Bullying

I hope my daughter does not get bullied. I will try my best to make sure it doesn't happen, but sometimes there's only so much a parent can do; most of the bullying that happened to me was done specifically without parents around, just kids being kids. The thing about kids, they're not babies: babies are innocent, they're just trying to survive and grow with the world, there's no ill intent (except maybe Damien the Demon Kid from the Omen movie). Kids, unfortunately like many humans, develop cognitive abilities and bad intentions; they can be some of the nastiest people because they can't empathize yet with other people or know what it's like to be on the other side of bullying, they just do it to make themselves feel safe. As an overweight Chinese kid who wore glasses and FOB-by clothing as a kid, I was the prime target. Getting made fun of on the bus, not having anyone to eat with at lunch, being called four-eyes at school, and a whole host of racial stereotypes sometimes crossing over to outright slurs (Ching Chong was the flavor of the month back in my day). I wasn't always the victim, as I also retaliated sometimes by making fun of other kids and resorting to the same bad behavior that was being done to me; I'd like to think I gave a lot less than I received, mostly because I knew what it felt like and didn't want to do that to other people. The outright bullying was pretty standard, but what really felt like a betrayal is if someone I thought was a friend saw other friends and an opportunity to be in the "cool crowd," they'd just cross over and sacrifice me to be with the cooler people. That really hurt, and maybe a part of that still sticks with me today, maybe I'm messed up because of it and get oversensitive if it happens to me. It just hurts when you think you know someone, you're on their team and they're on your team, but then they turn out not to be, at the most crucial time when you need them. The point, of course, is to prevent it from happening to my child. I hear from other parents that their anxities become not necessarily worrying about themselves but about how their kids are doing, and not wanting their kid to be bullied, or worse, be THE bully. Weight issues can be contained hopefully, and hopefully diet restrictions will help along with baby's powerful legs (she kicked her mother while in the womb and is continuing to kick hard now) making her exercise and get out on her feet. Unfortunately she will look at least a little like me, with an Asian countenance and un-telegenic appearance, so any hope of getting "pretty privilege" may be inheriting genes from her mother. Unlike my parents I will have the advantage of telling my child what school is like and how to deal with bullies in America, what kind of things might happen and to get mentally prepared for them. The best way, of course, is to have good social skills: be friendly to everyone, but also not get too bothered when you hear something and show that you're bothered by it. Also, try to find a friend or friends early. Elementary school unfortunately is like prison: you need to group up early or others notice that you're alone and can team up on you, Mean Girls style. Don't be arrogant, don't be weird, don't be too loud....these are all probably things I suffered from but didn't realize until now. So many things to know as a child, it's hard to remember them all much less know that they're things you have to watch out for! Nowadays, more than the 1990s when I was growing up, there's this thing called "cyberbullying" where people just go online to bully their classmates, yet another hurdle to cross and figure out, and other thing social media has betrayed us on. (Social media's that friend that you think is on your team and helping you make more friends, but it actually betrays you because other people have more followers or "friends" or are doing cooler things than you, and you actually feel more lonely after being with it). Or maybe AI will be able to stop bullying when Baby Girl is old enough to start going to school. Abolish bullying! Defund bullying! No Bullies' Day!

Cyclospora

One of the most obvious new terms that will be a trivia question soon is the onset of cyclospora, the parasite that's sweeping the nation that's causing consumers of lettuce to poop themselves. This development would not have been a big deal in my twenties as I did not eat salads, but my diet nowadays consists of a heavy dose of leafy greens, and I am now concerned about eating at Chipotle and Subway, 2 of the closest restaurants (literally downstairs from my building) and affecting my daily lettuce intake. Trivia writers, or Jeopardy clue writers specifically, love to ask about: 1) new top 40 albums, 2.) new blockbuster movies, 3.) new records being set, 4.) new viral moments on social media, and 5.) outbreaks of disease. Jeopardy has specifically shied away from politics and the news in the last few years (understandably), but diseases and nonpartisan news is still very much fair game. Science news is excellent: the next space shuttle launch, astronauts arriving home from the ISS on the SpaceX Dragon, and fun cat/ dog stories like Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippo at a Thailand zoo. Unfortunately for the new blockbuster summer movies, I'm out of the loop. I didn't attend the 2023 Barbenheimer event of the summer, last year was Deadpool and Wolverine, and this year appears to be the back-to-back weekends of The Odyssey (by Christopher Nolan) and the newest Spiderman: Brand New Day. Admittedly I would have LOVED Spiderman Brand New Day as a kid because it goes into territory the cartoon show didn't cover: Spiderman used Dr. Strange's potion to make everyone forget about his identity as Peter Parker, even his girlfriend MJ and other best friends, so he's totally alone in the universe. Kind of the opposite of what I did for Jeopardy, with less favorable results: went from no one knowing who I was to.....practically no one still knowing who I am and after a few weeks of my episode airing, those people by now have forgotten. If Spiderman's every boy's dream and harnesses all of those desires of heroism and getting the girl and fighting crime and flying through the air above Manhattan, then the Odyssey really plays into a different aspect of those boyish dreams: setting off on a long journey to get back home. Really, the Odysssey is like the prototype for one of the most typical heroic tropes: protagonist takes a heroic journey, and even better with monsters (Cyclops), sea creatures (Scylla), gods (Poseidon), and attractice members of the opposite sex (Circe and Calypso). It's fitting that the movie came out in summer, when a lot of Americans are out on road trips maybe across the United States (my law school buddy is going from Boston to Seattle to L.A.) living out the dream of hitting the open road, very close to the aesthetic of hitting the open seas, living in different places every night, finding the next hill to climb and the next challenge to conquer. In an ideal world, that is my dream as well, fresh new adventures with no jeopardy of actually dying or failing, just enough danger to feel accomplished for having survived and lived to tell about it. At least I can watch the movies to simulate those feelings! (later on a plane something and at 1.5x speed since I hear they're both pushing 3 hours long, which are odyssey-length movies in this day and age).

Lox Bagel

I have a long and complicated relationship with the lox bagel (aka nova lox bagel), a dish originated in NYC by Jewish immigrants who had to find something to eat for kosher days (similar to why Filet-o-fish sandwiches become popular at McDonald's. Filet-O-fish sandich was coincidentally an answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire this past week with Jamie Ding teaming up with Ben Affleck. Yes, that Jamie Ding who won 31 games on Jeopardy this season, something I would have loved to do, but Jamie represented Asian males well and had a few funny moments.) I can see why it's so popular, because the salmon fits well with the cream schmear and bagel to get a rich, salty taste where you can taste the smoked salmon part of the salmon. I love it, but I had one bad experience with the smoked salmon: it gave me diarrhea one year right before a ski trip in Colorado, ruining my ski trip and laying me out in the cabin all weekend. My roommate at the time almost at the lox as well before I warned him off of it, although maybe the diarrhea wasn't from the lox but some other mystery substance I consumed that weekend? Whatever it was, I'll always associate lox bagels with that fateful weekend...until today when I had it again. It was delicious! Food trivia is something I wish I was better at, just so many different foods I've missed out on over the many many years of existence, partly because I grew up in a Chinese household with strictly Chinese cooking but also just me not being curious about different foods and trying new things. So many different cereals, for example, as a kid, that I could have tried, but I settled on Honey Nut Cheerios (with the friendly looking bee mascot I now know to be named Buzz, how creative) and didn't get into Raisin Bran, Lucky Charms, Smacks, CornPops, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Wheaties, all the fun-sounding cereals that Corporate America wanted kids to get addicted on, I didn't pay much attention to. And lunch at school was just a steady diet of Subway Day, Hot Dog Day, Pizza Day......generic stuff. Not that I'm expecting exotic foods in a school cafeteria like Beef Wellington Day or Chicken A la King day, but some variety would have been nice with different pastas like rigatoni, bucatini, mastaccioli, just saying. And it's really too bad that salmon doesn't have a lot of specialty dishes with fancy names like duck l'orange or veal piccata, because I would have ate them all up, I was a big salmon guy even from a young age (my parents just got the pre-buttered salmon from Costco.....an unfortunate choice from a culinary perspective but equally delicious in my book as the lox bagels).

