DYFI

 TIL I learned about "DYFI," or a commonly asked phrase in California apparently that I was never privy to: "Did you feel it?" after earthquakes were reported. Either I got extremely lucky, or I just have very low sensitivity for sensing the ground beneath me shaking. I've never felt an earthquake, nor have I ever expereinced a tornado, a fire, or any other natural disaster that they trained us for in school; I guess I'm just a blessed person. There was even an earthquake inside Dodger Stadium one time, all the baseball players felt it, and I didn't feel it. I've never been part of a hurricane evacuation, or blizzard. Not that I'm asking for it, but if you lived my life you'd think the Earth was perfectly fine, nothing out of the usual or lifethreatening happening, ever. 

Hurricane season in America is apparently August- October, and this year is especially active with super-hurricanes Helene and Milton. Hurricanes are rated from Category 1 to Category 5 (5 being the strongest) on the Saffir-Simpson scale. There was talk of adding a "Category 6" hurricane due to the severity of Milton that just passed. MJ and I have only been on the residual end of hurricanes, but even hundreds of miles away, you can feel the rain and thunderstorm and the power of the weather. The weather taketh, and the weather giveth away. My parents are now in Maine during fall leaves season catching the beautiful orange and red of Acadian National park and all the foliage changing colors and lobsters and lighthouses, a nice peaceful trip for my mom who's been battling cancer all this year and last year. 

The last week or so I've been forced to put my phone away for work, and I realized how much of a load off it is, the days just feel completely different, my eyes feel different because they're not as strained looking at a rectangular screen in my hand all day, my ears feel different because they're not listening to incessant political ads and cell phone games or learning academies guaranteed to increase my score on the SATs (what??? why am I getting those ads 20 years too late?) and most importantly, my mind feels different, like I don't wander off and think about "who is fighting at the next UFC event?" every few seconds which leads to more inquires which branches off into more inquires, all of which are answered by using my phone to get the answers. It's no way to live life, just sitting at home every day on the phone. I imagine it's similar to what opium users in China did, never even leaving home anywhere due to everything they ever wanted being right around them at home, just living off of them and depending on them. I realized for the last few months slowly but surely I had been increasing my usage of the phone, my screen time was going up, and I was being less productive in other endeavors (like studying trivia, a better use of time, or studying languages) because I was so engaged with the phone. It's a silent time-killer.The downside of course is that I don't get to see all those trending hashtags like "DYFI" (Did you feel it) about in-the-moment stories like earthquakes, but the upside is, I don't really care and don't really need to care anyway. If I felt it I felt it, and if I felt the middle of it, I would be dead. I don't need to feel it. 

"Manic Monday" (躁狂星期一, マニックマンデー, 조증의 월요일)

 "Just another Manic Monday...." is an earworm that I've heard for many years now from the song "Manic Monday by the Bangles (from the duclet tones of Susanna Hoffs!) but I learned from Friday's Jeopardy episode (I bragged to MJ that it was a Bobby episode- meaning if I was on the show, I would have won the game because I knew FJ and all 3 Daily doubles- but who knows how I would have performed on stage with stage fright, I know it's probabaly easier at home) that the song I know and love was actually written by Prince, yes the artist known as Prince but full name Prince Nelson Rogers from Minnesota who wrote songs that became hits not only for himself but for other bands, like "Nothing Compares 2 U" for Sinead O'Connor, and "Stand Back" for Stevie Nicks.... he has quite the influence on other bands and singers, enouh hits that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had a question with 4 possible choices of songs that were originally written by Prince... all seemed plausible. 

"Manic Monday" was a song about work on a Monday morning and wishing it was still a Sunday, lamenting the rat race lifestyle that a lot of everyday workers have....I haven't had that for awhile. Sure, like most people Monday is the return to the work week after the weekend, but I don't really feel the physical pressure of Monday, as I roll out of bed like every other day and have no heart pressure-raising bus or train to catch or need to be out the door by a certain time. This week, though, I gave myself a little stress test: commuting to work on a Thursday, by (gulp) train. Unlike the private confines of your own car, a train exposes you to the masses of humanity, to hundreds of others within 100 square feet of you all sharing the same space, breathing the same air..... some germaphobes swear they won't do it, some commuters swear by it. Me personally I can do without it, knowing how many people have sat in the seat I have, or that someone in my vicinity will suddenly open up a box of fried chicken and start eating while everyone else in the car has to smell the fried chicken while NOT being able to eat it, or someone will talk loudly on the phone about their root canal operation last night or what they thought of their dentist, or just general loud music, or people putting their feet in the aisle, all things that have happened to me. It's a crazy world, full of different variables, stressors, catalysts for anxiety, one could even call it.........manic. And don't get me started on the subway! I can't believe I spent a whole spring/summer in NYC commuting using the subway, and why are there always people who rush to get into the train, only to stop right at the doorway so they can be near it, but then everyone else trying to get on have to get around them to get into the middle. You really get to see some of the ills and shortcomings of people on a subway. 

