水涨船高 (A Rising Tide lifts all boats)

2 expressions today! ( I will get to Korean proverbs soon as I'm learning quite a lot of them!)

Chinese: 水涨船高A rising tide lifts all boats- first associated with John F. Kennedy, this quote has a long history and was possibly derived from the Chinese, and the 4-character idiom says exactly that. It's exactly what happened yesterday, when good earnings reports from different companies in various sectors (Goldman Sachs, United HealthGroupand then Netflix!) all reported good numbers to combat the recent worries of high interest rates and trade war with China to send stocks higher, a welcome reprieve from the fretting and worrying I'd been doing recently due to stocks being down. Finally was able to take a sigh of relief, as ALL my stocks and went up steadily throughout the day without dropping off for a bit as usually happens. Home-game personal investors like myself live for days like yesterday where all the boats rise......

only to have them sink a bit today as the exact opposite happened: housing information caused companies related to housing to sink (like Home Depot, one of my stocks!) and the whole Dow came crashing down again. The market is a fickle person: one day she can be really happy and energetic and positive, the next day it's like she changed into a totally different person: negative, complaining, aggressively get upset at a drop of a hat. Most of my stocks went down, even some of the technology stocks that have nothing to do with housing, the ripple of the tide was so pervasive. So I guess a Falling tide sinks all boats as well, hopefully those boats have enough support and safety inside them to have them rise up again and not totally submerge into the bottom of the ocean. 



Japanese 鵜呑み (unomi ni suru): 
literally means swallowing without chewing (not a good idea in itself because you're eating too fast and may cause indigestion, don't inhale food!) but more commonly associated with the idea of accepting facts without questioning, as in being too gullible. 

As hardened as I am and as practical-minded as I try to be, sometimes I am still too gullible. I've been able to block out the people on the street in downtown Chicago who ask for money (it's almost every street corner and almost every subway station!) but the other day I had a normal-looking guy come up to me. I thought he was asking for directions, so I actually stopped to talk. BIG mistake. He said he left his wallet on a bus, and he just needed to get home, so if I could call him an Uber. In retrospect, his story seemed too perfected, too freely offering details, so he said he lives pretty close by, not too far from downtown Chicago. I accepted his story without asking, which is my mistake: I could have asked him any of many questions, like "why don't you try to track down the bus now?" or "did you lose your wallet too? Can you pay me in cash?" but I just took him for a guy in distress who needed to get home, so I pulled up an Uber for him. He said he'd venmo me back and had me pull up "his Venmo account." It was late at night so I didn't think much about it, but I figured Uber can only send you to one place, it's not like you can trade the Uber money for cash. Needless to say, he didn't pay me back. It's my fault in being too nice and believing without asking questions. If I had just thought to ask a more direct question and be skeptical, he probably would have backed off. Sadly, that guy has an even more negative affect on society in that those who ARE actually in distress will be less likely to get help, just like I will be less likely to help next time. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan