Unemployment Benefits (실업수당, 失業手当, 失业救济金)

Today I learned a cruel lesson about shaving: shaving blades are sharp. I don't cut my face too badly while shaving, and if so I never need a band-aid to cover it up or anything, but the more painful and longer-lasting cut is the one on the finger: it tears off the outer surface of the skin like peeling an onion and I'm left with a painful nick right on my left index finger, that affects everything from washing dishes, washing my hands, to typing this very sentence. It turns out, humans have more practical uses for their hands than their faces, but we treasure our faces more (especially if you're MJ) and make sure it always looks nice, whereas the hands do so much more work but receive no recognition and don't get any aesthetic enhancements except the occasional application of moisturizer. Kind of a microcosm of life. 

Speaking of aesthetically pleasing, I'm pretty alarmed by the rising coronavirus numbers throughout the country, but I'm even more alarmed by the way many people wear their masks in groups: over their mouth but not over their noses. Maybe it's because the smell of the mask can be off-putting, maybe it's an aesthetic thing of not wanting to cover one's entire face? But letting one's nose peek out of the mask is NOT wearing the mask properly. I feel a physical reaction every time I see someone not covering their nose; it's called a face covering, not a mouth covering or a nose covering. I guess now I understand why people protested seat belts long ago, or don't wear a helmet when riding their motorcycles, and that's just for their own safety.....wearing a mask is about protecting others, so I guess it receives less respect. The world's citizens have to fight the urge to just "give up" and throw up their hands in resignation that "the world is ending" and therefore not care about consequences anymore, otherwise the world will actually start ending due to the chain reaction of apathy and negative attitudes. 

Unemployment benefits are running out at the end of this week (so pretty much now! Oh man), and Americans seem anxious. The extra $600 on top of regular unemployment benefits (about $400+ a week) will run out, and instead Congress is passing another $1 trillion+ bill to give benefits tied to wage, something called a "70% wage replacement." I have mixed feelings about unemployment because although it provides a necessary economic boost to people who have lost their jobs, it's not giving ample incentive for people to go back to work. I've definitely heard of people who just sat back on their $1000+ a week and actively rooting for the economy to stay closed so that the benefits would continue. It's definitely not a plan that is able to target specific people who need the aid......some people desperately need it and even the extra $600 isn't enough, while some people like me don't desperately need it (but it's still nice to have). It's the probably with government: it works for the people, but there's so many people that it's impossible to make specific plans for everyone that works individually, and doesn't deliver the help to the people who really need it. It's like charity organizations and when I ponder whether to give a handout to a homeless person on the side of the street: am I really donating to someone who really needs it? When I think of government helping the public I always think of a wise king holding court and allowing individual citizens to come tell them about their problems and ask for relief, like the farmer whose crops had a bad year asking for federal subsidies, and the king granting relief to those whom he (or she) deemed need it. Kind of like Ned Stark in Season 1 of Game of Thrones, but then the obvious problem is that there become way too many cases for the king to handle, and then we wind up with the impersonal system we have now that tries to do the best it can for the most amount of people. I suppose it could be worse, there could be no unemployment benefits for those who lose their job, and you could just be out of luck until you find your next job, or just never find one and have nothing and become homeless. (Many homeless are just people who were stretched so thin that they couldn't afford to miss one paycheck, and then they lost their job). It's sad, and I suppose unemployment benefits ultimately do help to mitigate the problem, albeit in a blunt and inefficient way. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan 

나는 이래서 바보다 ( I am an idiot because....)

I always lament that I did something stupid in the past and regret doing (or not doing) something, but then I lament that I am dwelling on the past and regret the act of regretting it, so it's a double whammy. But sometimes there is value in looking back at one's past decisions to inform future decisions so as to get different results. Sometimes I'll even have a visible reaction while doing a normal task like reading my email or checking my phone because suddenly a regret that I have about something I did several years will pop up in my head, I have a disgusted look on my face, MJ looks up to see what's wrong, sees that I'm just being weird (or an idiot), and goes back to doing what she's doing, as it's become normalized.