The other "manic" nature of it is the time.....getting to work exactly on time, now that I've been able to spend 4 years without having to do so, seems like an impossible task bordering on trying to land an airplane onto a helipad during a thunderstorm with high winds.....how do people do it? I don't even know if I'm going to wake up at a certain time, even with an alarm I might sleep through it or ignore it, or take a bunch of time going to the bathroom, getting something to eat......trying to project when you're going to get into the door of your office from where you are in the morning when you get up (before you get dressed, get ready to leave the front door) is so difficult, especially knowing EVERYONE IN THE WORLD is also doing that same thing on Monday morning, so trains, buses, roads for vehicles, everything is crowded. For someone like me who values every second and every minute and tries not to waste any time, it's way too manic, way too unpredictable, raises my blood pressure way too high. So yea, Google and Amazon employees plus all the tech companies trying to get their employees into the office, you better negotatie all the perks you can, more than just free food, maybe parking validations, gyms at the office site, good coffee machine (MJ would love that) before committing to go to the office....before you settle for just another Manic Monday! 

The Overstory

 The Overstory, besides being a catchy title punning on a literary work and the top layer of a forest, is one of the few contemporary novels that Jeopardy contestants have to name the title, whereas other clues usually gave the name of the novel and ask for the author, or some other iteration, but The Overstory is its own level of importance, having won the Pulitzer Prize for author Richard Powers in 2018 and telling a powerstory about preservation of trees and the environment. The story is well-adapted for a movie already already with various story lines and character arcs including a paraplegic Indian computer coding mastermind (think maybe Karl Penn or Dev Patel) with a war veteran (think like Jake Gyllenhaal or Mark Wahlberg or something) with disavowed academic who is just on her own in the wilderness (think Reese Witherspoon) and a loving couple who are unable to conceive a baby but put their efforts instead into the environment (think any iteration of Ryan Gosling- Emma Stone types). I'm not a good writer, but I'm a decent reader, and even an unpolished boor like myself can discern what is exquisite writng with the prose and quality of plot, although not as much dialogue as I would like liked (remember I am a big stickler for dialogue in stories), but the trees and urgency of the global environmental crisis and deforestation drives the plot and gives plenty of impetus for the reader to keep going, as well as plenty of literary references to classic works (Powers is a writer, after all, and makes plenty of references through his characters reading certain books in their storyline like Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche). I also like that Powers probalby wrote from his own experiences, as he lives in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains according to the author bio flap, adhering to one of the earliest tips for writing I ever got: "write what you know." The energy and knowledge of the topic shines through in specific situations, not just about environmentalist tree huggers and geographical descriptions of the Pacific Northwest/ Santa Cruz Mountains near San Francisco but even in just the short one-page summary of the couple going through infertility problems and the pain and agony that couples face trying to decide whether they should continue trying to have a genetic baby or "settle" for adoption (the book characters ponder whether to move to Russia or China where there are ample babies who need parents). 

I also like reading about real (as real as characters in a novel can be) people with real problem, instead of all the narratives and social media narratives we are fed that provide a warped sense of the world nowadays. One can easily be manipulated just staying at home and being fed versions of the world through a screen without ever actually talking to real people anymore (especially with the 2024 US election just a month away now- gulp). I almost looked forward to jury duty this past Monday at my local courthouse, just to see what normal people look like. Instead of a self-selecting population of people I usually run into like at Costco (lots of Indian and Chinese/Korean Americans looking for good deals) or the crowd at Mom's (people taking their diet seriously with fresh veggies and usually vegans), jury duty is just a random group of people who live in the city who are U.S. citizens and have an address on file with the DMV. That's pretty much everybody over the age of 18 (and under the age of 70 for my particular county, it turns out who are exempt from jury duty). And the mix of people was about as ecletic as you could get: not supermodels, not social media influencers, not people whose stories have been curated by the media to get the type of spin that they want, just normal people living their lives, all a little irritated at having to report to jury duty at 8:00AM on a Monday morning (although the $30 in jury pay for the day might alleviate those compliants just a tad) A good portion of people were overweight, a big tell that we're not operating in TV land anymore, this is what America is now, and people reading books, waiting for instructions from a government entity. This is not "normal" in America now; people don't wait and people don't wait for instructions. So as much as I dislike jury duty as a concept and think it's a waste of time for a group of normal citizens to determine the guilt of a random person's incident, jury duty nowadays might be one of the only ways to get people like me to experience a gathering of real people, to be amongst my fellow citizens. And I guess the jury population doesn't include homeless people, so I'm not REALLY getting into certain areas of the population, but this level of working class, middle class, feel like real people to me. I don't care about the problems of the elite or the celebrity class or the manufactured problems of those who don't necessarily deserve all that attention; I care about those in the working class who are ignored and not heard from, like me. I want to hear their "overstory." 

