尊厳 (Dignity)

Today as I was enthralled in 2 excellent March Madness basketball games (I got hooked again! This year's college basketball tournament has been especially good with close games and OT thrillers. Purdue just went through 2 OT games back-to-back in the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight! How crazy is that!) I was reminded that basketball players are trained by custom to lie about calls. It's so predictable whenever there's a close call that the referee has to make or especially on a "who-touched it last" out of bounds play.........As soon as the ball goes out of bounds or even before the ball has gone out yet, both teams' players start pointing towards their side, imploring the refs to award their ball to their side. Sometimes, it's a genuinely close call where it's hard to tell who touched the ball last. Often though, it becomes clear on replay who touched the ball last, and one of the players on a team knows without a doubt that they touched it last, but they immediately insist that it's their ball. In dodgeball we call that cheating. Unfortunately, this happens not only in basketball but almost all sports, especially mainstream sports that everyone watches.......The custom is to always insist that your team should be the beneficiary of the call, or if you did foul somebody, don't stop unless the ref calls it. It's kind of a loss of dignity in a sport.....If there's anything that I gained from my years playing dodgeball, it's an appreciation for a sport that polices itself, where competitors are encouraged and urged to tell the truth about whether they got hit or not. Some people do lie or cheat, but then they are ridiculed on the spot or get shunned later if video shows them having lied about it, and develop a reputation of cheating that sticks with them until they reverse that reputation by maintaining a steady streak of honesty. It develops a sense of dignity about a sport.....a sense that other people are also playing with the same objective as you, to play a fair game and determine the outcome through fair play. 

Now, I don't pretend that I don't lie.......I lie about being sick and not going into work once in a while, I lie to telephone marketers or people who ask me for change on the street......sometimes I lie without even needing to (I should fix that). But I don't lie about playing sports........sports should be played with some dignity; it should be a competition to see who the best is, not who can win because they got the benefit of the most calls by the referee through their imploring of the officials. There should be a sense of "If I'm the better player or better team, I don't need to cheat." Sometimes I'll even let the other team or player get a couple points on me just to keep them happy. 

And unfortunately, fans and kids see what they see on TV, these basketball players, football players, soccer players arguing and harassing the refs on every close call, many times lying about it, in a win-at-all-costs attitude, sacrificing their dignity of fair play, and they carry on the tradition of argue-all-calls, and that seeps into all other sports and games we play, even other arenas in life: cut this guy off in traffic, cheat on my taxes, screw this guy over in a business deal just so I can get ahead. 

My proposal is this (called "Dignity Rules"): Make all calls in sports determined by the players themselves. Call your own fouls in basketball. Call own penalties in football. No refs involved; the players settle it on the court between both teams somehow (sometimes it'll involve a "coin flip" or "shoot for it!" where someone takes a shot to determine if they're right or not, that's how it's settled on the pickup basketball court) and move on. Of course at first players will try to get away with stuff, not everyone will follow the Dignity Rules, and people will take advantage of others' kindness. But now we have the advantage of video, and people will see immediately who's lying, reputations will form, the blatant offenders will be called out and asked to improve their behavior, and eventually players will buy into the system. It's not going to be 100% perfect, sometimes people will still make the wrong call on themselves, or teams won't agree on something, but even nowadays the refs aren't even close to getting 100% right, and the players themselves usually know better than the refs. It works in dodgeball; it'd work in all other sports and send the right message about sport and life: it's about honesty and fair play, not doing your best to get away with it. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan 

AirBnBobby

The Title is a name I gave for my fantasy baseball team a while ago because my leaguemates think I am always just sleeping on an airbed and never settled down......which is kind of true due to the kind of work I do. I have stayed at a lot of AirBnB's in my life......and I must say, I don't think it's worth it. Have you ever seen the cleaning fees the AirBnb's charge? AirBnb gets a large fee for connecting buyers to sellers.......wasn't Craigslist invented many years ago and essentially free? Why add the middle-man cost to everything? I wince whenever I hear people go "just Uber it" or "just Lyft it" almost as much as I wince when people say "just get an AirBnb it."

Now, granted, hotels are not cheap, especially in a place like New York City, where I am now. Many people have said it before me, but it's amazing how much can be concentrated into one 22-sq-mile island, how many people come be gathered, how many buildings and skyrises they can build, how many cool museums (art, history, you name it) you can have, how many subway lines can criss-cross underneath, how many great shows on Broadway and performances at Madison Square Garden, how much stock trading activity can be done on Wall St. and the NYSE.....

....and unfortunately how much more expensive everything is. Chipotle prices automatically go up $1, $2 (which is like 25% on a $8 chicken burrito!), how much subways cost ($2.75 v. $1.75 in L.A......like 40% increase! On some smelly trains!) how much taxis cost, how much hotels cost......it's just an expensive city, and kind of in an artificial way. It's kind of an old city too, as one can tell by its subways, its roads, many of its buildings......you would think it'd be a little more impressive as one of America's top attractions and one of the most prestigious cities in the world. When I was a senior in high school and applying to schools, I wrote my high school essay on how I liked New York and why I wanted to be there.......it seemed like the big city with all the glistening lights and important people, that seemed like such a destination for a kid who grew up in suburban Chicago never having gone to any cultured places in his life except occasional visits back to China. Looking back, boy was I misinformed writing college essays on that irrelevant topic, but also boy has my perspective on New York changed. I always thought I'd go from Chicago to L.A. to New York (No. 3 biggest city in U.S. to No. 2 to No.1) but that 3rd leg to New York might not happen. It's a fun city to be in for awhile, but I regret to say I wouldn't really like living here for too long. (It's a little bit like Vegas in that way, a bit of a trap for your money).

Back to Airbnb, Airbnb is a very interesting technological advancement and in an interesting stock whenever it goes on IPO....lots of IPOs happening this year in the similar share-everything way like Lyft (just debuted this week), Uber, Robinhood (the trading app that I use that charges $0 for trades, incentivizing customers to make more trades, which has risks of its own, etc.), Pinterest (I never figured out what that did, except it was somewhat helpful to give MJ some "inspiration" for our wedding).

I've never come out an AirBnB thinking, "wow I got a great deal out of that!" Usually its "ah, OK, they rented out their home to us for the weekend and we paid a price for it," or just simply, "wow that was kind of expensive. It's the millenial generation's way of doing things.......make new experiences, borrow other people's things for a short period of time, don't worry too much about the cost.......but things like lodging and ride sharing add up since you need them every day (in lodging's case, literally ONCE every day).

The Verdict for AirBnb? Not surprisingly, AirBnBobby (usually, I'm StingyBobby) does not approve.

Insane Insomnia 失眠, 不眠症, 잠 잘 수 없음

Recently, I suffered a bout of my own brand of insomnia. Most people who have insomnia, from what I understand, can't fall asleep.....they lay awake in bed, tossing and turning, counting sheep, whatever, but their mind won't "shut off." I've had that too, it's painful, but I've mostly solved that, the culprits are usually cuz I drank too much caffeine too close to bed time, I'm still hungry, or I'm too excited, or something's too loud. No, the Robert "Insane Insomnia" that I suffered for about a week allowed me to get to sleep just fine, in the usual 2-5 minute time span, but then, like a few hours in, WAY before I'm ready to wake up, I wake up HUNGRY. Like really starving, and my hunger is doing somersaults in my belly begging for more food. And my body is sweating like it's used up all the food it can and has no more fuel to burn. I then eat a little food to try to get myself to go back to sleep, like an egg or something, go back to bed, can't sleep, still feel hungry, get a little more to eat, rinse and repeat, until I've lost an hour or two, and it's only a few hours til it's time to wake up, and I finally fall asleep after giving in to the hunger and suspending my diet by eating like a whole can of sardines or something (MJ and I sometimes run out of ready-made food) only to wake up an hour and a half later not feeling my normal refreshed self.