1.) I'm an idiot because MJ and I didn't fully live our lives before the pandemic. 2019 was a great year to wrap up the decade, to get out and do fun things, go anywhere in the world, travel, go to restaurants, gather in museums, get on crowded planes to faraway locations......and we definitely had the ability to do that in the summer before she started her nursing program. Instead I spent it all selfishly in New York City by myself on a work project, squandering a golden opportunity for exploration and great memories by doing what I apparently am stuck doing, working and following the stock market. Basically what I'm doing this summer, except it's because we have to due to a global pandemic. Timing is everything, and we (probably more "I") messed that timing up.

2.) I'm an idiot because I didn't shop at Trader Joe's and Costco more before I met MJ. Costco is especially money in car-based communities like Southern California, as it is difficult to get bulk goods in subway and public-transportation communities like New York or DC, but I lived in the suburbs for most of my life and didn't discover the joys and bulk benefits of Costco. Just the ability to  buy and store for long periods of time saves a lot of headache of finding the next meal, deciding what to eat, avoiding cooking.......and I missed out on the pre-pandemic samples! What was I doing! Trader Joe's also had samples and lots of great food ideas to try out. Instead I whiled my days away at Ralph's, Vons, and Chinese supermarkets where raw meat and live fish helped to give a very visceral experience (in a bad way).

3.) I'm an idiot because I resorted to online dating too early. I didn't have the courage to ask women out in my 20's so I used online forum to set up dates, which I now understand to be fear of rejection. It all worked out in the end, but I doubt that those online dates in between of meeting women I barely knew and had no background on enhanced my ability to understand women better or be a better husband. They were just a way to spend Friday night and spend money at a decent restaurant that I could have allocated better.

4.) I am an idiot because I went out running in a 90+ degree heat wave, something not exclusive to our location but applies throughout the US. I didn't get Covid-19 but I did almost get dehydrated. Yet another reason to stay indoors this summer (and gives more ammunition to anti-maskers for not wearing a mask because it's uncomfortable and can't breathe). As much as I'm an idiot for doing certain things, there are definitely people in America more idiotic than me who swear off wearing masks or socially distancing who are convinced that Covid-19 is a hoax. America is definitely a ripe hotbed of Covid not only because of the dense population cities in large cities but because of the pervasive use of smartphones by people who think they are smart and have everything they need, don't trust the news, don't trust other people telling them what to do, and are convinced they are right all the time. Not a good combination to have in any situation but especially dangerous in trying to combat a disease that feeds on that distrust, nonchalance, and know-it-all attitude, whereas a more shall we say cooperative society and less petulant, who follow directions from trusted leaders, would have been able to stop this virus already through the use of masks and disciplined measures.

5.) I am an idiot because I didn't start a Youtube channel in an era where attention and content is increasingly becoming personal and has increasing value. People don't need the major news networks or entertainment networks anymore now that anyone can put anything on their own channel, and a lot of personal channels have just as good content from editing as the most organized networks. Jomboy is a baseball Youtuber who was instrumental in uncovering the Houston Astros cheating scandal last year, Talk to Me in Korean uses its Youtube channel to get a following for their Korean learning websites (they're just fun to watch), all of my favorite past times like watching Survivor, Game of Thrones, and UFC and Japanese dramas all have some Youtubers dedicated to commenting on them.....it's definitely become a mainstream activity, and I just never got into it to establish a following. Probably not too late as any quality content is appreciated, but the time and energy required probably necessitates taking off from my full-time job, which I am not willing to do yet.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan

Stocks and White Sox

After a lengthy delay due to Covid-19 and a worldwide pandemic, it appears Major League Baseball will finally start its season on July 23. During the pause there was some ugly labor negotiations between the MLB and the MLB players' association over prorated salaries and number of games, all giving off the negative image of millionaire players fighting with billionaire owners. It would be reasonable to discourage this kind of behavior by not following the sport anymore and shifting my attention to something more important than baseball, but the truth is I can't......baseball is just part of who I am, who I grew up with. It's a game of numbers, a game of strategy, a game of patience (lots of patience in those 0-0 games), a game of listening to announcers call the game over the radio, a game of hearing the crack of the bat, a game of summer, continuing on when no other major sports are being played, and it's also a game of fantasy baseball, a game I just can't really quit.

