今天是妈妈的生日，我想分享很多次妈妈送我礼物的故事。
My parents recently bought a Lexus SUV, possibly accomplishing their lifelong dream of purchasing a luxury vehicle. They were going for a Tesla for its electric abilities and suddenly more ample supply due to half the country boycotting Elon Musk, but the Lexus likely represents something my mom has always wanted as a status of making it in the world, coming as an immigrant after age 30 to a new land WITHOUT the aid of Internet and without much money to finally achieving that oh-so-elusive American dream, especially with her health not guaranteed, time to enjoy. I personally have a strong relationship with my Honda Accord, purchased 11.5 years ago, before I started my current vocation; before learning Japanese, before getting into trivia, before having even met MJ; I've had a longer relationship with this car than my wife. I often tell people that a car is just a machine to get from one place to another, which is true, but I've now developed an attachment this car, partly due to having gone so many places with it and so many adventures. I've lived in so many apartments, condos, my parents' house, and hotels over the years, so much that I view each place as a temporary location, but my 2013 Honda Accord? That's a permanent lodging situation when I need to drive. I might still be traumatized from the last car I inherited from my parents that I donated to Cars for Kids: one day the donation center just came with their tow truck and took the car, and I never saw it again, after taking out all the CD's and other personal belongings out of it like I was cleaning out my desk at my old workplace. One day I will have to do the same to my Honda Accord, but I just hope it won't be such an unceremonius goodbye with it being brusquely taken away from me. I guess I understand why so many Americans love their cars more than their family now.
Also, I'd try not to spend more than $50,000 for a car.....for a depreciating asset.
Today I played chess for the first time in a live tournament since high school......I felt the nervousness again, the adrenaline rush when the clock was ticking down towards the end, where I had to make a move or else, the sound of pieces on other boards and players hitting their clocks after making a move. It all sounded so familar...this must be what retired players miss about getting on the field, the competitive drive. Also...the incentive to get off your phone. Today was probably the first day in years I stayed off my phone for an extended period of time. Nowadays with everything digitial, basically everything on your phone, it never leaves my hand or my pocket. To put be forced to put the phone down and do something I like better than being on the phone was worth the $60 entry fee. It's fitting that tonight was Oscar night because I identify with the sediment Sean Baker, director of "Anora," said after winning the award for Best Director, which was basically "support local theaters." Theaters are where people can actually become totally immersed in a movie not only because of the huge screen and surround sound effects but also.....you have to put your phone away or get scolded/shamed. Watching a movie and slipping in that world feels a lot like sitting down at a chess board and playing for an hour, hour and a half. I miss the single-minded devotion in high school of winning the match right here, right now, staying in the moment, no worries about anything else in the world, just locked in the zone right now, which is almost impossible in our multi-tasking world. Also, I love the competitive fire, whether it was dodgeball or chess or playing basketball at the college fitness center, I've always gotten a rush from being in any competition, and I've suppressed it for so long that when it does come out, the thrill is real. Wooooooooo!!!!!!!!
It's Oscars weekend, and most of the attention will be focused on the Red Carpet, the major categories like Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress, and for the casual viewer, maybe expecting some drama like announcing the wrong winner LaLa Land instead of Moonlight? or maybe the Slap Heard Around the World Will Smith on Chris Rock? But one category I've only just started paying attention to was Best Original Song, which looking at its history has yielded quite a few memorable tunes. The one that I wandered into was "As Time Goes By" featured in the iconic movie "Casablanca," which I've only ever seen once but gets referenced in Jeopardy plenty of times down to where Laszlo and Ilsa are flying to at the end of the movie (Portugal), but I still remember Ilsa asking Sam (Dooley Wilson) to "Play it again, Sam" asking fro "As Time Goes By." You must remember this, A kiss is just a kiss......