Jarlsberg Cheese (贾士伯格奶酪, ヤールスバーグチーズ, Jarlsberg 치즈)

 I'm slowly realizing that we have too much variety in America. There's just too much of everything: too many types of cars, too many Netflix TV shows to choose from, too many blogs to read, too many podcasts to listen to, too many types of alcohol to drink, too much everything. This isn't just a problem for trivia nerds like me because it expands the amount of information that we need to know, but it also is just too much for the consumer to handle. It's too hard to evne know what to pick. There's ESPECIALLY too many cheeses in the world: Jarlsberg cheese, the cheese of Norway, is something I'd never even heard of, much less experienced, before watching Jeopardy. Then there's Roquefort (KING of cheeses, as if that's a source of pride), Brie, Edam, Gouda, American, Swiss chess, Camembert, feta, Parmesan, ricotta, colby, cottage, and those are just the ones I'm vaguely aware of, I'm sure there's hundreds more. And none of them will be consumed in our family because MJ's vegan (she only eats vegan cheese) and I think all cheeses are pretty similar, and don't add much different from one another. And they're not that good for you. Also Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures don't really have cheese in their diet, so I didn't grow up knowing anything about cheeses, didn't have pizza, didn't have Mac & Cheese, so I didn't have to make that awkward choice when the Subway guy asks you, "what kind of cheese on your sandwich?" and out of embarrassment just say "American" because that's the only one I know. America also allows way too many chemicals: The FDA allows food manufacturers to use more than a thousnad different chemicals to manufacture their food, some of which are banned in other countries. Kellogg's makes their cereal for Americans differently than the ones they make for Canadians' different ingredients. STOP eating all these exotic foods and desserts and treats and things. Restaurant foods are yummy BECAUSE they put all these extra chemicals in there on top of butter, mayo, and all kinds of stuff you don't think about because you're just admiring the taste. Stick to a strict diet that you know is healthy; that's the real choice to make. 

There's way too many types of cars; I think there should just be 3 selectinos of cars in each class of cars: 3 types of sedans (Toyota, Honda, and GM each get one), 3 coupes, 3 pickup trucks, 3 SUVs, 3 minivans. That's it! More than that is just promoting big business and too much for consumers to handle. 

There are too many TV shows! Not even counting the Youtube channels, there are at least 8 streaming sites with various arrangments of movies, packages, bundles, premium plans, etc. This is like the 3rd time I'm mentioning Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 4 posts, but the reason that show got such good ratings is because everyone watched the same shows, everyone could talk about it. I could ask in a random room "anyone see who got voted off Surivvor?" in 2000 and someone would definitely know. Now you get blank stares, and people have even sworn off TV. The last shared viewing experience was Breaking Bad 2013 series finale, and then 2019 Game of Thrones the collective let-down of Season 8 the Final Season. 

Having too much choice has a name: it's called choice paralysis, choice overload. Even on Saturday nights (tonight) I often agonize over how to spend that precious little time: should I go to a football game, watch the MLB playoffs, work out in the weight room, go to a live comedy show, go to a classical music concert, drive to the next city over, call my mom, watch the latest UFC fight....someone on Reddit said it best, "if I only had an hour left to live and could watch any TV show I wanted to, I'd spend a half hour scrolling through to pick which show. 

Chekhov's gun (契诃夫的枪, チェーホフの銃, 체호프의 총)

 Tonight's Jeopardy episode had a category called "Possessive Names" that featured clues about famous people as the possessive and things that belonged to them, like a "vulnerable point" was "Achilles's heel" and the argument that you should gamble on the existence of God (because if you're right the upside is so big, and you don't want be wrong about the existence of God if you're betting there isn't..., called Pascal's Wager- I don't necessarily agree with this, by the way, if you take it too seriously and devote this existing life to God and get too embroiled in religion, con men, religious cults, etc.), and one I didn't get called "Newton's Cradle," an example of something I've known existed since I was 7 years old but didn't know the name of, it's that weird scientific toy that some people have on their work desk that has a set of balls in a row and if you pick up the ball on one end and swing it into the rest, the ball at the other end springs into the air, falls back, and hits the row of balls, causing the original ball to go back in the air, and so forth. Awesome evidence of Newton's 3rd law: for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. 