In the past few years I've been able to replace some of my enthusiasm for fantasy baseball with stock investing, as they both have the same idea of investing in something, putting one's faith in a stock or player and rooting for them to do well, and the better they do, the better I do. It's kind of like what drew me to Pokemon: collect different Pokemon, see them develop and win battles for you. There's a lot of different strategies in all these games, but there are 2 different schools of thought: 1.) buy low, sell high, and 2.) just go with the winners and stay with a winning horse. The first strategy is the basic tenet of investing, trying to find undervalued stocks and invest in them before they get really good. Easier said than done, as usually there's a reason a stock is down a lot: something fundamentally has shifted about the company, it's balance sheet is bad and it's taking on a lot of debt, it just cut its dividend, or just simply, investors don't like it and don't want to be in it anymore. Currently, those would be represented by the "re-open" stocks that are correlated directly with the opening of the economy: if the economy opens sooner rather than later, they will do well and get back to business. Disney (Disney World just opened this weekend), restaurants (McDonald's), airlines, travel, malls, retail business, are all examples of these: they have been beaten up badly since the pandemic hit, but there's a reasonable thesis that they good go shooting up if and when there's a vaccine that allows the economy to go to normal and the consumer to get back to what they do best, spending. Then there's the winners of the Covid-19 economy, coined the "Covid index" by Jim Cramer (genius founder of the acronym FAANG, which coincidentally are all doing well under the Covid-19 economy). These companies don't need the economy to reopen to do well, in fact they might be benefiting from it, especially Netflix and Amazon, who are growing more quickly than they would have normally due to people being at home. They've come up so much in the last 3 months, so there's a reasonable thesis that they'll dip down at some point or at least stop going up so fast, but sticking with the winners has worked for Amazon since it IPO'ed, going continuously up, up, up basically in the straight line the whole time. Can it ever stop? That's the question I ask myself every day even when it was at 2400 (new all-time high), then 2700, then 3000 (surely that's a psychological stopping point it won't break easily?) until Friday's closing at another all-time high of 3200. (WOW). Other Covid-19 stocks have even crazier moves like Zoom video, Peloton, Docusign, Tesla, the list goes on. Should I stick with those winners?

The same kind of divergence plagues me in fantasy baseball as well. A baseball player comes out of the gate very hot, performing really well with several strong weeks. Does that mean they've changed fundamentally as a player and can be trusted to be good players the rest of the season? Or will an ugly beast called regression (to the mean) rear its ugly head and make that player go back to being a pumpkin? In stock investing there are terms like "hitting a top" or "getting ahead of itself" or "way overbought" or "trading at a high valuation." I often try to buy low at the beginning of a new season (they struggled last year like Kris Bryant, but I believe they'll come back to to their career averages!) but then as the season is playing along I go with the hot hand, believing that baseball players get momentum and "find their groove"/find their swing and will keep going until it stops. It's all very tricky, but trying to find out the answer is what keeps me going, and being right some of the time is what gets me really excited. Investing in stocks and investing in baseball players definitely have some similarities, not least of which is the ability to lure me in and get me invested in their success. Also, it helps to have some money ($$$) on the line to keep me interested: one of the strongest motivators, for stocks it's inherent but for fantasy baseball it also comes with a tinge of bragging rights and championship trophies (since I don't "win" any other competitions in my ripe adult age, I settle on trying to win fantasy championships).

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan

Ochazuke ちゃづけ

Ochazuke is a simple, traditional Japanese dish made by pouring either hot water, dashi, or green tea over cooked rice, and I've never had it. But I do know I love soup over rice, a reminder for me that of how easy simple combinations can lead to great taste without a lot of hassle. My parents always make some sort of soup as part of their dinner preparation, something I envy tremendously given the extra steps it adds to an already busy schedule. (Seriously, who can take an hour to cook 3 dishes AND was the dishes after that? Not to mention taking the time to actually eat). But soup soaking up the rice and seeping the taste of the soup into the rice really hits the spot; I suspect that's the idea of ochazuke having never had it, to inject the blandness of rice (but it's very versatile! Can have it with almost anything) with something rich and flavorful. Recently working 12-hour days I've been at maximum-burn out and minimum-hassle mode, so getting something done quick in the kitchen has been essential especially during a pandemic. One easy dish MJ and I make is avocado with rice and teriyaki soy sauce, mix all 3 together and scarf down.

