same as it ever was

I touched ground in PDX on May 27th. That means I’ve officially been living in Portland for six whole months. From my 21-year old perspective, that’s a damn long time. Since then, I’ve gone through about 40 containers of plain nonfat yogurt. I figured if I ate enough of it the flavor would grow on me. I still don’t like it; it’s tangy and, well, plain. On the other hand, I’m still going on the same bottle of hand soap, which either means I’m frugal with my resources, or I don’t always wash my hands after I pee.

Anyways, thinking back on my time in the Pacific Northwest, I realized that I'm torn by two sides. On one hand, I love adventure. For me to fully have life, it’s all about new experiences, places, people. I want to be somewhere long enough not to be touristy and learn some of the ins and outs of a new world, but also short enough to challenge my mind and soul from getting stale.

I grew up a Boston kid, but I applied to colleges everywhere except New England. I only got into one, so I shipped off to Ohio for school. I never went abroad, so I spent a full four years there, and even though I was ready to get out after year four, I loved it.

At Kenyon, I was a molecular biology major, but I’ve already forgotten just about everything I knew about the Ni-Fe catalytic subunit of hydrogenase-3. What did stick with me is my friends. I loved all those early Sunday mornings suffering on hungover 15 mile long runs when someone feels the need to drop it to 6 minute pace when we're still 5 miles out from campus, and also all those late-night-caffeine-driven working sprees spent on senior projects.

At another stage of life I spent a summer in Wyoming waiting tables. Before that summer my conception of the west was Kansas, which I later learned is the center of the country. I didn’t know anybody out there, but I jumped on the opportunity to have more story-worthy experiences. It turned out to be that and more: I climbed Middle Teton, recited Robert Frost's poetry to drunk Turks, ran a 100 mile week, experienced alone time with God for the first time. Wyoming will always be a part of my heart.

As I reached the end of college I applied to jobs everywhere but New England and the Midwest, but I knew I wanted to see the west coast, and the Northwest in particular. Again, I didn’t know anybody out here, but a lab from Oregon contacted me, and within days I had committed to a two-year stay. When I told my friends about my sudden move to Portland, I was told on multiple occasions, “Such a Ken thing.” I was proud to be associated with such a bold decision.

I loved the thrill of these adventures. I love going to sleep at night thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe my life is real. This is so much cooler than I expected.”

But at the same time, at every stop, I feel like I’ve struggled with the same thing.

When I first got to college, it was hard to swallow seeing my high school friends sprout new lives. In Wyoming, I spent hours on the rec hall payphone isolating myself and talking to my then girlfriend while my friends would stroll in and play some pool. Now in Portland, some of my biggest highlights are waiting for my old friends to visit and experience my new world with me. (Sidenote: two of said old friends, Amulya and Keyser, are visiting me in the next two months!)

This struggle is my second side, one that asks, “Why make new and different friends? I already love the ones I have!”

So maybe, the more the circumstances in your life change, the more it reveals how your core character stays the same. Going from farmland Ohio to picturesque Wyoming to urban Portland, it's made me realize that at every step of my life, my core has revolved around missing my old friends and seeking out new friends.

Kind of a sidenote, but if you’ve ever read the news, you’ve probably realized the world is fucked. Earthquakes regularly target the most vulnerable, the Middle East will always be at the end stages of war, and sex will always dominate everything else. I guess, in such a world, relationship is the one glimmer of hope of what I think life was meant to be. People were meant to have friends, to love and be loved.

But I guess adventure forces me to branch out and find new and different friends. I just need to remember different doesn’t mean worse, it just means, different.

So after six months in Portland, this is what I know: white guys really knew how to dance in the 80's, I’m excited for the new relationships I’m finding, and I count myself as incredibly lucky to have old friends that will put up with me even when I’m miles and miles away.

from ken

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

People Helping People

I’ve been excited to write a post reflecting back on my first six months out of college/in Portland (not this post), and one of the things it’s made me realize is that my biggest struggle is the same as it was in college.

