in each of Valencia, Barcelona, Sevilla, Cádiz, and Málaga over the course of 3 months. I came knowing a handful of greetings and verbs in the present tense and left B2 level (still shitty but conversational up to 20 minutes approximately. After 20 minutes I've run out of topics I know how to talk about and my spontaneous conversation is messy and annoying to listen to if you're fluent). I'm hardcore with Duolingo now, but am planning on resuming private classes with one of my favorite teachers (& friends!) I met in Alicante last year so I can not be such a shameful gringo.
What was meant to be a 4-day trip turned into a whole month traveling along the coast in Morocco, surfing and eating tajine. It was awesome.
Got a gig at one of them SF AI startups where you work 80 hours a week in a smelly little hacker house with a bunch of boys. Basically I got paid six figures to talk to AI agents all day. It was a frustrating experience, but also a little bit like they were our friends or our children. It was weird overall. Sam Kriss does an amazing job illustrating what it is like to live and work in this dystopian San Francisco we have created for ourselves in his Child's Play.
Mount Rinjani. Top 10 hardest things I have ever done in my life. It was so long and I was so dirty and cold and hungry. When anyone asks, however, I always say it's super chill and easy and they should definitely do it.