Child Proof

The time has come that I'd been dreading for a while: the time when Baby Girl Yan can move around freely at home, and we need to childproof the home. For a long time it felt like we could just let baby sleep in the bassinet, assured that the high railings would prevent her from falling out. Then she started to flip over, and we couldn't leave her in there anymore unsupervised. Then it was the play area; for a while she could just play there on her back and would stay confined there. Now, she is able to explore her surroundings and crawl her way out, sliding through the floor to other destinations. The world is her oyster, and it's our job as parents to prevent the world from hurting her, or baby hurting herself. This means putting up guardrails (luckily right now we don't have stairs in our unit, but eventually we probably will), making sure things can't fall on top of her, removing unsafe materials from baby's reach. It's a development stage that eventually she was going to get to, but I can't help feelin that baby is ALREADY growing up too fast. Is that even possible at 7 months? Maybe it is, because she has changed dramatically since her infant 0-2 month days, even just her facial experessions and general demeanor. And we know she can only get bigger, not go back to those infant days ever again. Oh and now she's flipping over in the changing table area every time we try to change her diaper, making it that much more difficult. Pretty soon we'll have to change her just on the ground or on the bed. Still a lot more diapers to go though......we're still at stage 3 of the diaper sizes we buy in bulk from Costco- it goes all the way up to Stage 6, we're not even halfway. I wonder what it's like for parents when their children become potty-trained: probably similar to how I feel now, proud that baby is growing up and becoming her own person, but also sad they've passed another stage as a baby that they'll never return to, and they're just another step towards independence and not needing their parents anymore. It's interesting how fruit flies really like Baby's poop: they surround her diaper trash disposal all the time to try to get in there. I guess Korean people call them "ddon-pari," or "poop flies?" Whatever is in the formula and the solid food Baby has started, the flies really can't get enough of it. I think I'll look back on this first year of the baby as the good ol' days for sure, the brain will probably do some mental gymnastics to filter out all the sweat and toil us parents went through to get baby throught the first year and only focus on the smiles, the happiness, the first words, the first steps, etc. This will also be the time, as mcuh as I rant about the injustice of losing on Jeopardy and how close I was and how unlucky I got, I'll look back on at the end of my life as a time when I felt so ALIVE, that there were still possibilities for me, that I cared about things and still pursued knowledge with vigor because I could still say I was building up to something, that it could all still be useful. That will probably end on November or whenever the Second Chance tournament is, whether or not they actually select me, because regardless that will be the last time I play Jeopardy, there will be nothing to study for Jeopardy-wise after that (well, maybe Pop Culture Jeopardy although I'm not good enough for that show to have realistic hopes of winning). This is the time now when I feel most "in the groove," have the most anticipation, have the most desire to maximize my chances to do well. I gotta baby's living area child proof, and my Jeopardy-brain blunder-proof (impossible to get everything, but at least avoid the costly errors).

AQI

This weekend had the World Cup final and various other events across America, but the big deal in my memory will be the bad air quality all around the eastern half of the country, as measured by the AQI, Air Quality Index. I never gave much thought to air quality as a kid and when I moved to L.A. it was just assumed air quality would suffer due to the perpetual smog around the city and other June Gloom- type conditions, but now I do perceive a difference between fresh, clean air and hot, muggy, microparticle-filled air. I've had clean air in the mountains or on a clear brisk winter day, and it just feels different, like drinking clear ice cold water versus a hot soda. So on Saturday I had to take one of my first DNP's (Did Not Play) absenses ever from running: I just did not go outside for the whole day. I did see a number of people still walking around outside though, only a few of whom were wearing masks outdoors. Wearing a mask outdoors was one of those parodied aspects of the pandemic where people made the virus out to be stronger than it was in certain areas (it didn't have much affect outdoors), but in this case it was advised correctly to wear masks outdoors to prevent air getting into your lungs. Oh and the DOUBLE whammy this week was the spread of this new vegetable parasite found in salads, fruit, etc. that causes diarrhea.....apparently Taco Bell was the epicenter of the outbreak? Not good for my YUM stock! I had the choice today of going to the local chess club or going to the local symphony orchestra to watch a performance of Bugs Bunny in Concert (happening at the same time as the World Cup) and I ended up going to chess, not because I love chess (I'm pretty dejected at this point at getting beaten in chess) but because the local club has a social vibe that I like: it's not just head down, silence, play chess for 2 hours and have no conversation; this club allows for friendly banter, it's held at a delicatessen not a library, kids are welcome to liven up the atmosphere. It's exactly what I needed in these times of staying home (not only due to AQI concerns but also just WFH as well as Take care of baby from home): social contact, preferably with friends if possible but next best is with people who at least have seen me before and/or know my name. I don't have the most friendly-looking face, in fact I try to give off a strong don't-talk-to-me vibe at Costco when they try to make contact and sell me cat food prescriptions for a cat that I don't have, but if you get to know me I can provide great banter, especially when something else is also happening like watching a TV show/sports game, driving on the road during road trips....or playing chess. Compare to a music concert, where I go to the concert hall which feels spacious and formal, but once the music starts rolling I can't do anything but listen and watch the performance......no talking on my part. That's a little less appealing to me. It's also encouraging to me how many people who go to chess club are just not good, and you don't have to be! Some people are probably like me, just looking to hang out with people with a common interest, and just reassure oneself that the outside world exists, and you can be a part of that world. And praise the organizers of chess clubs for keeping them going: it's not exactly the most popular of activities, and doesn't attract the most social type of people, but it's there for those who want it or need it. Oh and sadly no one recognized me from Jeopardy. Oh well, can't win them all.

Cherish the memories

One of the most common things I hear about baby advice is "cherish the memories." Easy to say, but how to do? I will attest that the first year goes by super quick, as it felt like yesterday that we took Baby Girl Yan home from the hospital. Time flies I guess when you're staying at home all day every day with little variation in your schedule, but I realize much of those 7 months have been spent with Baby Girl, and that time is precious and in a few short years I'll be wishing I could play back those times again. Mundane tasks like changing diaper, singing songs to the baby, putting them in the carseat, all of those will change and eventually no longer be necessary, so I do appreciate the opportunity to do them while I can. One of the most relaxing activities I do now is taking Baby Girl into the hallways of the condo unit we live in and just walk around, checking out the different windows of the building. There are 4 floors to our building and they all have different color carpeting, so it's pretty interesting walking all the way through each hallway and letting her check out all the decoration our neighbors have on their doors, hear noises coming from inside our neightbors' units, and look out the window at the various scenery surrounding our building. The key is that she likes this activity, and even if she was getting fussy before "strolling" as I call it (walking around without the stroller, just me holding her) she'll be completely well-behaved when we're out in the hallway, being polite about not waking up neighbors or making too much noise. It's like my nature walk, very peaceful and time I get to spend with my daughter in a different environment than just at home, and she gets to be in the comfort of her dad's arms while feeling like she's going on a journey. Maybe she inherited my gene of loving to explore new areas and check out the unknown (something I personally have put on hold for her) but eventually we can explore the big wide world together. Right now, though, the big wide world of our condo unit is enough. Drew Goins is rumored to be in the cast of Survivor Season 52. This may not seem like big news, but in the tiny world of Jeopardy contestants, Drew Goins is kind of a big deal, and even bigger that a Jeopardy contestant can cross over into the realm of an original reality TV powerhouse, one of the shows that started the whole genre off and is still going strong. Also it's MUCH harder to get on Survivor than Jeopardy. Jeopardy casts about 360 new players every year; Survivor casts like 40 people every year over its 2 new seasons. You need to have something special to get on Survivor, and Drew Goins has it: the charisma, the charm, the wits, the personality, the smile, but most importantly for TV, the boyish good looks that can take you very very far in the entertainment industry. Some people were just meant to be on TV and meant for people like me to be jealous of him because he succeeded on Jeopardy (through the Second Chance tournament), did the Jeopardy Invitational tournamnet, did Pop Culture Jeopardy, and now going to other TV shows, something I could only dream of. Sadly, I once met Drew Goins at a Jeopardy event: as much as I wanted to dislike him, as we stood outside of the theater where the Jeopardy event took place, I just couldn't find anything fake about him, he genuinely has a good personality, and I'm sure that came through in casting interviews. It's kind of the story of my life or at least my relationship with being on TV: I know what it would take and would actually make pretty good TV (in my opinion), and the opportunity is just right there in front of me like Drew Goins was at the Jeopardy event, so close I can touch it, but also so far away because I'm NOT actually Drew Goins, I'm just a normal plebe who is lucky he ever got on TV at all, once, much less multiple TV shows. That's what jealousy is I guess: I would be content with my life IF ONLY there wasn't someone else who had more and shows that you could have more.

