Mayfly (蜉蝣, カゲロウ, 하루살이)

 Jeopardy clue on the last day of 2024 reminded me how quickly 2024 went; it was about the mayfly, which is a famous insect known for being alive for only a few hours (unlike its name which suggests it lives for a month). It's an aquatic insect with relatives like the dragonfly and the damselfly, and it's life is tragically short, but is it that different from humans? In the whole spectrum of the universe our 70 or so years of expected life span might as well be a few hours as it is functionally zero. 2024 definitely hammered that home; I remember distinctly it being 2024 and having to change all my date signatures to 2024 instead of 2023, just barely getting used to it being 2024, filing my taxes a few months after getting all my W-2s, seeing all the Google Year in Review videos of 2023, and then not having to worry about 2024 being over for a few months. But then suddenly......it was over. (although I did get through 104 blog entries, which is a personal high for this blog!) I saw a Facebook friend who posts videos of each year by sharing one second of every day of 2024.....a bunch of baby videos, driving in the car, short clip of playing dodgeball, snow days, etc.... that really hammers home how each day just passes by like a mayfly's life, you get about a few moments that you remember and then the rest passes into memory. 

I ended 2024 by watching Squid Game Season 2 with MJ which is a global sensation, but following the theme of "finding underrated shows that aren't talked about enough," I watched "Man on the Inside" with Ted Danson, Stephanie Beatriz (voice of Mirabel Madrigal in Encanto) but notably a Michael Schur-run show, producer of The Good Place and "How to be Perfect," a book MJ loves and swears by. In addition to all the trivia references and beautiful scenery (Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco), Michael Schur always throws in some wholesome philosophical debates and ideas on life and death, where the Good Place is all about moral decisions but "Man on the Inside" is more just examining the lives of senior citizens at their live-in senior center. It's sad, illuminating, and hilarious at the same time, a stark parallel to that other "end-of-life" examination of Squid Game where players also have only a short amount of time to live but for ddifferent reasons. One of the characters on the show, Calbert played by Stephen McKinley Henderson (almost guaranteed to be a Jeopardy clue at some point) confided how fast his child went from a baby to an adult who was no longer cute and adorable.....that hit home, not only how little time babies are cute and listen to their parents (probably from 2 years old to 10 years old, at which point now they just become terrors and just sit around looking at their phones into oblivion, from what I understand) but also like a mayfly, how quickly we all just grow up and grow old, and eventually end up at the Pacific Living Center, the fictional setting of the show. Pretty soon I'll be ringing in 2026 (maybe after having appeared on Jeopardy, or MJ and I having a baby? Who knows what will happen in 2025, but much like 2024 it's all going happen too quick and feel like the year just went by like a mayfly's life. 

Virtual Reality ( 虚拟现实, 仮想現実, 가상 현실)

 According to some really smart people this world is already a simulation and we are all part of a virtual reality world, but yesterday for my friend's 40th birthday I experienced the closest thing to actually experiencing another virtual reality world. I know technology exists now with the Oculus Rift and Meta Quest virtual reality machines to get your own personal virtual reality simulators, but we tried going into a VR simulator room for the low-low price (not really, but it was for fun) of $29.99 for 30 minutes of simulating an experience of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (starring the Rock DeWayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black, as well as the lesser-known Scottish actress Karen Gillian. We entered as a group of 4 and got strapped in with the necessary equipment (vest and headset) then randomly selected a playable character (I got Kevin Hart, aka Franklin Finbar) and entered the VR room. I was a little apprehensive about starting in case we had to go through obstacles and some sudden drops like a roller coaster, but I guess there are too many liability issues to allow for any physical risks while you're walking around without vision. The virtual reality experience is really realistic, it is really like entering a completely different world and now you've entered another body, like Avatar or the Matrix. Visually and audially, at least. There's music and surround sound built into the headset, and of course the visual is like watching a movie while moving around, and you can turn 360 degrees to see around you, making own decisions and not at the whim of a movie director to explore your surroundings. The other players are also physically the same distance away in VR as in real life, so there were times I bumped into surrounding players if we had to all fit in a small space or all "step on the platform or something. Spots on the "floor" helped us identify where to stand, and soft walls confined us to where we could actually go in the warehouse where the VR took place. But yea, pretty real. "Spiders" flew down from the sky and tickled us (probably some feathers) and we had to brave man-eating crocodiles (felt the wind coming from them) and if we "died" the vest would shock us simulating death. Pretty interesting expereince, and I thought once or twice about removing my headset just to disengage from the VR and see where I actually was, but I oddly didn't want to break the illusion of being in a different world, as the Jumanji world was so engrossing and more fantasitic than our "real world." 