I tend to throw myself into too many things, a sort of, my eyes being bigger than my stomach mentality:

Oh yeah, of course I can take on that additional responsibility at church. Learn a new mouse surgery technique? No problem. Dinner on Wednesday night? Sure! Activism group? Sign me up!

I had this exact problem in college, and I still haven’t struck a good balance of giving myself a break.

The other night, I had a few of my friends over. One of them was my friend Maureen, who is a real southern smily girl that says y’all, a novelty in the northwest. As we were chatting she explained her struggles in her job search. She was especially frustrated because she had such amazing work experiences before moving to the young-people-mecca of Portland, aka job-hell.

My other friend Lee, who is the kind of guy that covers his face in makeup and wears a diaper to be a baby for Halloween, chimed in with a similar situation. His first job as a chef was amazingly rewarding, but when his second job didn’t match up to that same level of meaningfulness, he could barely handle it.

I had similar experiences. In my undergrad lab, a bacterial physiology lab, my experiments worked so beautifully that I had myself thinking I had a god-given scientist’s touch. I had ample data to put together a publication within an academic year of working part-time, an impressive feat. However, it wasn’t easy because of my unreal talent as a scientist, which after seeing the hyper-competitive world of biomedical research is admittedly average, but because bacteria are used to growing in weird places like your fridge. That makes them easier to grow and a lot easier for me to churn out good results.

On the other hand, I work with mammalian liver cells now. Have you ever seen mammalian cells popping up in your old milk? No? Well that’s because they’re needy and aren’t engineered to grow outside of your skin. Basically, that just means it’s a lot tougher to handle them. My experimental success rate has plummeted lower than I ever imagined. Seeing wave after wave of failure and troubleshooting is exhausting.

But that night the simple act of sharing reminded me that everyone struggles. I’m not unique in having stress in my life! Of course, that’s intuitive but to share those burdens is a beautiful thing. It not only lightens the load of the sharer, but it was a great reminder for me as the selfish listener that the world doesn’t stop when I’m stressed and that other people have anxiety too.

Maybe chicken little was right when he said the sky was falling, and maybe all we can do is to accept that life is stressful, be nice to each other, keep each other company, share, and laugh a little along the way.

from ken

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

Miracle in the Andes

I just finished reading Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado and Vince Rause, a true story about the 1972 plane crash that left an Uruguayan rugby team stranded in the Andes for more than two months. The story has been told before, but Parrado, one of the heroes of the trip, offers some very insightful thoughts about what he learned during this unimaginable ordeal.

I don't want to give too much away because I think every reader should encounter this book with their own perspective and with their own lives in mind, but one of my favorite ideas is summarized in the following quote:

"Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love."

This book definitely touches on many issues of faith and philosophy, but at its core it is a story about the incredible power of love.

Caution: This book frequently brought me on the verge of tears, so if you're reading it in a public place or are particularly emotional, you have been warned.




Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

What do you do everyday?

I was sitting at church, zoning in and out, as I tend to in the mornings. One head bob jolted me back like a slap in the face, and they were talking about 90x prayer, an activity in which you pray 13 minutes a day to develop the discipline of prayer.

13 minutes broken up over the course of the day doesn’t seem that overwhelming or even that significant. But when you look at it over the course of a week, it quickly adds up to 90 minutes.

It got me thinking, man that’d be great to be like Martin Luther King Jr. who was once asked, “I heard you pray three times a day, but what do you do those days when you’re so busy?” To this, King replied, “Those days, I pray five times.”

On an unrelated note, one of my coworkers, Carl, a new dad, was telling me about his parenting struggles. He’s an incredibly hard worker, and he spends most of his time slaving away in the lab. Unfortunately, this means that there isn’t much time left to spend with his daughter. His daughter, Anna, spends most of his time with her mom, and she breaks out in a crying fit whenever her mom leaves the room, even when Carl is there. I’ve hardened myself to deal with failure, but I don’t know if I could swallow rejection like that.

Another one of our labmates, a veteran mom, interjected, ”Oh it’s just a phase, you just need to snap her out of it. Just go home everyday around four o clock for a couple hours and spend time with your daughter, then when she goes to sleep come back and work some more. It’ll take a while, but soon enough she’ll love you.”

The 90x prayer and fatherhood struggles reminded me of Amulya’s post on small change. It’s easy to make one or two glamorous decisions every once in a while. That doesn’t take that much work. But how come small change is so much more important to your true character?

I wrote about this thought a while back but it seems important so I’ll rehash it,

“There is no such thing as a courageous person, only acts of courage.”

If you pray once, it’s a nice heart-warming experience. If you pray every once in a while, other people will probably think you’re spiritual. But if you pray everyday, you become a person who prays. You are conscious of your surroundings, you are someone who cares about people around you, you are humble enough to ask for help. Prayer becomes a part of your identity.
There are no innately great dads. There are only dads that greet the sun every morning and sacrifice their own free time and well being to spend time with their kids to slowly but surely develop relationship.

And as I sat in the coffee shop drinking my decaf Americano, I got to thinking…

It’s hard work to pray everyday! Do my ideas have any idea how busy my schedule is? I just don’t have the time for it. I’ll make some other form of small change.

But maybe that’s why small change is so important. Because it gets right up in our face to challenge us, everyday.

If you made a couple big decisions in your life, like you moved to a brand new city. You might just be someone that other people think is a risk-taker, because other people will see you through the big stories in your life.

But if you take small risks everyday, risk losing control of your schedule to a discipline you might be trying to develop, or risk losing sleep for the sake of an important relationship, then, maybe, with time, those small decisions become ingrained in our habits, and become a part of our character.

from ken

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

photo by Enid Yu

Beyond Mountains, There Are Mountains

Probably the question I get asked most frequently these days is, “So, are you a student?” Only briefly resenting the fact that I look like I’m 16 and should probably still be in college, I quickly gather myself, repeat “serenity now, serenity now, serenity now…,” and reply calmly, “Yeah actually I’m working up at OHSU (Oregon Health and Science University) in a research lab. We study how your body manages iron.” Further than that, I never really know what to say. Maybe this story will paint a better picture...

It’s too uninteresting to explain in detail, but my job in a nutshell consists of growing up some liver cells, treating with certain conditions like high or low iron, then harvesting them to measure their response to such conditions. The final step involves developing a piece of film that reveals my results for a usual week-long experiment.

So about a month ago, I was going through a cold streak in lab. Cells I was trying to grow would die for no obvious reason. Simple experiments I handled without thinking twice as an undergrad turned into massive uphill battles. I kept getting flustered, which made me more nervous, and I messed up over and over. My confidence looked something like Ted from the cult classic sitcom, Scrubs. In other words, it was shot.

One of those depressing days, with the grace of God I had painstakingly reached the final step of developing a piece of film with my data on it. I waited in the darkroom with the red light on, allowing the chemiluminscent marker to burn its mark into the Kodak blue x-ray film. Reluctant but feeling confident, I stuck my piece of film into the developer. Waiting for the moment of truth. Was this the day my cold streak would finally break? Would I be a genius again? Or would my last six days be useless, again?

As I waited, the developer started making ungodly screeching sounds. My piece of film was stuck in the goddamn developer. I momentarily considered hiring a therapist.

I quickly collected myself. Realizing I had no idea what to do, I went over to one of our grad students and asked her to save me. We went and got one of the professors, Jack, who was experienced at fixing outdated lab machinery. He was the kind of guy who has a huge smile on his face and asks questions like, “So I’m sure you did everything absolutely right, but were you sure to make the obvious decision to put the film in vertically?”

Together, we struggled with it for a while, trying all the obvious solutions, replacing the rollers, tightening the screws, nothing worked. With time, we were able to put together a patchwork solution.