Parental anxiety

There's a scene in Game of Thrones, the wildly popular HBO series from 2011-2019 (seems like a lifetime ago) that I understand much more deeply than I did before I had Baby Girl Yan. Sandor Clegane, the Hound, and Arya stark stop at a small house on their way to their next destination and meet a father and his young daughter, who are just getting by before the winter gets there, trying to make ends meet. The Hound steals the man's gold and leaves them to die, and then several months later Clegane comes back to the same house and finds that the father killed both his daughter and himself because they were starving. In a series of horrific ways to die, betrayals, heartbreak, this was one of the most devastating scenes because that father and daughter represented the common people and in a way reflected us, if the high lords and ladies of Westeros are like today's political leaders or celebrities who get to make decisions from power positions, commoners like me would have to struggle in a world of chaos and some of the worst parts of humanity. If you watched Game of Thrones from that lens, that of a common people suffering while kings and queens fought for power, you might see it as commentary that all the so-called important people fight their trivial people at the expense of so many millions of others who don't get that oppoortunity. Above all, though, I do feel parental anxiety about the fate of the world and what will happen in Baby Girl Yan's lifetime. Parental anxiety is a real thing: some parents suffer from overwhelming stress worrying that they are not doing enough for their children, having sleep issues and inability to relax. I can still sleep well and look on the bright side of things, but I fear that the best the earth had to offer has already come and gone, that what is coming up is a backlash to all the excess and indulgent living the richest people put the world though for the last few decades, and now like Game of Thrones winter is coming, making life difficult for all of us. I don't anticipate it to be a situation where we're starving to death, it shouldn't be that bad, but it pains me to think how I'd feel in that position, that I as a parent couldn't provide a good life for my baby. It really has kept me up thinking about it, these worst-case scenarios that seem to pop up pretty regularly in the media like post-apocalyptic films and youtube videos warning us of the emergence of AI. If only I as a parent could transport my child back to the times when I grew up and give them everything they need based on what I know I went though, that would make parenting a lot easier but also reassuring because I know the earth survived through my younger years, even thrived. What's coming ahead of us, though is like a blank slate, but what I do know is a lot of the things I grew up with, Baby Girl Yan won't need anymore, and thus I can't help as much. I guess this is the transition from just a few years ago of me just caring about myself and plan what I want to do for the foreseeable future, to becoming a parent and thinking ahead to what I have to do for the baby, what's best for her, how do I fit that into my schedule. It's really a big life step; I hope I do better than Sandor Clegane.