Anyway, the one most interesting to me, and easiest to visualize, of that category was "Chekhov's gun": the idea that if you have a loaded gun on stage, then at some point during the play it must go off. Chekhov being the famous Russian playwright. This makes a lot of sense in the physical sense and is all too real in America: a lot of guns exist in America and quite a large percentage of them are probably loaded ready to be fired, and if a gun is already loaded, it seems almost nonsensical for those bullets not to be fired.... it's just a disaster waiting to happen. That's America's gun problem, and gun control isn't being discussed at all in this year's presidential election because both major candidates are in agreement: they're not taking away the guns. Kamala and Tim Walz both own a gun, and she apparently is going to fire it if she needs to. In fact, it's one of the only issues Kamala and Trump agree on! Amazing. 

The other, more philosophical idea of Chekhov's gun is less applicable in the real world: that everything happens for a reason (often said by religious people, I wonder if they are more apt to apply Chekhov's gun to real life).... that if I dedicated a lot of hard work to a cause, some good must come out of it, or if I bougth this set of golf clubs, I must become good at golf, or if I like this girl, she must like me back and we live happily ever after.... these things often make sense when watching a movie when viewers can almost guess the plot after seeing just the first few minutes of a movie or TV episode, surmising that "because this guy broke up with someone named Summer in the first part of the show, he must meeting someone named Autumn later" or something like that. Unfortunately, real life does not work like that..... things often don't follow a continuous story line, and things that happened previously in life coudl just be nothing, wasted, nothing comes up of it. In the movies after all the time I've spent studying trivia, we're conditioned to believe I would have made it onto Jeopardy already.......In the movies all this learning of who "Edward the Bear" is (Winnie the Pooh), what the largest archipelago in teh world is (Malay Archipelago) and who wrote Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson) would all eventually become useful in a Slumdog Millionaire-like moment when it all comes together onstage as I accomlish my dreams, but reality is that most of the knowledge I've gained will literally be trivia- good for nothing. After all the time and effort MJ and I (mostly MJ) have dedicated to having a baby, you'd think we will eventually have a baby, or should have had one already... but it just hasn't happened yet, and I'm sure there are some unlucky couples who went down the same path we did thinking they'd eventually succeed only to give up in the end. (Hopefully we're not one of them). Maybe, just maybe though, as we continue to live our lives and go through new experiences and new challenges, we'll find little areas where things do come full circle, and we're rewarded for our efforts...and Chekhov's gun, like so many real guns in America, actually goes off. 

Substitute Teacher (代课老师, 代理の先生, 대리교사)

 Tonight I got MJ to watch the Jack Black movie "School of Rock" for the first time ever.... cute movie, good trivia study material with different rock bands and songs, catchy music, and kids! Always a good formula for success, except even in 2003 (just 21 short years ago!) some of the humor would be unacceptable nowadays. Definitely a movie that still works though, and especially needed in times of anxiety and hand-wringing about kids. It also featured one of the most brilliant 3-week runs of a substitute teacher ever turned in by rock music lover Dewey Finn played by Jack Black, and it got me wondering what it would be like to be a substitute teacher. Well, I looked it up.... the pay is terrible, but most school districts in large urban areas kind of need them, especially with the amount of permanent teachers who have a difficult time now at school after the pandemic with distractions and social media and smartphones, etc. Just imagine if School of Rock had happened in 2024.... the kids would just all be on their phones while Jack tried to convince them to start a band. Also I looked up which school subjects are the most popular....apparently math and science teachers are in the most demand, which makes sense because people with those backgrounds usually can find a job in other sectors, while English and social science teachers don't have as many options to choose from and have to "settle" for being a teacher. I would love to learn science again the right way, especially chemistry and physics, because I don't think I was taught correctly in high school or at least didn't have the interest in it that I should have. I wonder what substitute teachers do nowadays..show movies? Try to teach something on their own? Go off of what the permanent teacher's notes were? Hard to tell. 