If our "real world" is actually a simulation created by someone to see how humans would react, there are some real complaints we should have about playing with our emotions, heartbreak, grief, sadness, unbearable pain, etc., but one of the worst things about this world has to be lotteries. The illusion of being able to obtain massive wealth and contributing into a system that really rewards only a few winners (sometimes just 1, like the $1.22 billion dollar winner of the Mega Millions Friday night from Northern California) at the expense of thousands, maybe millions of people, willingly participating in decreasing their own wealth to fund one person, pretty much the antithesis of what we want in a fair society, where everyone is more equal and no one becomes drastically wealthier or more power than others, at the expense of others. (I readily admit I fall prey to the lottery conspiracy whenever the prize gets over $800 million or so).  We pretty much have ways of promoting massive wealth inequality already (see uber-billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc. - worth $237 billion or whatever it is based on their companies' stock prices), yet the lottos actively encourage that, and the players follow along because no one says no to a billion dollars (10-digit number). How many people have to suffer for that one person to win though? That's likely the message of Squid Game and its sequel that recently came out, Squid Game 2, the disgusting lengths that people do to win lottos, and really it's actually depicted more acutely with real contestants in "Beast Games," Mr. Beast's competition forcing real people to do crazy things and backstab, be ruthless for the pursuit of money. It's human beings at their worst, the naked pursuit of money and inevitable failure for 99.99% of all those going for it, with the chances for most lotto people functionally 0, yet that dream of winning fueling those 99.99% to continue with dire consequences. Oh, and in April each ticket for MegaMillions is increasing 150% from $2 per ticket to $5. Great, more money being fueled into what essentially is a poor tax, making poor people pay for one person to win (and the lotto system fueling it). Damn the lotteries, this should be a virtual reality, not our reality. 

JOMO

All throughout my twenties, I experienced severe cases of FOMO: Fear of Missing Out, wanting to be at every party, every wedding that I was invited to (not that many), every time friends got together, that I often tried to go to 2 Super Bowl parties at the same time (big mistake) because the friends realize at some point that you're going to another Super Bowl party, or another 30th birthday party, and you just can't be in 2 places at one time, and you have to commit to one or the other. Now in my thirties, though, it's been an opposite feeling: JOMO, or the joy of missing out, which according to Jeopardy and a cursory search of the internet, is actually a real thing: spending Friday and Saturday nights at home with MJ and not worrying about the world passing me by or whatever party is going on that I can't be apart of. With some rare exceptions, I end up being rather content, except if they are real friends who I haven't seen for awhile. Then I make my best effort to go. But JOMO is good for any clubs, bars, or any event that I'm not that comfortable at: lots of nigths "pissing the night away" (Tubthumping by Chumbawumba) that I now relish not having to repeat. MJ and I have gotten good at "missing out" on the big holidays too, just totally ignoring Christmas and Thanksgiving and visting my parents at different times instead of the usual holiday rush. It's great. Instead of putting pressure on making Christmas a bigger deal than it has to be, it's just been 2 days of rest and relaxation for us. The joy is most keenly felt in the wallet, where gifts don't need to be bought, no tickets to go see Taylor Swift, no European vacations with other people, no round of beers at bars to people who I barely know. In fact, our wedding marked a nice border line between my 20's and 30's, but also the FOMO and JOMO phases of life: after our own weddings we realize that life goes on after big parties, real friends will be friends no matter how many times you invite them to parties, going to events isn't always the huge thrill that my brain associates it with. I wonder if this is the case with pregnancy; are human beings all instinctively born with a FOMO chip of wondering what it would be like to be a parent? This would be a necessary part of maintaining the species. Or will it be a situation of JOMO and we have the joy of missing out on pregnancy and having kids even though everyone else seemingly is doing it? We'll find out! 

One other realization I've come to realize more recently: nails grown fast if you don't bite them. Sounds pretty obvious, but I've always had a habit of biting my nails, since probably 13 or 14 years old. It's my nervous tick, my go-to when I feel like I need to focus on something and get through it, kind of like me always rolling paper towels into a ball, it's just something I do as a habit, no utility to it or anything. Recently MJ encouraged me to stop biting as it's damaging my teeth (enamel has worn off the outer layer of my incisors, the 2 front teeth) and given that my dad wears a full set of false teeth now and needs them before eating, I should probably protect my teeth more. I'm Robert Yan and I'm a recovering onychophagist (nail-biter). I've been clean for about 8 weeks now. Will it continue? Hopefully; I have to stop myself sometimes as I instinctively just start biting when a stressful situation arises. Maybe I'm just lucky to not have an addictive personality, but I wonder if it's just a matter of willpower to quit doing something. If it's so easy, everyone should be able to quit drugs, quit alcohol, quit all the toxic elements of one's life, right? I don't think it's that easy and it depends on one's background, one's genes, what one did as a kid to develop an addiction, etc. I never drank coffee or ever got started with anything (except biting nails), so I never even had a taste of it. That's the key, I guess. Once your body is used to something, it can magically adapt to it and pretty soon you feel like that's how it's always been. (Maybe getting pregnant is like that too!) 

DINK

 No, Dink is not one of those new slang words Generation Z is flooding the internet with, like something is "drip" (in fashion) or IYKYK, bussin', low-key, "symp," etc., no DINK is actually a creation of the 1980s, I know, a long long time ago when people were actually born in years that started with "1" not "2" and it's an acronym for Double Income, No Kids, which was inspired by the yuppie culture (young urban professionals) but then accentuated during the Great Recession of 2008/2009 when people couldn't afford kids and just chose to go it without them. And it's increasingly popular now, with terms like "child free" instead of "child less" highlighting the joys of having no kids. MJ and I take the joys of DINK even further because we're DINKNP, no pets neither, no cat, no dog, no obligations. We have spent most of our relationship as low-responsiblity as possible, and even then it feels like life can be overwhelming at times and there are not enough days in the week (I'm writing this on Sunday night before a Monday where I'm going to work on Christmas Christmas Eve). As jealous as I am of seeing my friends' and co-workers' kids and creeping on Facebook, I think quite a few parents are probably jealous of MJ and I and our DINK lifestyle...until we eventually do have kids, of course. 

Some features of being a DINK: 

1.) wake up generally of your own accord, have fixed sleeping schedules. SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT! I've done that all my life with no breaks, so I guess I've been living in luxury. Just the other night I dreamed I was a pitcher for a major league baseball team making my debut in the big leagues. Ah what a night. And I generally wake up refreshed, don't need coffee, sleep is my caffeine. 

2.) I save up a lot of money. I'm not a gambler, I don't have crazy expensive hobbies, I don't get into trouble with lawsuits, I don't have a million relatives I need to buy presents to for Christmas. Money is passed through efficiently from my bank account to a savings or stock account, funneling through of course Middle (Wo)man MJ who sometimes has some needs (not crazy amounts!) but it's not a leaky bucket with lots of different holes, it's just the usual mortgage and tax, HOA, health insurance holes. Out of all those risky behaviors I listed, the biggest hole in the bucket would be the kid bucket because you're supporting a whole nother human being who doesn't bring in any income but instead only soaks up money, so water going through that hole only goes one way. 

3.) I have free time. I complain that I don't, but I do. I still have enough time to watch Jeopardy every time, subscribe to premium subscriptions to "stream my favorite shows," but also READ. Time! is mine to control. 

4.) MJ and I can drop everything and go anywhere in the world quickly. This is probably the best part of DINK, where I know some parents are just resigned to staying at home for the rest 18 years. 

5.) Not forgetting where the kids' stuff is. I forget things all the time and forget to do little tasks during the day, like leaving my phone in my pocket, forgetting the keys to the house, leaving chess sets at chess club, etc. It's like my brain has too many tabs open and I forget to close them all out and leave tabs open (I saw that on a sticker today and thought it's apt for what everyone does nowadays). The problem is, when having kids, you can't just leave the kids in the car, or forget to take them with you when they're needed. They become No. 1, and the keys and mail and phone and extra sweater will be forgetten even more than now. 

These are the things I think about when taking the plunge and preparing for a child... taking the plunge and making huge sacrifices to all 5 key things above......that sounds like a lot. And rationally, why do people do it? From an objective viewpoint it's a pretty low cost-benefit analysis.....high, high risk of personal detriment to yourself in committing to a lifestyle that's irreversible (at least for 18 years or so) as opposed to just continuing this rather luxurious lifestyle of being an adult and enjoying all the good stuff of being adults (my own decisions, financial freedom!) and little of the bad stuff of having to take care of other people. Why do all my friends do it? They're not crazy, right? I guess love makes you do crazy things, and that's the one thing that's missing as a DINK......love from a child, pretty much irreplaceable. It reminds me of one year towards the end of my dodgeball competitive career when I had built towards the UDC (ultimate dodgeball championship) all year, but then got onto an overtime project at a law firm that paid a lot per day, and taking time off to go to dodgeball would have cost me 4-digit figures.....so I missed the first day of the tournament, and I'll always wonder what will be. It seemed like a good decision to take the money at the time, but years later I would give more money than I earned to go back to that time and play that first day, just to find out what would have happened. I think a similar inflection point is nigh for me now: I value my free time, my extra cash, my extra sleep, but I think at the end of my life I might look back to this point and be willing to give up all those extras to see what it would feel like to have a child of my own. That's the downside of being a DINK. 

Malapropism

 I was watching Pop Culture Jeopardy with MJ tonight (I know, big Saturday night plans- but we did watch Love Actually together before that, which was great to reminiscence on, and Amazon Prime actually has the cut-out sex scenes with Martin Freeman) and one of the contestants, on a question about a former governor from Minnesota who also appeared in Predator, answered, "Jesse James" instead of the right answer, Jesse Ventura. Even MJ knew enough that Jesse James was the outlaw (she called it "bang-bang person") from the 1800s and wouldn't belong in a pop culture jeopardy category (unless I guess there was a recent movie or documentary about it, definitely possible). But it's just an example of how normal people have malapropisms, the incorrect use of a word in place of a word that sounds familiar. Everyone has these, even the best Jeopardy contestants fumble with them from time to time, and I can now understand why: The sheer amount of information out there in the world, even just the trivia world of having to know certain things, is so vast that names get confused, certain things just sound the same. For example, Margaret Wise Brown is the author of Goodnight Moon, a famous children's book. But Tina Brown is the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, Daily Beast, etc. But Helen Gurley Brown was the first editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Confused yet? And just to top it off, there's a Rita Mae Brown who was an LGBT activist and writer for her book "Rubyfruit Jungle." These 3 are all expected trivia material for Jeopardy, so it's totally understandable to get them mixed up. 

Our brains (ok, I'll jsut say my brain) makes so many of these mistakes all of the time, and they would have continued to do so until I fixed them. Often in life we just let small things go because they're not important and not worth fretting about. But sometimes it IS good to nitpick details, especially if those details come up over and over again and you're always getting them wrong. I had to correct myself the other day that it's White MEN Can't Jump the Wesley Snipes movie about basketball and Jeopardy, not just "White Man" (there's only one white man character, Woody Harrelson in the movie, to be fair to my memory)... if I don't fix that there, I continue making that mistake forever. Lesson, I guess, is to learn it right the first time, because it takes longer to unlearn a mistake later. How to unlearn a mistake? I've been trying the "say it five times" of rote memorization, but also just write down my mistakes, as hurtful as it is to my pride, especially long words that I know I will have trouble remembering and probably fumbling one of the later syllables. Okeefenokee (swamp in Georgia), for example, or  Okeechobee (lake in Florida). They're like tongue twisters, these facts. 

Common relative of malapropism? Spoonerisms. Switching consonants of back to back words, for example, like jelly beans to belly jeans. That's funny. Often pretty funny when it's said in conversation, which may be why I hadn't tried to actively fix them before. My dad calls avocado a Colorado. 

I think about common errors I make in foreign languages- Chinese? Sure, plenty of words I get wrong with pronunciation that I have to correct myself, or someone else corrects me, Japanese, yup. Often people just brush past them because the listener knows what the speaker is trying to say, so the conversation just moves on unchecked. And yes, in regular conversation, if someone says "I might fade into Bolivia" instead of "I might fade into oblivion," do I know what they mean? Yes, sure, but I like to be precise, and I guess my inner English teacher might feel like correcting them (I do this to MJ plenty of times with stuff like "ours is good" versus "ours are good." I just wince every time someone gets something slightly wrong on an answer, because I know I'm going to make a similar mistake too. 

By the way, Beast Games by Mr. Beast is just horrifically bad and an obvious money grab ahead of Squid Game 2.......but that didn't stop me from making MJ watch 2 episodes last night. Mr. Beast.... weird dude. 

Spirit Airlines

 As chronicled on Jeopardy, Trevor Noah has a bit that he goes back to time and time again in his skits, especially on the Daily Show (back when Trevor Noah hosted the Daily Show and spawned the phrase "Na mean?" mean "You know what I mean?" which MJ and I have adapted in our daily conversation. Good times. Having never flown Spirit Airlines (I know, surprising, given my history of being a tightwad and trying to save as much as I could on any purchases and going with the lowest quality product) but I can just imagine what it would have been like and the type of people on those flights.... pure chaos. So at the end of the Spirit Airlines era (it went public in 2011, about when I started investing, and got all the way up to $85 dollars in 2014, indicating there was some promise the company would become a major player in the low-cost airline industry), and then cratered and is trading at $0.69 per share today. Just another reason not to dabble in airline stocks, despite United, American and Delta all having big stock market years..... the year to year volatility is huge and it's frankly just hard to run an airline, huge overhead, have to pay the pilots, the workers, order the planes.......if there's one industry I wouldn't want to become an owner of, it's airlines. Fun fact: I once owned Jet Blue stock (JBLU), one of my first stock purchases.... and the stock is trading almost exactly the same price as it did in 2010 when I first started investing, while inflation has increased more than 45%. 

It's probably hard for people to have nostalgia about plane trips, but there are some plane rides from my childhood that I felt alive, emboldened, or just had a really good memory. Maybe it's because they used to have full meals on planes that were not necessarily better but different from my parents' cooking, I sometimes craved going on planes to see what food I would get (Chicken or fish was a big decision for me back then!) and looking out the window at the clouds, taking off from the airport, and admiring all the busy-looking adults looking important and business-like (come to realize now that they were just slaving away at their jobs or trying to handle 3 kids on a cross-country flight, no easy task on its own) and boy oh boy, I was so excited to know what the flight movie was! Yup, that's right, back then there was just ONE movie for everyone to see on the plane, and the pilot announced it at the beginning of the flight. Like it or not, that's the one you were stuck with watching, no matter if you were a kid, liked cartoons, rom-coms, or Friends re-runs. Oh but I enjoyed those movies. 

Yesterday also marked my 23rd anniversary of coming to America, landing in America on December 13, 1991 (a George H.W. Bush kid!) Hundreds of flights later, I'm a veteran of planes and am just trying to get through from place to place as quickly as possible, but when I was 4 and a half years ago I was full of wonder, what this plane thing was, why my stomach feels so weird, why we had to switch planes in the middle (changed in either SFO or Vancouver, I forget) and whatever happens, follow my grandpa. My grandpa was as old as my parents are now, that's how the grains of time have shifted. I crave that feeling now, of adventure, youthful exuberance, not knowing what's going to happen next but being excited about the day, not knowing exactly where the plane was headed (somewhere called Chicago? I just knew it wasn't Shanghai where my relatives had sent me off) but satisfied that I had a destination, and that destination would have food and soccer ball chocolate candy. Now I can see my road map to my death, and it has some exciting things on its path but it's not nearly as mysterious and ignorantly blissful as I was on that plane coming to America. I didn't fly on Spirit Airlines; I had spirit on that airline. (I know, bad pun, but I tried). 

