Recently I was humbled by an event that put my English skills into question. Quick test: Do you know what "bi-weekly" means? Does it mean twice a week, or every 2 weeks?
Tough, right? I didn't know, and apparently it's both! In the dictionary it says "bi-weekly" can be used interchangeably, and it's up to the reader to figure out. Well I'll be damned. My first thought was "I didn't know that," but my second thought was, "they should really come up with a better word for both concepts," because if I tell someone to water the plants bi-weekly, how does that person know how often to water the plants? Water them too often and you could flood them out and they die, but don't water them enough and they could dry out and die. In case you're wondering, it's the same for tri-weekly as well.
Other examples I struggle with:
1.) fewer v. less
2.) maybe v. may be (when to use each)
3.) when to use hyphens between words like Anglo-Saxon or semi truck? See I'm not sure, and if I'm not sure, I don't think most of the world is sure. It's almost like most American people need a refresher course on English (as well as my proposed financial literacy course upon turning 18).
English is FULL of these conundrums , paradoxes, unclear points that didn't get hashed out, and at this point they're not going to be. It makes you wonder what people who started this language were thinking, and makes me want to go back and tell people to "do better!" But then again, language is like a really incredible thing, able to describe things that are difficult to express and which saves a lot of people a lot of time. When asked about what's the greatest invention in history, rarely do people say "language" because there's so many of them, but shouldn't that be near the top of all inventions, in the top 5 at least? It has a huge utility, is used by almost every single person in the world,
MJ and I purchased matching iPhone XR's today to replace our older models. For some reason I have an eerie feeling about being sucked into this trap by Apple where our lives, our minds, our souls are sucked into the Apple Universe (and not a cool one like Spiderman: into the Spiderverse). It's all part of this subscription business model nowadays that reminds me of the "the first hit is free, but then they got you" drug culture.
There's been just a bit of buzz recently about 2020 Presidential candidate Andrew Yang, notable to me because he's Asian American. He's never held public office before, but he has these ideas about implementing a universal basic income and imposing a value added tax on huge corporations like Amazon and Google, and the most salient (am I using that word correctly? I'm doubting myself now!) point is accepting that robots/ automation are taking over the world, and what people should be doing about it. His big example is self-driving truckers replacing the 3 million truckers in the US. My first thought was, out of 300 million people in the US? 1% are truck drivers? That's kind of a lot, given how many people aren't in the work force, and that we don't think about truck drivers as a normal profession. I've always wondered what it'd be like to be a truck driver, just you and the open road and maybe a podcast or radio station on, with your thoughts. And in this fantasy I have it's always like driving through verdant fields and through the mountains with rainbows peeking through, but in reality it's probably like a lot of toll roads, stopping for checkpoints, sleeping in your car, missing your family, the same boring stretch of the I-90 or I-80 cross country over and over again, there and back. Probably not my cup of tea, not anyone's cup of tea. It's at this point I remind myself how cushy of a job I have.
As the Korean phrase goes, 눈코 뜰 새 없다
I'm so busy I don't have time to open eyes or nose. Sometimes I wonder if I'm lowering my quality of life by trying to rush through life. I always feel pressured to get things done like I'm in a race, I have no time, which I do feel pressure of......I feel like I only have a finite time left to live, I feel myself getting older all the time, I have so much stuff to do before having a baby and my life being over! (not really over, but people who have kids tell me they can't do ANYTHING!) But by rushing all the time, I lose the quality of experiences, like when playing dodgeball I rush through it like I have somewhere to be and need to end the game quickly, which makes me impatient and play worse. I barely have conversations with people before I have to go to my next activity (a BIG problem I've had and probably why I don't have that many deep relationships), and apparently I don't spend enough time washing myself/ washing dishes thoroughly/ really focusing on something). I just want to get things over with and go on to the next thing. Probably another millenial problem, and probably will be exacerbated by getting a newer, more advanced Iphone. Maybe I should open my eyes and nose once in awhile and enjoy life for awhile......and keep them open.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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