Tuberculosis (结核病, 결핵)

I often, like most humans, lament and complain about what I don't have (a big car, a big house, a bigger bank account, a more athletic body, the ability to throw a baseball 95 MPH, etc.), but it's important to take a step back and reflect on what I do have, or to put it another way, what bad things I don't have: I don't have tuberculosis. And according to John Green and his latest work "Everything is Tuberculosis," that's definitely something to celebrate. Tuberculosis has been around for centuries and was highlighted in many famous works by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, etc., it's been very present in human life for centuries but doesn't get the top billing of other more lethal and contagious diseases like Ebola, Covid, HIV/AIDs, etc, but it's definitely there and it's definitely deadly. The most common symptom is coughing up blood and having your napkin turn red, which we're all familiar with in movies and other media, and John Green does his usual excellent job in describing all the horrors of it, including how it just decimates families and villages and whole communities of people in Africa, who suffer due to cramped living conditions (where tuberculosis can spread the fastest and most easily) and bad healthcare. I think people in the U.S. are extremely lucky tuberculosis is just not that much of a problem here (although there were some breakouts this summer as a wake-up call), so much so we don't even vaccinate for it. Let's hope that continues and that everything doesn't turn into tuberculosis like John Green's book. I recently heard that humans are still at our infancy about understanding the human body, and there's still so much go to go about understanding diseases, how they interact with the body, how the body tries to heal itself, and how everyone's body is different. So doctors don't have all the answers (just ask my mom who's going through a difficult situation with medical professionals right now), but the answers they do have have made a profound effect (vaccines, surgeries, anesthesia). I still feel like the best way to go through life is all-natural, let the body heal itself and do its thing, don't subject oneself to too many medications and being dependendant on artificial stuff. But to the extent it's needed, do rely on medical help: for childbirth, for example. I think I've become very naive and complacent about diseases: I've never once had a surgery, had to use anesthesia, had any broken limbs/arms, never had to go to a hospital except to visit others. Never had to worry about tuberculosis. It's almost like my parents just wished upon a healthy baby and put all their energy in giving birth to a health kid, and I was the beneficiary of all those well wishes I feel like I have a circle of protection around me (not to say I'm invincible and I like to think I drive cars to maximize safety and make sure I don't test the physical limits of that circle of protection). I think every parent probably wants that for a child and it's one of the No. 1 things that they prioritize (MJ might prioritize being pretty and cute over this), but it's health for me. Just be healthy, be free from disease, be able to live like I have, pain-free. But of course the baby will get sick in the first few years, like all the time, is what I've heard, because they have the immune system......of a baby, it hasn't been tested and it's prone to everything. So I'm anticipating some really bad grossness and being sick a lot....one of the things that has probably kept my relationship with MJ alive is that I don't get sick very often and don't really get her sick, so we're both relatively healthy most of the time (except those Covid bouts everyone had to get over)......that's about to be tested with the arrival of a baby. As long as it's not tuberculosis!

Encyclopedia (百科全书, 百科事典, 백과 사전)

Playing chess. Going camping. Going surfing. Taking a road trip. Going to a baseball game. Going to a music concert. Watching TV. Sleeping all weekend. Reading a book. Going to a wedding. I hear a lot of fun things that other do in this wild wacky world of ours, but of all the activities I've heard friends say they are actively doing, I've never heard anyone say they are busy reading the encyclopedia. I suspect this is partly because of the nerdiness associated with reading dictionaries and books that never really went away after grade school where you just don't want to be outed as the nerd who is in the library reading references books for fear of getting your lunch money stolen or just bullied by other kids in your class, but it also could be that encyclopedias seem boring. They don't have a plot like novels do, they don't have a famous actor or actress on the cover marketing their tell-all memoir, they don't prepare you for any particular test like the LSAT or the GRE or the MCATs. There's really no purpose especially in our internet age of reading physical encyclopedias like the Britannica or the World Book Encyclopeda (my go-to encyclopedia). And yet, I must be a special breed because whenver I go to a new library, I always wonder where their encyclopedias are, and often crack open the A section to check out where all the familiar sections of "Alaska," "atoms," and "aardvarks" are and what they say about them (a lot of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Samuel Adams action in the first few pages of the A's in the encyclopedia, by the way). I often find that these encyclopedias are in near-mint condition because nobdy has read them; it's like cracking open a new book and the pages still kind of stick together, and pages turn crisply with a little "whoosh" sound. I get enjoyment out of taking an adventure into those pages, but also of the content of the encyclopedias: they've really made an effort (probably to attract any readers they can) to put in more pictures, make the entries more reader-friendly, full of stats, quotations, fun facts, etc., so that it's not pages upon pages of full text. Still....reading an encyclpedia front-to-back is pretty hard work, I like the overviews of states with their capitals, populations, landmarks, famous peoples, famous universities, largest cities, etc., but in between are entries that you can only take so much of like random species of trees, plants, bygone technology, books you've never heard of, old medieval instruments, yet another type of antelope native to Africa. One really is incentivized to skip ahead to something that you're interested in. I've just never ever in my life been interested in fashion and clothing, and it's just a bore sometimes reading about all kinds of shoes, fabrics, styles of the 1930s, etc. It doesn't help that each tome is 800 pages or so, depending on it's a meaty letter like "A" or "M" or even if they have to divide certain letters like C (C-Ch is just one tome). It really doesn't help that encyclopedias are characterized as "reference books," so they're for libary use only and can't be checked out. In this day and age, who's going to steal an encyclopedia? I wonder each time I go to the library and have to put the book back for the next time. Luckily, there are encyclopedias on various topics that CAN be checked out like Space encyclopedia, dog encyclopedia (I really like that one, shows a lot of pictures of dogs and gives the illusion that I have one of those dogs, without actually having one). Yup, reading the encyclopedia is difficult, which is why I give props to an author named AJ Jacobs (I've discussed him before) who took on the monumental project of reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover in about 2003-2004. This was before iPhones and just the beginning of the Internet, so people had more uses for encyclopedias back then as a source of knowledge, but still his story inspires me that others have done it before. He didn't even read the read-friendly World Book version, he did the Britannica all-text black and white copy version. Yikes. I honestly don't know if any normal person would do that in today's day and age without some serious monetary incentive now. There's just too much out there. I'm able to go to the library and sit down for a solid hour without checking my phone (and actualy my eyes thank me for letting them read a physical piece of paper instead of a screen, either phone or computer) but it's just too tempting nowadays with a device smarter than any encyclopedia just sitting in your pocket and beeping all the time with new alerts, new information, new communication from friends, there's just too much to do nowadays to read encyclopedias. I wonder how college kids read textbooks, to be honest. But Jacobs's book about reading the encyclopedia is great: he describes trying to use the facts he learned in normal conversation, to no avail; he just sounds kind of weird at parties, he lugs the book around the New York City subway and other inconvenient places to have a 5-pound brick of a book with you at all times, and he discusses important entries he learns about Descartes (liked cross-eyed women), gagaku (Japanese music), all very relatable to an encyclopedia reader: so much human knowledge that is right at our fingertips everyday that we just brush by without a second's thought. Before reading the encyclopedia and getting into trivia (more like general knowledge), I was naive like a babe in the woods. Now after having read the encyclopedia, there's still a world of information I don't know, but I at least know a little about the stuff that I don't know and how much else there is to know. The more you learn, the more you understand how much more there is to learn. In 10 years when all human beings will be programmed with a microchip with all the knowledge in the universe or there's a magic pill that increases your IQ by 100 points, and encyclopedias including digital encyclopedias become obsolete, I'll always look back on those days spent leafing through an encyclopedia and getting endorphin hits each time I learned something new, as "those were the good ol' days."

Caesarean section (剖腹产, 帝王切開, 제왕절개)

What a time to be alive: we have the internet at our fingertips, indoor plumbing, personal showers available at any time, food stocked in neat categories to shop from, almost anything you could ever dream of available upon a click of a button on Amazon, and....Caesarian sections don't require the mother dying. Of all the things you learn about childbirth, one of the many things is how common mothers died during childbirth before modern scientific advances, so to give birth was literally risking your life, and in case of C-sections, it was a death sentence back when it began in the B.C. era: they just cut the mother's stomach, pulled out the baby, and left the mother to die. Pretty disturbing stuff. Nowadays, C-sections are pretty common and come with a very minimal chance of adverse damage and certainly death is not on the table, but it's still a big sacrifice for the mothers as the recovery time is much longer than natural births. And why do they call it Caesarian section? Supposedly Julius Caesar was born from one, but that's not been confirmed, more of an apocrophyl story like Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants. I was born through Caesarian section, not that I remember it happening. I do remember a little bit about my sister being delivered through C-section, and my mom spent 2 days in teh hospital afterwards. The doctor who performed the c-section also made a mistake and made a small incision into my sister's head, of which she had a scar for the first few years of her life, without causing any brain damage or developmental issues luckily (that we know of). Still, it's not the easiest of processes, and intuitively it seems pretty daunting: There's a human being somewhere inside the mother's stomach, and your job is to cut around the baby without touching the baby with the scalpel. Maybe one of the things that we might entrust AI with in the future, the precise cuts. I can barely figure out where the baby is now when I touch MJ's belly, even though MJ is pointing out where the kicks are coming from. I'm just looking at a sea of belly, no indications of any human life anything (life walking on the surface of the moon). And how do you know if the baby is head first or feet first? if the baby is moving around during the C-section? She's moving around a lot now, what if she gets nervous and starts thrashing around because suddenly a hole has opened up to the world? The answer is probably ultrasound and other scientifcally proven techniques, which is why the doctors get paid the big bucks, I guess. Philosophically, that's a pretty significant moment and metaphor for one's entry into this world: The baby is in a dark place in the mother's belly, kind of existing in this world but not yet, kind of a limbo before wherever we all come from and this world, can't see anything, can't hear anything, can't go anywhere, and then when you're ready to join the world, suddenly.......you go through the portal of your mother's belly into the next world, our world. It's really like the movie The Truman Show, once you go through those doors, you can't go back: the world is a wonderful, delightful place but also a dark, dangerous place...apparently we're starting with generation beta now, not even generation alpha, and this new generation of people are going to be growing up in a world of AI, robots, something we could never have imagined......maybe one day they'll come up with something more advanced than C-sections, like the baby will just be teleported out of the woman's body, or some sort of womb-simulated area that babies grow in instead of the mother's womb.... who knows? Although, childbirth seems like one of the only things left that is not totally explained by science, there's an aspect of magic and creating life out of seemingly nothing is one of the few miracles humans can perform. It doesn't make sense, but it happens, and now the C-section part makes a lot of sense scientifcally, but the numbing the pain part and stitching the scar up, that's also miraculous. Hoping for a great c-section!