The Japanese often eat ochazuke with some sort of topping, like furikake, seaweed, salted salmon, etc. (something lightly salted is usually the idea). I'm also fine with just soy sauce and rice, but I find he subtlety of furikake and seaweed are good substitutes for the in-your-face punch of soy sauce (or worse, wasabi). Subtlety...is a new thing for me in my diet. Fish has been a great source of protein for me to cut out the heavy meats and the stigma of eating red meat but still getting the texture and wholesome feeling of meat, while Beyond Meat feels and looks the most like red meat while not even being in the same food group.

If I get anything out of this pandemic other than some relief from my waistline (amazing how a New York on-the-go diet of sandwiches, bagels, rice bowls, and pizza compares to cooking at home) it's the newfound ability to add things together, experiment, and find new, unexpected combos that work, like creating food chemistry (add the blue liquid with the red liquid and get a purple compound with bubbles!). Sometimes they don't work out, like broccoli with instant ramen mixture (who knew!) but I've surprised myself with some of the things I can find tasty: sweet potato with kimchi (actually a Korean staple food), peppers with sausages, cod with cauliflower (rolls off the tongue). Everything also tastes better with some sparking water to wash it down with (and just as effective to wash away the taste of anything bad).

That's probably how all food combinations including ochazuke started, with people trying new things and combinations.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan

Hunger (열망, 飢え, 饥饿)

I watched a Korean movie last night on Rotten Tomatoes called "Burning" (버닝) about a man who struggles with identity, family troubles, lack of economic resources, and being generally displaced within the Korean society. This main protagonist meets a girl who he grew up with but has no recollection of, who he falls in love with gradually. Pretty standard setup, right? Except it gets really dark and weird in a Haruki Murakami way (as MJ would say, in a BAD way), a rich Gatsby-like man shows up to start a relationship with a girl, and then it becomes sort of a mystery/stalker thriller towards the end. The movie was full of symbolism and literary tools that went way over my head after working a 12-hour shift at home on the July 4th holiday with fireworks booming all around our apartment (I've started to do a 180-degree shift on fireworks, btw), I'm fine with professionally conducted fireworks displays with music like at a baseball stadium or organized by a city, but private fireworks going off randomly and illegally just disturbs the peace. I'm just glad I don't own a dog that would go crazy once every year on July 4th). One profound passage, however, stood out when the female protagonist (I've been told I shouldn't use the word "female" towards people nowadays in the sensitivity-of-words movement, even though "Karen" seems to be thrown around quite liberally) describes going to Africa and understanding Little Hunger and a Great Hunger, with Little Hunger just being normal hunger satiated by consumption of food, but the Great Hunger being a yearning for the meaning of life, to make sense of it all and why we are all here. 

I've always heard about this Great Hunger and it sounds very neat and a noble ideal to aspire to, but I'm not sure I would waste my time trying to find it. Sounds a lot like hoity-toity artistic pieces saying they are representing something but me just seeing a white line on a black background, with 2 circles in the corner or something. I feel like I have already discovered the meaning of life, satiated that hunger, is to be generally happy while surviving as best as one can, then if I have extra resources like wealth or time I'll try to give some to other people. That's pretty much the extent of what I can in terms of addressing the meaning of life. I think many of us would love to go through a thrilling intellectual exercise about the meaning of life and strive to achieve our ideals, but those don't pay the bills and don't necessarily make us happy, and there's no endpoint or goal in sight. It's a bit like people who set out to change the world: they come up with noble ideas and goals and ambitions and set out to achieve them, and their heart is in the right place, but then when actually executing them they find that their ideals and ambitions might be compromised, or that they conflict with other morals and ideals that seem equally righteous and it becomes a zero sum game of you can have one but not the other, so you end up going against another ideal. Or their ideals are corrupted by other people who use them as a force to achieve their goals, a bit like the Black Lives Matter movement that has turned one very noble ideal (enforce that black peoples' lives matter and should not be valued less than lives of others by the police and other groups) into a movement that condemns everyone who tries to say anything against them and denounces all critics as being racist. 

More than just being political, though, I just think human beings are limited in what we can understand about the meaning of life. It's kind of like one of the messages n Burning (a movie that I skipped through despite its 95% Rotten Tomatoes score because I kind of figured its value was in its hoity-toity-ness) where we're born, we live, and die, but it's as if we never existed. There's very little we can do during that time other than just survive (most of us don't have financial resources and time to do much of anything) and before we realize it we've lived most of our lives without making much of an impact. But that goes for everyone; even great political leaders and army generals and iconic writers and artists; their impact is on display in museums and history books, but do they really make that much of an impact in the great scheme of things? Unfortunately, we're closer to animals or every other living creature in that respect: we're simply given life for a short period of time, we live it the best we can, and maybe it's actually a simulation and we go on to some form of life outside of the simulation afterwards. We're not gods or some almighty beings who can shift life somehow to satiate or Great Hunger. We just remain forever hungry, some more than others. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan 

한글 패치 (Korean Patch)

A "Korean patch" is someone who was not born and raised in Korea but knows Korean really well, almost like they put a patch on themselves that magically gave them Korean speaking powers. I wish they really did have a patch or a microchip to implant into my brain to learn Korean, but I'm trying my best to do so on my own, and with the help of a nifty website called "Talk to Me in Korean." If I ever created my own business I'd want it to be run like Talk to Me in Korean, with a state-of-the-art website that tracks one's progress and provides hundreds of lessons (some video, some audio), but also a Youtube channel that updates every day or so to stay in the mind of loyal subscribers. Most importantly, though, the creator of the website adheres to the rule that learning a language has to be fun, or else people lose motivation quickly and abandon ship halfway through, forfeiting all the progress they had made until then because language learning is like dieting, you need to stick with it every day and exercise every day to keep the brain in that mode. They also have cool explanations of words like Korean patch to have it stick out in one's mind, rather than the 15 different ways to say "to see" or "to stay."

MJ has a classmate in her nursing program who wants to study Korean and had even learned Korean as a child, just didn't stick with it and didn't get over the hump of actually learning it. She just wants other people to teach her, as if there was some sort of magical patch a native Korean speaker can give to a learner. In fact, it's probably harder for a native speaker to teach a brand new speaker their own language, because native speakers just know it naturally, they didn't even need to learn the rules. I couldn't describe all the rules of English and its exceptions if I tried; it takes some real skill to dig into one's own language and learn all the nuances of it, and then also try to make it as fun as possible to a new speaker. Of course one can try to memorize all Korean words by rote memorization, in fact there's tons of books and videos that just give 2000 most common words, go ahead and memorize them, but it is NOT easy to sit down and just try to digest them all in one session, not when Facebook and Youtube (not to mention the Robinhood app when the Nasdaq and E-commerce stocks hit all-time highs this week in front of July 4th- the time-honored July 4th trade) for trying to memorize all the words. It's the videos and funny situations and actual usage and going through the situation of using it that makes us really learn a word. I remember first learning Japanese and having a hard time saying anything in front of my Japanese colleagues, but word by word I spit out some things that I was learning, and each time I said something new I was so nervous to use it that when I did use it, the native speaker actually understanding it made me get such an adrenaline high that it was like remembering the first time I played dodgeball all over again, or the first (and only time) I ran a marathon.

Which is the whole premise of Talk to Me in Korean. So many memories. But the website's name itself is a good reminder for practice: I need to talk to someone in Korean, and luckily I know someone really near and dear to me who I spend almost 24/7 in lockdown with, and whom I hope to share many memories (not just to retain new words I learn like Korean patch).