The results of this insane insomnia, as I'm calling it, because it drove me crazy trying to eat more food and sacrificing my waistline but also not getting enough sleep and sacrificing my deep REM sleep......is a week of feeling groggy during the day, feeling like I needed to sleep but couldn't, waking up at random times feeling frustrated (NOT again!) and wanting to punch the pillow, drenching the bedsheets from the sweat (catastrophic for MJ), feeling grouchy all the time cuz sleep is related to emotional state and almost every brain function, not having a "fresh brain" for work or studying, AND on top of that still gaining weight cuz I'm eating a lot at night and then not getting the usual sleep time to let that food digest it off. One of the worst negative cycles I've experienced.

Basically, good practice for the first few years of parenthood I guess.

I looked for causes of this constant sleep thing, including PARASITES.....I really was afraid I developed a bug or worm or something in my stomach that ate all my food and made me hungry.

And then......one day, about a week in........it ended. I had a great night's sleep, went all the way through, dreamed my happy dreams (The real emotions I feel in dreams and how vivid they are for me where I don't feel like anything else exists makes me wonder more and more about Elon Musk saying our world is a simulation, and maybe that's real). Yay! I'm going to go to sleep now feeling grateful I got my sleep back. Hurray!

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan

Commute (통근하다, 通勤)

So many things are going on in my life, all of a sudden it's been more than a month since I last posted! Unacceptable. A month of my life gone undocumented, uncommented upon.....when really, in 50 years, these will be the only memories I have of these times.

Part of the reason for the lack of communication has been the daily commute. For the last 2 years or so I had the commute some people could only dream of.....I walked to work and walked back, no need for any trains, plains, or automobiles....I had a stable job in downtown Los Angeles, knew I'd be working there for the entire year, and got an apartment for a year in downtown. Simple....why doesn't everyone do it? I thought. Not having to commute saves me up to 2 hours a day, I don't have to devote energy driving through horrendous traffic, I don't have to get up super early or stay super late to work to beat traffic, I don't have to be rushing to squeeze every second of the day in.

But then of course reality hits.........My job changed, my circumstances changed, my life partner also has her commute to worry about.........these are the things that go into getting a commute, and suddenly I had the unenviable position of traveling WEST into mid-city Wilshire and back every day. If people don't know L.A., Hollywood (and West Hollywood) is a very trendy place to get to, and right next to it is Farmer's Market, the Grove, LACMA (County Museum of Art), LaBrea Tar Pits, etc., lots of cool places down Wilshire Ave., but.......it's in a Bermuda Triangle of highways, no highway directly gets to it, and Wilshire Blvd.....well, is a mess. It's only 6 miles or so to my work (I feel like I could run there! The L.A. marathon's tomorrow and it's 26 miles!) but takes 50 minutes or so to get to, so like 8 minutes per mile. Seriously, that's a runner could beat me there on bus. There's a purple line subway coming, but only in 5 years, so what to do? There's a bus called the Rapid 720 that I've become intimately familiar with the last 2 months. There's a LOT of people who ride the bus to work, and I feel fortunate that in my life I haven't had to take the bus for long distances, because especially in L.A. there are some weird occurrences that take place on the bus. There's just 1 bus driver driving up to 100 people, so it's pretty much just the passengers enforcing each other. There are homeless people, criminal-looking people, space-invading people who take up 2 seats, singing people who sing to themselves, closely followed in weirdness by people who mutter to themselves, a fight that almost broke out between 2 passengers, always someone who is taking the bus for the first time and asks the driver a million questions taking up everyone's time, smelly guy on the bus (the bus never smells good and never smells clean, I bet they wash it once in a while but like the subway it's almost pointless as every time it goes back into circulation homeless people infest and make it smell bad again). It's just a long ride of bumps and smells.

Then there's the bus itself. Because of the nature of traffic, many times 3 buses will show up at one time because one bus got slowed picking everyone else up, one bus is right on time, and the last bus is early because they didn't have to pick anyone up. The buses themselves get cut off in traffic all the time even though there's a bus lane in Wilshire. SO frustrating when other buses pass the bus I'm in as I feel like life is literally passing me by. The buses are naturally kind of herky jerky with 3 sections of the bus connected together, so it's a "hang-on-for-dear-life" situation when the bus turns or jolts to a stop.

Anyway, I miss my 0.3-mile walking commute to work! But now I know what L.A. public transportation is like! I feel like a real Angeleno!

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan