Baby store (婴儿用品店)

MJ and I went to a few baby stores to check out some baby items today, and it made me question the whole baby product business. I've learned this lesson before, from commercialization of higher education (college tuition, textbooks, etc.) to weddings (every wedding venue has a huge upcharge once they know you're doing a wedding and not just a regular party) to Christmas to Valentine's Day to pretty much everything that costs money in the U.S.: it's a pyramid scheme. Are these baby companies just capitalizing off parents' anxiety and worry about not being prepared for the baby when the big day arrives? I haven't gone through it yet and I may eat crow about it, but my guess is yes. Take "Carter's" child store for example: a strip mall store we went to that sells mostly children's clothing. Why does it sell mostly children's cloth, including children's toys, children's Halloween costumes, cute hats, shoes, all that? Probably because that's where the most margin is, and it's stuff you don't really need. Open secret about babies: They get bigger really quickly! So they can sell clothes from 0-3 months, 3-6 months, 6-12 months, etc. unlike adults where MJ has worn the same Nike shirt at home for all 9 years of our relationship. I'm pretty much the same, I wear my clothes until the lettering falls off, and wear socks until there are multiple holes everywhere. And for some reason every pair of shorts I have eventually pops a hole in the crotch. It's not me, I swear! I think my washing machine/ dryer has a disklike for all clothning and wears them down significantly faster. Anyway, I'm a minimalist and never wanted that many fancy clothing, and luckily MJ is not obsessed. But then there's all the other "must-have" items: crib, bassinett, stroller, car seat, baby bottles, baby bouncer, a nursing pillow, nursing chair, breast pump, etc. etc. These are just the basics, but there are literally thousands of types of just strollers. One store we went to had a $15 consultant fee just to let them show us their strollers, as if choosing one of a thousand strollers is a life-changing decision in the life of a baby synonomous with choosing their first car to drive with. The baby doesn't care! It's probably the only time the baby won't care, by the way, in teh first few years of life, then I imagine they will start getting picky about their food, their clothes, their toys, everything, but for now they don't care! I feel like I probably grew up in a bare minimum, change diapers, go to bed, sleep, wake up, eat, and then go back to bed. What happened to babies born in the wild like Tarzan or Mowgli raised by wolves with no modern amenities and no need for a crib or anything? They seemed to have turned out already, maybe even the better for it. What's with Target stacking up huge aisles of baby products just to make a profit off of us naive first-time parents? In a society where everything is for sale, even having babies is commercialized, maybe even more so because it's finally another way for a hardened, habitual shoppers who only go to Costco (MJ and I grabbed a pizza and hot dog at Costco today for $3.50, it was glorious) to add more to our budget and change our spending habits (for the better for the big companies, for the worse for us) and bleed the common man of some of our hard-earned money. They probably figure parents likely have money, or else they wouldn't have had a kid (parent planning) which is probably not true for all parents, but also, talk about opportunistic vultures. I feel like baby should just be another human being, we just need food, we need shelter (room to sleep in), a bed, poop, and wear clothes. That's how I live my life, why can't she be like me? The whole post-partum doula thing is even worse. There's a whole cottage industry of people thriving off of taking care of baby after the mom is compromised either by natural birth or by c-section and can't operate normally for a few weeks/months, wearing adult diaper and lying in bed while the baby is at its most vulnerable, the first days of life. So these post-partum nannies come in and help the families, which seems like a noble profession and a good job to have but it's because commercialized with various companies advertising their services at high rates and "pimping out" (no other way to say it) these doulas to come help the families, and the work week is 5-week days, so you pay for "5 weeks" but that's actually just 25 days of actual work, you need to pay 6 weeks for a month's work! Welcome to Parenthood! More complaints to come but I can see already why the financial burden for a baby is so high for families, and this is before the baby is even here!