He stepped out, and I was left in the dark again, to test the developer. Somehow, it felt symbolic to be standing in the dark. Having no idea what was going on. Being lost.

Realizing I was taking myself too seriously, and that I was just developing some film, I stuck the film in the developer and stood there, quietly but audibly humming Maroon 5 to myself.

The film came out. The results didn’t look great, but the developer worked. I stepped out of the dark room and saw Jack, who looked engaged with one of his students. I waited a second to make eye contact with him, and threw up an awkward thumbs up along with a forced-looking smile, signaling success. He raised a fist and exclaimed, “We persevere,” and went right back to work...

Sometimes, what’s on that piece of blue film isn’t what you want. But maybe that’s not what counts. Maybe there will always be mountains beyond mountains. Maybe it’s about accepting those mountains as an inevitable part of a beautiful life. Maybe, it’s just about persevering.

Maybe, even when there’s no hoop, you just have to keep throwing that basketball up because you never know what can happen when you keep fighting.

from ken

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

The End

A guest post from my friend from Kenyon College, Sean Edelman. The two of us, pictured handsomely, below.


Over the crest of the hill, the familiar flags, people, and noise come into view. After laboring for what seemed like an eternity, the runner could finally see the physical goal; the one he suffered through the summer heat and winter snow to reach. He had climbed mountains, crossed plains, and conquered his demons. Yet, with his goal finally appearing like the sun over the horizon, he can only feel emptiness and longing. Was this it? As he approached the finish, this particular thought echoed throughout his mind, bringing doubt to his soon-to-be achievement.

Over the last 6+ years of my life I’ve been a runner. What began as a placeholder for not making the high school soccer team became one of my primary identifiers. Back in high school I proudly displayed my identity by wearing t-shirts I had won or purchased at meets, I spent my afternoon sitting with my runner friends discussing other teams and their runners, and I would gladly spend my free time in my coach’s office hoping that some of his knowledge would pass down to me. Every fall I toiled through the long miles, steep hills, and unfortunate weather of cross-country season, counting down the days until the first winter track practice. I lived for that feeling of lacing up my spikes and tearing around the oval. I gave up parties, weekends, and countless hours to nothing but running. The competition kept me going each day. I loved racing and the palpable sense of accomplishment drove me to worker harder and harder. Never would I have thought that my attitude towards the sport could ever be changed.

The realization came around last February.

With only a couple hundred meters standing between him and the finish line, the runner’s thin muscular frame remained upright and focused, hiding the mental turmoil that dwelled underneath his skin. The single thought of doubt that troubled him wasn’t a new phenomenon. He had managed to suppress its growth in his brain by thinking that it was only a passing attitude. However, as the finish line got ever so closer, he could no longer ignore his own demons, and they began to overwhelm his thoughts.

It was a Friday night and with a meet the next morning, I was spending it sitting in my room watching a movie. A knock came on the door; it was a friend of mine coming to get my roommate to head out to the party scene. As the door shut behind them a question crossed my mind: Why was I depriving myself from the fun that I knew was out there? Was a track race worth really worth this?

I was appalled by the thoughts crossing my mind. Track was who I was. My once stable identity was now at conflict. The sacrifices, which I had once made without an afterthought, now had to be justified. I realized the personal achievement gained with racing had long left my body. Just like an injured runner’s tendons may hang by threads, my connection and love I had for the sport of track had withered away to small, decrepit strands.

Like a virus, this string of thoughts plagued me throughout the rest of the season. I found myself just going through the motions that I had once put all of my effort into. For the second straight year, I didn’t see my times drop. Races became something I felt forced to do. The glow of accomplishment no longer surged through my body. Emptiness replaced fulfillment. Change had come and I was reluctant to accept it.