Hunger Pains (饥饿的痛苦, 空腹の痛み, 배고픔)

 My body has a weird way of processing hunger; sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night because I didn't eat enough during the day, and my stomach is screaming for the brain to feed it with something; and I give into those hunger pains which are caused by a hormone in the stomach called ghrelin. Ghrelin is everywhere in the middle of the night. But then, the next day after I wake up, the ghrelin levels (they sound a lot like gremlins, maybe they're only active at night!) seem to be always on a steady level, so that even if I eat something, my stomach still feels upset and a faint feeling of hunger pains lingers. It's like an unsatiable beast, no matter how much I eat it will not be tamed! And in the middle of the night I wake up really hungry again with hungry pains, and I have to eat to go back to normal and the cycle continues. All except LAST NIGHT, when I tamed the ghrelin/gremlins and decide to just go back to sleep hungry on the advice of my medical professional (MJ) and it worked! I deceived the gremlins and actually fell asleep without having to further distort my stomach, and sleep won the day! If it was like a Magic School Bus episode of exploring the human body, the melatonin army overpowered the rogue ghremlins and let my body shut off on an empty stomach. Probably the best case scenario; now I just need to for my whole life, which MJ has been doing (trained since birth, raised by wolves, apparently, is how MJ put it). 

Unfortunately other than hunger pains, I dealt with more serious pains on 12/11/2024, a pretty bad day in the history of Robert Yan. On the even of 12-12-2024, no less! Sometimes all the training, practice, hard work, and good vibes come together to create a magical day where it all pays off, but some days it's like a House of Cards where everything goes wrong and everything comes tumbling down (House of Cards, good first season, I just couldn't finish it knowing what eventually would happen to Peter Rousseau and Zoe Barnes and what Frank Underwood would do to them. Sad stuff, even for a fictional show). Yesterday was a House of Cards day. I got stuck out in the rain, my sock got wet, I woke up early to catch the train but missed it because I forgot where I put my cell phone and spent a crucial 3 minutes frantically scrambling around looking for it, by which time the train had left and I was resigned to take the next train. This after having a ghrelin-induced bad sleep the night before. But all minor compared to learning that MJ and I will not be having a baby as a result of our latest attempt. Doesn't mean we have stopped trying, but this was our to-date best shot at it with the best odds of success, and it still didn't happen for us. This time I had maybe the worst thing, the thing with feathers (Emily Dickinson), hope. The tough thing with trying to get pregnant is that you get weeks of lead-up, of thinking maybe this is the time (I've been secretly hoping to replace my grandpa's life force with a new life force after he passed away 3 years ago in some sort of weird circle-of-life scenario) we finally succeed, and it only takes about 5 seconds to get the bad news that it's not happening. I guess all bad news is sudden, there's no leadup, no one wants to prolong the bad news or have any build-up, unless it's something chronic like cancer that increasingly gets worse. No, the bad news comes pretty quick and just totally tears down everything that I'd been privately hoping for (buying a new house, picking out name) but rationally guarding our hearts, as they call it. It's also tough because I realize that MJ is going through her 5 stages of grief, going through bargaining stage ("I wish you had done something about this"), anger, depression, etc., whereas I have to put on a brave face because she deserves her time to grieve as she's putting her body on the line and in some sense going through it for me, but I also have no time to grieve, to let the 5 stages of grief play out, I just have to be strong and take it each time (and we've done this more than a few times now) and each time a little bit of me is heartbroken, like that Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now" from "Love Actually..." I've looked at pregnancy from both sides now, and I don't know how much disappointment and thinking I might be a father soon to not becoming one to maybe never becoming one I can take. Maybe it's melodramatic, but I am losing hope and losing confidence, and maybe some cosmic force is telling me parenthood is not right for us. In the middle of my jog today I just yelled out in the middle of the street (hopefully nearby people didn't hear me!) some curse words for the situation, a real breakdown. I don't think I've failed, I definitely don't think MJ has failed because she's had to put her body on the line for us this whole time and has bravely done things I might not have been able to do, it's just this feeling of being left behind, of being exactly where we were 3 years ago, coupled with a lot of wallowing in self-pity. It's not as physically painful as hunger pains, the pregnancy pains have zero physical pain (for me, MJ might feel some) but a lot of psychological pain. I don't wish it on anybody.