And that's just No. 2 on the all-time list of AFI's list of best songs ever! No. 1 is hard to beat, "(Somewhere) Over the Rainbow" sung by Judy Garland in The Sound of Music. The top 10 list is probably hard to beat ever, just from the timeless quality and sheer number of people who know those tones and get exposed to them from a young age, like Pinocchio's "When you Wish Upon a Star" is in almost every Disney song collage as their iconic highlight music, Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees (from Saturday Night Fever) has common usage like being used as the beat for performing CPR, those aren't going away. Also, MJ has this odd fascination for the song "Chim Chim Cher-ee" from Mary Poppins, singing it whenever it pops up in something we're watching or even when we're not watching anything, just singing it with wild unexplained exuberance.
One song that might push into history's lore might be Billie Eilish's "What Was I Made for" from the Barbie Movie, just because of how pervasive the Barbie movie was but the message of the song about why human beings are on Earth and if we're all just dolls in some Barbie world. I definitely had that song playing once per day for several weeks, capped off by hearing it being played in Mexico at a bar, attesting to the power of song but also the power of Barbie. Some years the Best Song is very forgettable and not even the most famous song in the movie (Naatu Naatu in 2022 in Encanto, over "We don't talk about Bruno?" but "Shallow" in 2018 with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper still persists today in Youtube commercials and various montages, and on the negative side some songs have just become earworms destined to play on a loop like the Bad Place described in "A Good Place." I'm talking about "Let it Go," sung very well by Idina Menzel in Frozen, but nonstop, to the point of asking if that song can just let our eardrums go.
So yes, I will be paying attention to who wins the Academy Awards this year (a lot of buzz about the Brutalist and its brutal 3 hours 37 minute run time, with intermissions in between) as well as Emilia Perez, but add one other category I'm looking forward to: Best Original Song, because "As Time Goes By," there are more and more songs that enter the cannon that might pop up on Jeopardy one day that I will undoubtedly have trouble remembering.
The Minute Waltz, aka Opus 64 No.1, is by Frederic Chopin, a very recognizable tune that lasts a little more than a minute and baffled me when I plugged into Youtube and watched the version where someone's hands are actually playing the notes on a piano and showing how many keys needed to be played at the same time and how much both hands are doing at the same time. I used to play violin and prided myself on getting through some tough music with all fingers moving around the fingerboard at a dizzing amount of speed, but that was just ONE hand, the other hand was just in charge of going up and down, up and down. The level of 2-hand coordination by piano players is pretty impressive; I barely am able to play the 2-hand version of "Rock Paper Scissors, Minus One" shown on the past season of Squid Game, where each player throws out both hands and then has to take back one of them. All my hands are trained to do is put out 2 versions of the same item, either 2 rocks, 2 scissors, or 2 papers. It was never programmed to put out 2 different items in combination, there's like a mental block preventing me from doing so that I have to re-wire my brain to convince it that it's OK to have each hand do different things (they're so used to doing the same action at the same time). I imagine that would be a huge problem for me playing piano at this stage of my life, although I do like the elegance and clean dulcet sounds of a piano. Even at my peak violin skill level, I could always sense some scratching, some notes being off slightly, violin is just an imperfect instrument for an imperfect person like me. Piano creates some all time classics like "Claire de Lune" by Debussy, "Gynmnopedie" by Erik Satie, Bach's "Goldberg Variations," not to mention modern day classics like the whole "City of Stars" soundtrack and Michelle Branch's "One Thousand Miles." And if MJ and I have a child, I'd nudge him/her towards piano; violin just has a high learning curve and the first few years are going to sound a lot like cat scratch. (Not cat scratch fever, which is an actual bacterial disease transmitted by cats.
We'll never know exactly what happened in late August 2021 deep in Yellowstone National park between Gabby Petitto and Brian Laundrie, but the latest Netflix documentary gives a pretty good idea, even using AI to generate what might have been Gabby's last few hours before Brian (he claims in his suicide note that he didn't) strangled her to death. The whole story has been denounced as an example of "missing white women syndrome" in that the American populace only wants to hear about stories about missing white women and ignores the hundres and thousands of cases of women missing who are of other races, which to an extent is true, especially for an attractive young white woman like Gabby Petitto, but I'd argue that it was more of the special circumstances of her disappearance that really drew natinoal attention (Britney Griner's case of being detained in Moscow is one example I'd cite of not a non-white woman "missing" but at least getting constant attention for her to be brought home). I think it was the video in Moab, Utah of Gabby and Brian being questioned by police officers that really got everyone's attention. In previous generations, that video would not have made it to everyone's media feeds, the video might not have been available by the police, and it wouldn't have been available on-demand for anyone to watch it on video. As of today there are now 16 million views of that video, and I understand why, especially looking backwards: we're all looking for signs of abuse, that Brian gave away his evil intentions, that Gabby was silently pleading for help, and we've all seen doomed relationships before and want to see one that ultimately failed in the worst way possible. Sadly, I don't see that in the video, and I personally think the police handled the situation correctly.......the fact that they're blamed afterwards for what happened is, to me, confirmation bias and hindsight bias for knowing exactly what would happen afterwards. The problem with relatinoships is you never know who has the capability to kill or what someone will do in the heat of the situation......most people get through it without violence. Gabby was already seeing signs of it with Brian and had already reached out to other people to maybe help her if she needed it, but things escalated way too quickly from loving each other unconditionally to an act of violence so horrible she must have not seen coming despite knowing the guy for over a year, much more than the police could judge from that one interaction. Gabby's case is a cautionary tale, unfortunately, for many women: even if you are sure that the man you are with is safe and the one to be with, just know that life has twists and turns. Protect yourself at all times and be OK to walk away.
Alarm fatigue is not exactly the right word for what I'm trying to describe: We need a new word for the oversaturation of everything being a crisis and everything being of critical importance, which is particularly pervasive in today's world of news alerts and instant information. I've heard "fearmongering" and "news fatigue," but there's no exact term for when everything is sensationalized to be the end of the world or of pressing need to know. This is partly due to news being a business now and needing more eyeballs, and nothing gets more eyeballs than screaming news alerts in bold and in red, begging the reader to clickand care about the issue. It's also prevalent in American Red Cross donation solicitations, as I constantly get emails saying platelets are "critically low," there's a "critical shortage," as if the reason it's low is because I haven't donated, or if I donate there won't still be a shortage. News Flash: there will always be a critical need for platelets, because their shelf life is just 5 days, so you can get all the platelets you want right now, but in 5 days you'll still need a fresh round of platelets. I don't think the messaging is effective: it's like the Boy who cried wolf, an old parable about not exaggerating or lying about danger: you do it too many times, and nobody believes it anymore. (In this case, even if it's true that there is a shortage), people just lose interest.