A few weeks ago marked the first day of fall track for the runners who don’t participate in cross-country. As I stretched in the autumn air after a long distance run, I watched the fall trackies finish up their workout. Eagerness and excitement was flowing throughout the bunch; they were elated to be back doing what they love. Watching them brought back memories of the sensation one feels at the start of a season. It was a feeling I once longed for and the thought of it used to make my heart race. Sitting in the warm sun observing them, I realized I no longer pined for what they were currently experiencing. I finally recognized that I had moved on.

Serenity and peace came to my troubled mind. Acceptance finally spread its roots.

As the runner crosses the finish, the aches and pains that he had ignored begin to throb throughout his body. He wants nothing more than the soreness to stop but he knows that the suffering has just begun. As he starts to walk away, the feeling of emptiness disappears from his body. The race is over and although it didn’t end as he once anticipated, he is now filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment. It had been a good run. He had made it. The uncertainty of tomorrow no longer bothered him; it excited him. Although the pain in his body had become nearly unbearable, he cracked a smile.

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to post your thoughts here, email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

What is Social Justice? Again.

This past spring I organized an event at Kenyon College called Social Justice Week. The week ended with an event in which several campus activists answered the question, what is social justice?

I didn’t have an answer then, and I don’t have an answer now. However, I heard that a maturing painter has to paint and paint, and then every once in a while, take some white paint, and cover his whole canvas to start over. Each time he figures out the artist that he isn’t, he gets closer to the artist he is.

I see these next few years of my life as crucial, I feel like my vision is slowly revealing itself, stroke by stroke.

A few years ago I came across a book called Everything Must Change. The contents of the book were mediocre, or at least, I feel that way because I can never remember anything from books, but the title has stuck with me. I believe in innovation, and being a radical, and that everything must change.

Martin Luther King Jr. said,

“After you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.”

I learned much through my work with social justice at Kenyon College. I did a lot of flag-waving and getting in people’s faces about poor people that needed our help. It was a lot of pointing out that people should care about something, without any real reason why. Kind of run of the mill social justice work.

This sort of guilt trip can work for the short-term. I was able to raise a ton of attention for Haiti and a lot of money to send down there. I learned that people will gladly pay to rid themselves of their guilt.

I know I’m stealing this idea from some book, but I can’t remember who I’m stealing it from. The problem with guilt is that when that bill is paid off, whether by a literal check or a couple nice gestures, people can clear their conscience and move on. I know this because after spending so much effort raising money for Haiti and being given a Humanitarian Award for my work, I couldn’t care less about the people of Haiti.

This protest method of achieving social justice has carried the tide of social justice to where it is today, and for that I praise it. However, I just don’t know that it is my answer. I see myself as the painter who finally built up the courage to pick up the white paintbrush.

With that white canvas, I want to find another way. A way from which I can’t just clear my conscience. A way that makes me care.

So what is my answer to, “What is social justice?”

I’ve heard this sort of lingo in activism culture, that the word “radical” and the word “radish” come from the same latin word meaning “root”. And so, a radical, like a radish, must always be concerned with its roots. To fight any issues of social justice, HIV epidemic in the Ukraine, gender inequality in the church, lack of strong education in predominantly non-white neighborhoods, I believe it always has to come back to the root causes of inequalities.

So what is the root of the problem, at the most basic microscaled level?

I’m not willing to think outside of myself. I’m not willing to sacrifice my own well-being for the community.

To change, like a radish, I want to operate from the underground. A subversive, much slower form of progress, but also hopefully, a real form of progress. I want to throw myself into a community, and learn its struggles, to really understand the human condition, and through that understanding figure out what I can do to help.

So, what do I envision as my painting of social justice? I guess I see it as trying my hardest to slowly let go of the luxuries in my life and making friends everywhere I go, but also being intentional about seeking out the right friendships.

I want to end with a Cesar Chavez quote that I love. It was taught to me by an activist I admire greatly, “It was never about the grapes or the lettuce, it was always about the people.” Any social justice movement always has to be rooted in the people, and I think right now I am trying to develop my roots.

from ken

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

photo by Wesley Oostvogels