Loyalty (忠诚, 忠誠心, 충의)

Loyalty- one of the most cherished values in our society, often preached but executed less, it's the idea of staying true to something or someone, or in the business world, it means keeping a customer for life and not having them go to a competitor. A truly sacred idea for big corporations, as loyalty means a steady cash flow, like signing someone up for a subscription or getting them to apply for a credit card. It's why Costco makes so much money every year and will keep having me back as a customer: loyalty, and the promise of $1.50 hot dog combo and $1.99 pizzas. It's also why MJ books Delta almost every time she flies, avoiding all other airlines if she can help it, and why she just scored one of the best things airline loyalty can get you: business class international flight. Ahh the Holy Grail of travel that I have yet to experience. I imagine it's like getting into the VIP club or being the guest of honor, or how you're treated on your wedding day.....except better. The flight attendants raise a curtain for you as you enter, they write a handwritten note to you wishing you the best of luck, the drinks come often and abundantly, the snacks are healthy and desirable. And the best thing of it all.......the ability to lie down and sleep on the plane over a long transocean flight. One day, if I'm feeling really good about myself and I have all my ducks in a row and my big boy pants on, I might book a flight like that for myself. But for now MJ has gotten it, mostly from her undying loyalty towards Delta Airlines. May they keep rewarding her and keep buying Airbus planes, because Boeing planes are the ones that are having some major issues recently. I consider myself loyal in the ways that really matter, like to family and close friends, but in terms of business I am NOT loyal at all. Whatever is convenient at the time, at the location where I am, is good for me. I will take the cheapest flight or cheapest option that I can get at all times (except Spirit and Frontier) and will always give something new a shot, until it screws me. That's why I tried this new airline called Breeze (from the same people that gave us JetBlue) from Huntsville to L.A. recently, because (you guessed it) it was the cheapest option and the most direct option (Delta only had flights back to Atlanta then to L.A., which for anyone who knows geography, that's going backwards east first and then doing a U-turn and going west. I don't like that; I never doubling back like that and will break loyalty to avoid that. Breeze....is totally fine, happy to report. Everything operated as expected, I was offered an exorbitantly expensive $4 for a Spindrift sparking water that I could get at home for a unit price about $0.25, so I refused and just got regular water, which was still $0 (at some point I feel like this might change, and at some point I feel like airlines will start charging tip for their flight attendants, I just have a feeling) but otherwise I was not charged a fee for my "laptop bag" that I brought with me, no surprise charges, the flight took off on time and landed on time, and I even accessed Wifi for $8 to summon some trivia study materials while on the plane. My thing is, I'm not the biggest fan of unpredictability, but taking a chance on something also brings me unexpected joy sometimes that I somehow got a good deal out of it, maybe the gambler's mentality of trying something new and adventuring out into the unknown. When I stop on a long road trip to get gas, I don't really care if it's a Mobile, Chevron, Speedway, 76, Shell, Sheetz, whatever is pumping out unleaded fuel, I will get, preferably the cheapest option available. I am definitely not the type of person corporate executives are targeting when they send out loyalty plans and subscription models; I am very very fickle about what I buy (if anything) and have walked out of line at a Subway before when the line was longer than I wanted it to be (one person). This kind of "whatever works" approach has probably saved me a lot of money over the years and given me a lot of shall we say "different" experiences as a customer (I was once stuck in Durham, NC for the whole night waiting for a Greyhound bus that never came, and I had to book a 5AM flight instead), and it has also made me not ever get close to anything MJ can do with her loyalty points on airlines, I've always been her guest at airline lounges, the riffraff from "Group 6" boarding zone who somehow is with the Silver Medallion Gold Star status that MJ has. I don't need to be loyal to Delta; I just need to be loyal to MJ.

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!