It's the same thing with the news. My anxiety levels on a daily basis: high in the morning when I wake up to log in to my computer to start working, get into the flow of things, lower stress level during lunch, pick back up in the afternoon when I want to finish all the work and doing check-in calls when I realize I have to present something or speak on something, and drop much lower after the day is done, to zero or negative when I'm running and destressing, and then suddenly........BOOM there's a breaking alert on a news item, and the president has tweeted something, and it's going to be World War III, or we are going to be a dictatorship soon, or a fascist country, or on the other side there's a new trans controversy, or Nancy Pelosi sold her shares of Apple and Nvidia stock so what does that mean for the stock market, to the Eagles won the Super Bowl which the previous 5 times they did that, the stock market tanked massively later that year...... It's just too much, and it's all presented in this manipulative, emotionally controlling way to get your attention to play on your emotion. Certain words are triggers that the news and algorithms know how to trigger your inner fears, setting off some sort of internal alarm. (For blood donations it's the idea that patients won't be able to get the platelets they need, their surgeries need to be be postponed or cancelled, and I admit it works). Part of the reason I oppose Donald Trump becoming president again is not even that much about his politics, although there are some problematic areas, and it's not the litany of issues any Trump critic can rattle off from the top of one's head....no, it's the fact that him just being in the Presidency creates so much anxeity and alarm in everyone's minds, on both sides of the aisle, the liberals hate him and criticize his every move (sometimes with reason, sometimes somewhat exaggerated) and the conservates are busy defending and applauding his every move and trying to "own the liberals;" it just raises the temperature to a temp much out of my comfort though (even more than the 77 degrees MJ keeps our home at, a little high for me but OK in the winter) and feeling like a constant alarm going off at all times. You ever live in a building or work at a school or office of some kind where the fire alarm goes off constantly? It's so annoying. You can't get back to work, you're constantly distracted, the alarm is just constantly in your ear and your mind you can't even think. That's what news and information transfer is like now. And even when the alarm stops momentarily, before the next one starts, you can hear the reverberations of those alarms in your mind, like your body has adjusted to that sound and can't unhear it. That's also how I feel about the alarmist news now. I'm tired. I'm fatigued. I'm wait for it........"newstired?"
All my life I've been trying to get on TV, but why? Is it just the very human desire for attention, to show the world how great I am, because getting on TV somehow represents that "I made it" in the world, so I can share on my Facebook and broadcast that I will be appearing on a game show and to see how well I do!!! ( I personally feel like people secretly hate this, even if it's their friends, because we're all jealous of other people's successes, so we have to show up to support them but quietly seethe with rage). Yes, I do have some impulses like these, but recently I've theorized that it's a lot like the song "Cool Kids" by Echosmith, a great song that sums up essentially my whole life up to college and even now applies: "I wish that I could be like the cool kids, 'cause all the cool kids they seem to fit in...." this refrain repeats like 10 times in that song which usually is the sure sign of an earworm, but for me it fits, the song came out in a really formative time for me (2013), maybe because it's not that often played, every time I hear it resonates. I've always wanted to be cool but never got to experience it. I've always walked around with my head down (mainly cuz I was ashamed of my acne as a kid), not walking straight, always just sticking out. Always last to get the new games, the new technology, know the latest gossip, never wearing the right fashion......and it's carried over to adult life. In adult society I'm a nobody, just a passenger on the train, a number on a screen, a customer in line to check out. Nobody cares what I do, no one wants to "fit in" with me. Maybe, just maybe, if I do something cool, people will admire me and I get to be the cool kid for once. I think that's what motivated me as a camp counselor way back in the day; the kids looked up to me because they didn't know better, they're kids and any person older than them seemed cool. But I was cool to them; when I said something they paid attention, actually wanted to hear. I "fit in."
Is the 1986 movie "Stand By Me" one of the best movies ever? Jeopardy sure incorporates it as a clue often enough, mainly because it's also the name of a song by Ben E. King, which also is played in the movie, but it's also basically an autobiography of Stephen King's younger years, apparently King got emotional after watching Rob Reiner's rendition of King's story "The Body" because it was so real. The movie's only 85 movies long, which is a good start because I just can't sit through Oppenheimer's 3 hours again no matter how good it is, it's got a young kids cast who later went on to bigger things (Wil Wheaton, Jerry O'Connell who does NOT look handsome as he does in Jerry Maguire, and sadly River Phoenix) and nothing really happens plot wise.....it's a very basic "4 buddies go on an adventure" plot line that is probably as old as stories, (The whole Hangover and Harold & Kumar movie franchises are based on it, just to name a couple), and no big plot twists, no CGI, no love stories....just spending 85 minutes with representations of your 12-year-old buddies again, which some argue is the most valuable thing to have, and the most wonderful time of life: young, free, naive, your whole world in front of you, everything is new about the world, and time doesn't move so gosh darn fast). It's set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Oregon, but it might as well be generic Smallville, USA, or suburb like I grew up in, Darien, IL, or anywhere boys grow up.....we all go through that period of growth and making friends and sharing bonds. Not all of us have to outrun a train on a bridge or find a dead body to accomplish that bonding, but we've all experienced what it's like to be 12 years old. "I never had any friends like I did when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" That is the iconic line of the movie, and should be one of the top movie quotes ever, replacing such drivel as "You had me at hello" or "Say hello to my little friend." I get it, the quote's a little long, but the idea is gold: I've had many friendships come and go over my adult life, and I don't even talk to some of my close friends when I was 12 years old anymore (much like the movie), but those memories are the best. Back then I didn't need me to be a cool kid or fit in.... I just needed my friends. Timeless movie.