Pickleball (匹克球, ピックルボール, 피클볼)

I don't think pickleball is very popular in the Asian countries yet, but it's exploded here in the US. i've been on record as saying pickeball is just tennis for lazy people, or just a passing fad; maybe I've given it an unfair shake. Just tonight I wandered around on a summer evening....and there was a tennis court, full of pickleball players. No one playing tennis. All pickleball players seemingly having fun, and it hit me: pickleball is a genius invention, and I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner. Tennis is such a frustrating sport, full of chances for errors: you hit it too hard, it goes out. You hit it too flat, it hits the net. you hit it too soft, the other player gets an easy shot. Points end early and often, and there's a HUGE learning curve, especially for serving: I played years and years of tennis and still don't have a reliable serve where you have to hit it overhead into a box diagonal to you, and you have to spin it in because the box is kind of small: very hard to get into it, kind of like violin or computer programming. Pickleball is easy and the complexity that drives tennis away turns into simplicity that draws people into pickleball. That and the camaraderie: pickleball is always played in a group of 4 from what I've seen, and the physical intimacy of the partners does matter. Tennis has doubles too but it's all just one shot kill, the average rally is like 2 shots. Pickleball you get a wider racket, the ball doesn't go as far, people get to hit the ball more. That's really all there is to it: it's more fun. Leave tennis to the professionals on TV like Jan Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. Pickleball is for the masses. It's probably one of the sports that has the best shot of becoming an Olympic sport; lacrosse and a bunch of other sports try but don't have the mass support. Probably one of the best things to come out of the pandemic. Pickleball is like something I probably would have have thought of when I was younger, like when I worked as a camp counselor during summers after college; a time of creativity and inspiration, where I thought everything was possible and my ideas would be accepted. Before I went to law school and got a MAJOR reality check of what life is really like, most people don't appreciate your ideas, going against the grain is frowned upon, people will only listen to you if you have power or they have some incentive to listen to you (money, fame, attractiveness being some of the most common). Maybe in another lifetime or the 2nd half of this life I'll come up with something genius, that no one else has thought of, that revolutionized how people do things, something as earth-shattering as changing tennis courts everywhere into pickleball courts. Until then, they're just fanciful whims in my head.

Nursery rhymes (童谣, 童謡, 동요)

When MJ and I have a child, that child is going to have some high expectations lumped onto her (fairly or unfairly, I'm not trying to be a Tiger Dad but there are just some things we hope to have our child do) such as: learn different languages, and be raised (at least) bilingual. If the baby can handle it, hopefully trilingual: MJ has expressed her desire to have both sets of grandparents be able to speak to the child (mine in Chinese, and hers in Korean). That's going to be a tall task, though, as I don't speak very good Korean (MJ has remarked that my Korean is VERY basic... and MJ's Chinese is in the early stages, let's say). I imagine the baby will pick up English quickly enough, but in America there are some traditional ways to start baby off in the language, with nursery rhymes being a key component: quick little poems that rhyme to teach children basic words. There are some common ones I didn't even consider nursery rhymes but I realize now, duh...Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are." It might be tough also because MJ wasn't raised in this country, and missed the class on nursery rhymes, like Jeopardy had a question about "Old McDonald" the other day, and she thought it had to do with McDonald's the fast food restaurant!!! Luckily this generation of Americans also isn't intimately familiar with nursery rhymes, as The Floor contestants evidence regularly, and even Jeopardy contestants have some trouble with the harder ones like "Little Boy Blue (fell asleep in a haystack)", Old Mother Hubbard (gave the dog a bone), Jack be Nimble (Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick). Yea, now then that I think about it, these nursery rhymes are a little difficult, and the vocabulary isn't the most basic level like A-apple, B-boy level. Candlestick? Nimble? Haystack? I guess these were old English rhymes that people thought would be ubiquitous in a person's life, now they've been phased out due to technology. Nowadays the easier ways to get kids attention are like the Baby Shark song with consistent patterns of letters like doo-doo-doo-doo and members of the family. Easy to remember, and actually the tune was started by a Korean company called pinkfong! Other languages have nursery rhymes too! 風婆婆 and something called "風來啦" all are good nursery rhymes to teach kids the language early and get all the Chinese tones correctly, which I feel like is more important than English when it comes to hashing all 4 different ways to say seemingly the same word like "bu" or "bo." The one thing I look forward to doing is reading to baby, but also learning Korean with baby! I'm ready for some Korean nursery rhymes and finding out how little kids learn Korean! I've already learned some children's games and children's songs through this educational program called "Squid Game" on Netflix, time to learn some fun ditties! Realistically, the baby would probably tire of speaking in different languages to different parents, so we would have to manage expectations, but hopefully my gene of loving to learn will pass through! I always just liked learning more words, adding more to my brain, feeling more empowered. Probably the same impulse that bodybuilders have to get more swole, I have the same impulse to always be learning, exercising the brain. I'm actually really jealous of babies, having a fresh brain to absorb everything and not littered with all the junk I've put into it over the years. Babies probably have the "morning brain" you get after a full night's sleep and brain ready to absorb new information, except babies have it all the time, just absorbing everything like a sponge. I have that brain for "simple information" like words and their counterparts in other languages and maybe the faces of certain people, but not so much complex thoughts like deep legal theory or physics concepts unfortunately. Nursery rhymes work though!

The Floor 地板, 床, 바닥)

MJ is big about what kind of floor we have in our home, and it's a pretty simple philosophy: NO CARPET! Allergies is a major reason, but another one is what goes into carpets that people don't see: sure the long fur and deep colors can cover up some of the nastiness that goes into the carpet that doesn't get swept up, but there can just e stuff hiding in there. At least with the vinyl floors we have now, I (and more importantly, MJ) can see what is on the surface and clean it up as necessary, and vacuuming is easier. Count me in as a hard floor guy. It's tough living on the floor of society nowadays. I went to Jack in the Box the other day and ordered the No. 1 on the menu with the combo because I was dying of thirst and (similar to MJ) I've been craving fries recently......and suddenly it turned out to be $16.00! That's a far cry from the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo at Costco! I thought of what it must be like for the people still making just $15.00 minimum wage per hour (it may have increased since then, but still) and what a financial hit just getting a greasy burger at a low-rated fast food chain must be (sorry Jack in the Box, but that's the consensus review among my generation of people). Unfortunately, that's the economic reality of people at the bottom: wages are stagnant and don't go up very often, but inflation hits you hard, so your wages actually give you lower purchasing power. For every major superstar celebrity or Youtuber you see on TV who get all the attention, there are probably thousands of people living on the floor who are just struggling to get by, and I get reminded of that every time I go to places like....Jack in the Box. It kind of reminds me too to not fall in the trap a lot of people do of getting too used to luxury: once you start flying business class instead of coach, you never want to go back. Once you start paying for the express lane on the highway, you never want to go back. Once you let your kids have cell phones, they never want to go back to reading or studying. It's very nice to be living at or the near the ceiling, but you need to have started at the floor to know what a blessing it is to be living at the ceiling, and to stay sharp and hungry lest one day you're back living on the floor (one of my worst fears really). Oh and turns out my order was probably entered in wrong at Jack in the Box.... even they're not that usurious to chareg $16.00 for their basic combo, except maybe at the airport, where it's really high crimes and misdemeanours for price gouging.... NEVER EAT AT THE AIRPORT. I've gotten into the game show "The Floor" recently with Rob Lowe. I binged the first season straight in about a day while visiting said airport and Jack in the Box, was so excited about it I showed MJ and my sister.....and they both were underwhelmed. I don't get it. Lots of trivia in a short amount of time except it's mostly pictures you identify instead of text clues like Jeopardy, and it's a duel format where 2 contestants battle in one of the contestant's chosen "categories" like Halloween costumes, State Capitols, Olympic Sports, Fruits, etc. I found that I have a lot of gaps in at least my visual identification of certain categories, like I just did not register seeing a daffodil, or a picture of Bad Bunny (Is THAT what Bad Bunny looks like?) Also tests reaction time, retrieving the answer from the back crevices of your mind quickly and blurting it out loud, and depth of knowledge. Like I just DON'T KNOW that many country singers, so would I survive a whole minute on the clock of identifying country singers by their faces? Garth Brooks, Keith Urban, Kacey Musgraves, Tim McGraw.... Luke Bryan and Kane Brown stumped me. Good study tool for trivia lovers, even if some of the categories are really easy, like naming all 50 states based on their location on a map. Rob Lowe is......LITERALLY one of the most expressive game show hosts out there, he doesn't have to do much except wince and react to contestant's missed questions.....he's great at it.

EB-5 Fraud (Eb-5欺诈, EB-5詐欺, Eb-5 사기)

Recently, I started helping my relatives in China with an EB-5 matter that's becoming increasingly common nowadays: EB-5 fraud, where an EB-5 company takes money from Chinese clients for an investment like building a bridge or a building and promising a return plus getting a green card to the U.S. years in the future......and then never delivers the funds, or embezzles the funds, claiming the investment just didn't pan out and the money's now gone, conveniently. There are so many scams out there now like Bitcoin scams, mysterious messages saying that I owe money for running a toll that I never used, etc., but the EB-5 scam is kind of a classic one of getting investors to invest with promises of high returns but not delivering, much like the pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes of the early 20th century or even closer to the Bernie Madoff schemes in the 2000s. Unfortunately, it's common because Chinese investors don't know the law here in America, they make the investment without fully appreciating the risk, figuring it's worth it to take the risk if they get a green card in the end. (I guess the green card for permanent residence in America, as much as current residents complain about it here, is still worth something to America, often a LOT of money like $500,000 per green card). Plus there's a language barrier, a culture barrier, the EB5 company holds all the cards because they receive the money and the investors don't know what legal channels to pursue, etc. Oh and then there's the matter of a lot of Chinese people coming into great wealth in the last 20 years or so, and they gotta put their money somewhere, so they want to come to America! For any future investors: don't be like my relatives, not consulting an attorney before investing, but once there are signs of trouble, finally consulting attorneys to see what can be done. Know all the risks BEFORE you put the money in. My relatives also have the mistaken assumption that all attorneys in America can handle pretty much everything (I guess attorneys have this reputation in America too as most don't understand what attorneys do). Just like you wouldn't go to a dermatologist or psychiatrist to handle your open heart surgery, you can't just go to any attorney for any legal problem. There are specialties, especially differences between litigation and transactional, criminal law and civil law, Intellectual property versus family law, etc. It's not a one-size-fits-all profession, but alas that's one of the downsides of going to law school and becoming a lawyer: all friends and family now just assume you know every law there is (lawyers don't know every single law out there, we learn how to interpret the law and argue about the law to help the client), how to handle any type of legal situation, what to do if they end up in jail and need to be bailed out. Through questions from distant relatives I've learned quite a lot about trademark law and immigration cases and now EB-5 fraud, which I'm happy to volunteer to do, but I know for sure I'm not providing the best legal representation out there. I'm just a normal dude with "Esq" at the end of his title and a State of California Bar number.

Bodies of Water (水体, 水域, 수역)

There are too many bodies of water in the world. Too many gulfs, too many straits, too many rivers, too many estuaries, too many seas, too many channels, too many sluices, too many oxbow lakes. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate all the physical bodies of water, they're the life blood of the earth (although some would argue their rising sea levels is causing land to disappear and bad for the overall health of the world) but there are too many NAMES of bodies of water that we need to know about, like every body of water has to have a name. There's recently the big controversy about the Gulf of Mexico being called the Gulf of America, a silly debate really about names and labels and symbolism of American strength.....that gulf, whatever you want to call it, is important because it has large chunks of America and Mexico bordering it, and is a huge body of water flowing into the Caribbean Sea with all those islands. The Great Lakes are named the great lakes for a season: they're so big and take up so much of the mass of North America that you have to get to know them, which states they border, etc. But do we really need to know GREEN BAY is part of Lake Michigan, that tiny sliver of Lake Michigan bordering Wisconsin (I know, coming from someone who grew up in Illinois this seems biased at best). Do we really need another name when it's all connected? I probably have tons of logical fallacies in this argument, and honestly geography is one of my favorite categories, but how many people in the world really need to know about Baffin Bay, or McMurdo Sound, or the Weddell Sea? Those are places that a tiny sliver of people working in extremely cold places only need to know, and even they proably get confused where the Ross Sea starts and the McMurdo Sound begins. Some of these bodies of water seem like downright plant-flagging, like hey I did something great or I claimed this land, I need my name on it, like the Magellan Strait, "world-renowned" for connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean in southern Chile near Tierra del Fuego? Really, is it that important? It's not as great as the Panama Canal cutting through 2 big continents, you could just sail a little further south of Chile and go around that way if you really wanted to get through. (I'm probably just upset the other day I got Strait of Magellan mixed up with the other strait named for a famous explorer, the Cook Strait in New Zealand). I think some of this obscure geography facts does make non-trivia people roll their eyes, and the geographic stuff is easy and fun to write questinos about, but really difficult to find a use for in America on questions about the Gulf of Aqaba (you really going the Sinai Peninsula after you visit Egypt?) or the shrinking Sea of Azov. Sure, a sea is shrinking and might shrivel up. But that seems like a problem half a mile away. Other trivia categories seem.... a little more practical, or at least interesting. Every movie, book, song, or TV show tells some sort of story that is dynamic, with characters and plot and it changes, so people are interested about what happened and the conflict that people face. History is very useful about what the earth has gone through. Cars, corporations, fashion, food.......all every day uses, even if a little "corporatized" making it sound like an ad every time they promote a Blizzard from Dairy Queen or McFlurry from McDonald's. Anatomy and medicines/diseases are probably the most useful trivia of the bunch. But weird obscure places in the world very few people ever go to or care about? Hard sell, which is why nature documentaries have to put animals in them otherwise people tune out.

