hello!

I'm OT. My name means "peace and contentment" in Chinese. A friend called me by my initials in fifth grade, and it stuck.

I was born in Singapore, raised in Hong Kong, and I graduated from a liberal arts college in New York. I’ve lived in seven different places and my perceptions of normality are constantly under revision. I’m an only child and my family is small, so I grew up playing Monopoly against myself a lot. My birthday is in September, and I'm twenty-nine.

I like flowers, jewelry that doesn’t rust, cups of tea with dollops of honey, boldly patterned socks, getting to know people properly well, reading, running, cycling, bars of artisanal soap, cozy sweaters, wild parties, traveling on trains, logical arguments, sunsets, and the color gray. 

A question I get asked frequently (as in, once a year) is "why greenglassheart?". I was fifteen when two things happened at around the same time: I bought a green heart necklace, and I decided to start a blog. For some reason, teenage-me thought it would be a great idea to name my new blog after my new necklace. I didn’t even do an accurate job of the naming; the heart was made of plastic and there was no glass. The necklace counted as “jewelry that doesn’t rust”, but it was pretty ugly. I wore it everywhere for many months.

If you're new here, you should know that this blog has no continuity or central theme and sometimes many months go by without a single post. I like to keep expectations low so that I can claim it's been a surprisingly eventful fourteen years. Highlights include:

  • Having readers from over 110 countries

  • Meeting total strangers who happened to be readers

  • This blog was referenced at the bottom of my college acceptance letter

  • Having two poems published in a print literary magazine — when I told my mom about this, she asked what they were about. I was embarrassed that the poems were really about boys and didn't want to admit that, so I said, "Nature."

  • Seeing a story featured on the front page of Medium

  • Writing a post about my Tinder experiences and getting to present these stories to actual Tinder staff, who nodded and smiled politely