Of all the fees, assessments, charges, penalties, taxes, and other little financial ticks that one has to deal with just to get through life, there's this concept of underpayment of estimated tax that I was sent by the comptroller of the state today. Today, February 10, in the middle of tax season, I got sent a nice letter that came in a pink slip (conjuring up bad thoughts right way) for the previous year's assessment, that I need to pay interest for money that I never even had, that was theoretically "theirs" by virtue of taxing me a certain amount, and because THEY didn't withhold enough money from money I made, I need to pay interest on it because technically I'm holding on to the state's money (like I'm manically setting fires around the world and living my best life with this extra money). It's just diabolical logic for the state to make more money, and the more I think about it the more I get upset, as well as subscribe to the theory that organized governments are just organized crime/ gangs but legalized. The whole concept of a sales tax is, when I buy something that I need, the state gets a cut of that purchase. Why? What is that sales tax being used for? I get being taxed for income coming to me so the govenrment can take a cut of it off the top, but sales tax is taking money that's flowing out, I'm not getting any of that.
I've really looked hard at living in states with no income tax, and I've narrowed it down to a few states that MJ would find (barely) acceptable and that I can, you know, find a job in: Texas and Washington state. Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota- yea I get why there's no state tax there. If you think about it from the baseline of starting with no state tax, then each year I live in California and/or other states, I'm paying upwards of 5 digits on tax, just free money I deliver to the state government. Am I really getting compensated for that money through public services? Yes, highways, but they're always crowded. Yes, DMV but they're always mean to me. Yes, fire department but the fires showed public disasters can wipe out your home ASAP.
The concept of interest bugs me too, just the idea of the amount I owe ticking up like a clock each time a new hour strikes makes me lose sleep. It makes my stress levels go up, makes my blood pressure go up just thinking about owing money, kind of like Mr. Beast's challenges where the money count goes up incremenetly. I do NOT want to owe any money to anybody, a lesson American don't really understand otherwise credit cards wouldn't be able to charge an exorbitant TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT INTEREST RATE! Even my current mortgage that I got at the rock-bottom low rates of 2021 right after the pandemic when everything was depressed, I'm still fretting every month about paying that evil line that says "interest" and not "escrow" or "principal." At least I can justify having the 2021 interest rate because it's lower than what I can get through dividends or savings accounts (I get taxed on those by the way), but now with the federal mortgage rates on a 30-year mortgage at 6.833%, not an all-time high but definitely high considering the last decade, and about the rate my first student loan was charged at for law school, I'm not feeling on aking on more debt.
Who created interest? Apparently even ancient civilizations had this concept of interest, so human beings have devised ways to screw other people for thousands of years; it's nothing new. Just like the ancients, if anything, I want OTHER people to be paying ME interest...... which is what the bank (and Robin Hood and other financial institutions do), but of course they're taking your money and ledning it out at a larger interest rate to other people. It's all just a sick game in a world revolving around money. I really feel bad for the people who earn a lot less than I, who have just one stream of income, but so many greedy hands coming to pick at it through interest and other organized means. So I declare interest to be........one of the worst inventions of mankind.