Tires ( 轮胎, タイヤ, 타이어)

Today I got all 4 tires on my Honda Accord replaced because....it was time. 8 years, 80,000 miles, those tires had seen a lot, and maybe on some level I could feel it. A lot of things in life happen gradually without us noticing, and it just gradually makes small changes incrementally, like gaslighting or the famous boiling frog story of the temperature of boiling water gradually increasing while the frog is in it leading to negative consequences as eventually the frog will be boiled alive. I couldn't really tell if anything was seriously wrong with the tires. Eventually, I felt like my tires would grind down to such a level that they wouldn't be road worthy, or they would just burst while driving, so I decided to make a change. After getting it done, the driving felt......smoother. The car still reacted to bumps and potholes, of course, but on flat land it felt a little smoother, and on turns there wasn't as much friction. The wheels feel nice, like I'm wearing a new T-shirt that doesn't have the sweat stains or marks from various previous incidents. A lot of facets are like this, incremental changes: shoes getting worn down every time you walk around in them so that the tread wears off and you don't get the traction (this is the most analogous to tires), dust piles up in the home until it becomes a thick layer coating the whole area, battery life on Apple iPhone goes down gradually as Apple tries to get you to buy the newest model by making their older phones run out of battery faster, and the human body obviously: gradually our bodies get older and everything is less tight, we get flabby. Oh and also I have a knot in my back that formed gradually because of bad posture and not sitting up straight until one day it just became a strain no my whole body; now I feel it all the time and can't get out of it. These are all tiny little things that aren't noticeable like bananas turning ripe, but eventually they become glaring problems. Does the boiling frog metaphor work the other way though? Do certain things get incrementally better without us noticing, until one day we've just become unwittingly a huge success? Not as much, because as human beings we're quick to celebrate the happy things in our life that make us feel good, like checking my bank account (hey there's more there now this Friday! Yay!) or winning sports games, there are various scores and numbers to tell us how we are doing, and we pay attention to those like a hawk, never letting them just go on unchecked, so very few things "suprise" us after long periods of neglect. (Hey suddenly I'm married and have 3 kids!) We usually notice all the good things, except maybe the rewards points I get on credit cards and Chipotle purchases. The other day I realized I got had more than a THOUSAND Chipotle points! That must get me something good, right? Nope, 1600 points is needed for an entree, the simplest burrito. Darn. Trivia, I'm hoping, works this way, where one day I just wake up really good not realizing I've mastered all the major things to know in trivia (no one knows everything of course, it's an infinite field of knowledge). Maybe some karma points, like donating blood/platelets eventually builds up to something and we don't even know it? An immunity to chronic diseases later in life? A "free blood transfusion card" for when us blood donors actually need blood to use it when we need it? Not sure that's how it works. No, I think the positive inverse of the boiling frog analogy is probably what I mentioned, the intangible love and trust and goodwill that you "bank" time and time again without noticing you're doing so, until one day you realize you're in a loving relationship with parents, wife, child, or friend. Suddenly I've been friends with someone for 30+ years! I know everything about them. That sort of thing, you know like important stuff.