Recently I've been hooked no watching old "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" episodes which came out 1999-2002. (Guess I've devolved into literally living in the past through TV shows that came out in the "Glory Days" pre-smartphones). In addition to a good host, good questions, and good format to keeping viewers engaged with lifelines, etc., the show is significant to me because it marked the last time that ordinary random people showed up on prime time national TV. I'm not talking about the contestants of The Bachelor, or Survivor, who are usually culled by the TV executives to fit the demographics that they need, matching specific criteria, one of them being that they need to be telegenic and exude sex appeal or look like a model, I'm talking about ordinary office workers, accountants, teachers, lawyers, truck drivers, police officers, who got on through calling a toll-free number, answering questions, and then flying to New York. There was very little "culling of the herd" by TV execs to get exactly the right contestants they wanted, it was more by merit and open to all who qualified to get on TV. That just doesn't happen anymore, and game shows like Jeopardy are the last bastion of "real people" like me getting on any kind of national TV (although I suspect even Jeopardy has a little bit of filtering for people). Millionaire didn't do that.... they let everyone have a chance. What it got them was often casts of very, very, very white people who all looked pretty much the same (mostly white males, plus Regis Philbin a white male host), but.....IT STILL GOT EXCELLENT RATINGS. It came on almost daily eery week at its hey day and one of the highest rated shows on televison, showing that even as late as 2001 (I know, maybe ancient times by today's kids' standards) you didn't need to have sex, violence, etc., or made-for-TV characters or gimmicks like drag queens, D-list actors, comedians, etc. I'd argue that the audience resonated with the down-to-earth folk even more. If only they'd try it again ( I guess the business of TV has changed where it might never happen again). Here's hoping it will!! Or I'm allowed to time travel back to pre-2008 days in my current adult form (not my pubsescent years of acne and insecurity). 

Sibling Rivalry (兄弟姐妹间的竞争, 兄弟間の競争, 형제 간의 경쟁)

 Another term that doesn't have a great counterpart phrase in Chinese that rolls off the tongue as easily as it does in English like "sibling rivalry," this term showed up in a Daily Double clue in Jeopardy recently as a psychological term, describing what the theme of Succession was about among the Roy kids (shoutout to Succession that ended its run last year). I've never thought of sibling rivalry as psychological, more of just competitive drive and human nature, although I will admit I don't think I've ever had a sibling rivalry with my much younger sister, so I almost want to have one just to see what it feels like. I guess it's a constant drive to be the parents' favorite child, to get your parents' approval more than your sibling(s?) I never felt that necessary because well, I was 9.5 years older so of course I would have way more accomplishments at the time of life as Emily did, so it never really occurred to me, but I do think my sister lives a little bit under my shadow because my parents expect her to be what I was like..... which, not to brag, I did pretty well in high school, not so much after high school, but yea big shoes to fill. But I never needed my parents' attention that much, I actually kind of wanted less of it, just let me do my own thing, and pick me up when I needed a ride after school, supply meals, pay tuition, etc. I guess I took a lot of these things for granted, but it's not like I thought any deficiencies were due to them not paying as much attention to me as my sister. 

I wonder if MJ and I ever become parents, and somehow have more than one child, will we have a favorite child? Probably yes, and I guess parents just don't talk about it, but I guess kids can sense that rivalry. 

The earliest sibling rivalry in human history is probably documented in the Bible, the story of Abel and Cain, an example of something I should have known about as an adult but had no idea about until I watched Jeopardy a lot, and now it comes up like every other week. (This past week it was a question about taking one letter out of a pile of stones on a hiking trail and getting a man's name in the Book of Genesis, answer being cairn and Cain. I couldn't for the life of me remember "cairn" and 5 seconds is not enough time to think of all the male members in Genesis, but usually it's either Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Esau, so on and so on. Cain is not the go-to, but for Jeopardy purposes he probably is because that story of his rivalry with Abel and eventually killing him is so compelling, so juicy, and so....human, so typical of jealousy and greed and trying to get approval from one's parents, except the parent in this case is God. Cain kills Abel because God shows favoritism towards Abel apparently, probably a good lesson for parents with multiple kids to be equal and treat each kid with special care and without favoritism. 

Most siblings I've met are all on good terms, either hanging out or speaking favorably of their siblings. I do know a few, though, who don't get along with their brothers or sisters and don't speak to them. That's tough, because unlike parents or grandparents, or sons or daughters, siblings are likely the ones who will be with you the longest, from birth to death, since they're always around your same age. They're always around, and they're of the same generation, likely with some of the same genes, same mindset, etc. To be estranged or not talk to a sibling for a long time or forever (or in Cain's case, killing them) seems awfully harsh, with exceptinos of murders like Ted Kacynski (his brother turned him in) of course. For most people, it's probably just a matter of not seeing eye to eye on something, some argument that got out of hand. I do hope everyone is able to turn sibling rivalries as a kid into sibling friendships, I'm curious what that's like.