Stopping By Books on a Snowy Evening- By Robert (Not Frost) Yan

 The 1922 poem referenced here is the one by Robert Frost "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," one of the most referenced poems in literary history but not even Frost's most famous (Road Not Taken arguably, I often get the 2 mixed up to be honest). 

Something about winter (the long nights, heated homes, and unappealing thought of going outside, maybe) always puts me in the mood to read books, or "stop by books" if I'm trying to be literary like Frost (what a literary first name, by the way, Robert was born to be an artist/writer). The snow outside falling making it a quiet evening (if you don't count the incessant car alarm that went off down the street) and curling up with a book on the couch without worries of work, the stock market, or the future. Just myself and the book in front me, which happened to be "The Year of Magical Thinking" by the late great Joan Didion, who tragically passed away earlier this year along with a bunch of famous people like Sidney Poitier, Bob Saget, and Barbara White. Yea January's been quite a rough month. Fittingly, The Year of Magical Thinking is about Joan coping with her husband's sudden and shocking death, finding herself alone without her longtime partner whom she confided in and shared her literary talents with. I now understand the feeling of having a partner whom I can confide everything in and share interests; the book itself was one MJ bought but I found interesting and started to read after seeing it in her pile. 

Back to reading, though, there's something just comforting about sitting in a quiet place to read. I didn't realize this aesthetic pleasure before, likely because it seems nerdy and I was so insecure about myself I didn't want to add another piccadilly others could tease me for, but the setting of where one reads is important too. In college I sat one glorious afternoon outside in the engineering quad at the University of Illinois as the sun rose and set reading an entire book cover to cover (it was a Percy Jackson page-turner, so no great feat) but I got exposed to the idea of reading settings by visiting Powell's Bookstore in Portland with MJ, one of the highlights of our journeys together. Maybe post-pandemic plans need to include traveling the country visiting different bookstores (call it Stopping by Bookstores on a Snowy Evening). There are bookstores apparently that have cats guarding the books against mice and bugs like Amelia at the Spiral Bookcase in Philadelphia. Really a lost aesthetic, reading in America. It'd be nice if everyone reverted to healthy brain activities of reading and educating oneself or just reading for fun, but we've went a different way of Iphones in everyone's laps, not books. And shorter attention spans. 

Alas, the time for preaching is over, for I have promises to keep, and pages of Joan Didion's book to go before I sleep. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan 

The Scoville Scale of Ovulation

 The Scoville Scale was created to gauge the spiciness of peppers, and one look at the components of the scale is rather intimidating, from the baby spiciness levels of "banana pepper" and cubanelle" at the bottom of scale to escalating spiciness and redness of the color gradation used, the names get scarier like roller coaster rides, "Habanero," "Cayenne," the "Naga Viper" near the top, but at the very very top of the scale it's not even red anymore, it's black with something called "law enforcement grade" hinting that the peppers are so spicy they may be criminal, like "Carolina Reaper" and "Dragon's breath." Kind of a fun read unless I ever have to sample any of them (I don't). I'm already pretty overheated after just a few drops of Trader Joe's Habanero Hot Sauce, and even after consuming the vegan egg I eat it with (great combination, by the way) I can still taste the spiciness in other things I eat afterwards, and it really takes a few other dishes to drown it out. 

If someone created a Scoville scale for the anxiety I feel when stocks are going down, there'd be similar gradation of totally relaxed at the bottom (when stocks are sailing along, 11-day winning streaks on the Dow, etc.) and it's Placid Bobby, versus the total confusion and disarray of the top levels of anxiety, "Panic Button" and "Desperation Mode." Oh yea, it's called the VIX, or volatility index, which nicely measures that fear and panic.

I also wish there was an ovulation scale for potential mothers who are trying to conceive, where there'd be a scale of "completely barren, no eggs forming yet" and on the day of ovulation, "96% fertile! Now's the time!" With all the apps on our phones, it's a wonder we haven't created these type of scale and alert system to do one of the most important things humans do in their lives: procreate. For someone who has important women in his life, I was blissfully unaware of how the ovulation process works; now as MJ and I are planning the process, I've gone from 0 to somewhere closer to 100 than zero in the process. Still fuzzy on the details, but apparently women are generally most fertile 12 to 14 days after the first day of their period.......BUT that's only if said lady is on a normal 28 day cycle, and even earlier if she's on a faster 21-day cycle or is just early that month. There's also the fact that the sperm doesn't have to arive exactly on time on the day of ovulation: it can be early and waiting there before the ovulation starts, sperm being able to survive up to 5-6 days apparently. So I kind of compare it to catching the train: there's a scheduled departure time, but me (the sperm/ passenger in this equation) can get there earlier and wait as long as it's not too early and lose patience, because the train will leave right on time when it's scheduled, and there's no getting on after it's left the station. Then again, the train might not get to the station on time neither, it can be late, OR it can be early, but instead of having to wait for the departure time like most train stations, the ovulation train doesn't wait for anybody and just leaves even if here's no passenger on board. (This is what I suspect happened to MJ and I this past month, the passenger arrived on time but the train had already left the station, unexpectedly). Luckily for us and potential parents everywhere, there's usually another train that comes the next month again (not infinitely though), and it's probably a good idea to have the passenger waiting at the station ready to go next time. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan 

Greed is Bad (贪婪, 탐욕)

One of the more provocative and memorable movies for me was the movie "Seven" directed by David Fincher, starring Kevin Spacey (had some seven deadly sins of his own in real life), Brad Pitt, and Morgan Freeman, with the plot revolving around the well known seven deadly sins (fun fact: not mentioned in the Bible, they are just Christian teachings). Pride, Greed, lust, envy, wrath, gluttony, and sloth. I'm certainly guilty of all of them from time to time to some degree. I was very proud of myself in high school and thought I was hot stuff, but college and then law school and then the real world was a series of ego-deflating experiences; I have had lust but that's tempered now that I've met my one and only; I am very envious of other people's successes and often wish I could have other people's beauty, brains, singing abilities, etc., but with some relative success I've been able to tone that down a bit (the best cure for envy is your own success), I'm the opposite of wrath in most situations except if you've angered me in dodgeball and then it's a personal battle, I've done my fair share of eating too much but I have a pretty fixed diet now that I don't stray from and try not to waste food, and sloth.....well, yes, if you consider sleeping and trying to get 8 hours every night sloth. Otherwise I'm pretty diligent. 

The big one for me towering above all the others is greed. Something about my childhood, or my personality, or my decisionmaking makes me super greedy, especially about money. It's a cliche, but I just can't get enough of it, and the I hate parting with it, mainly because that means I'm doing the opposite of accumulating it. There is no upper limit, I am insatiable when it comes to money, to a fault, especially the stock market. No matter how many times I get the bitter lesson of a huge drop in the stock market, I can never learn from that lesson the next time stocks are at all-time highs and just sell some at the top, which I never do. I can say that I will do it next time, but when the time comes, I always just shrug it off and think that stocks will keep going higher. 

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with the pursuit of money as long as you're working hard and making wise investments, but it's when you're pursuing more money at the expense of protecting the downside that you run a lot risk, and that's often reflected in the stock market and (much more so) gambling. Whereas working overtime at a job doesn't have any downsides to money except I guess from a health standpoint of overworking yourself until you get sick, letting big gains in the stock market hang out there in hopes of making even more money can be hugely detrimental because it allows the stock to go back down and actually lose money; that's where a flood-stop (like the flood-stop in homes preventing pipes from letting off too much water) would be useful metaphorically to have to set limits to the downside. (They actually have this in the stock market called stop-loss, but I just never set them on the way up because my head is so high in the clouds I don't even consider that stocks will go down that far, plus the misinformed belief that as soon as I sell a stock, it'll bounce up a lot higher than where I sold it and I'll have sold for nothing). This is actually a valid reason in the last few years because most of the dips in the market have been followed up by a sharp spring back up, but this is a trap as  once investors get accustomed to that feeling, they're vulnerable to that huge nosedive down and don't protect themselves against it. That's where we are in a month of heavy losses ever since the calendar flipped and the QQQ index hit 403 but dipped sharply especially this week to 351, the ever-reliable AMZN dipped from 3300+ to 2800+ below 52-week support levels, NFLX lost 20% in one day due to reporting OK earnings but terrible guidance on future subscriptions, pulling most everything down with it as the "pandemic" stocks are all getting hammered because, well, we're coming out of the pandemic soon. (Docusign, Peloton, Roku, Zoom, Teledoc, etc., etc.) This 2-year "bubble" of inflated tech stocks is being stamped out, the party's over but I'm still in the dance hall with the lights out by myself I guess......All by myself. (Great Celine Dion song). 

Trans (变性人, トランスジェンダー, 트랜스 젠더)

 I have a lot to learn about the LGBT community in general, but especially about the trans community. I just recently differentiated between "transgender" and "transsexual," for instance, and I think there is a subtle negative connotation in some people's minds associated with "trans," and that could simply be due to the word "transvestite." As a child, I wrongly gave that a negative image just because it was something I didn't understand, and the word itself is a particularly extreme word with extreme sounding syllables. 

Recently, an openly trans woman, Amy Schneider, has surpassed James Holzhauer's 32-game winning streak in 2009 by winnin her 33rd game this past Friday (we only found out about it on Friday Jan. 14th, but the episode was actually taped on November 2nd last year, per Jeopardy's method of taping games well in advance of when they air.) Amy's run has given Jeopardy a positive ratings boost as it's one of the highest rated shows on TV right now, as there may be some carryover from 38-game winner Matt Amodio's run earlier this season. Amy is such an impressive player, showing diverse knowledge in all areas, and the gameplay is improved due to her presence (it's always more fun when the contestants actually know the answers), and when even Amy doesn't know an answer, it's usually because it's a very hard clue. More impressive, however, has been Amy's representation of the trans community, and her message to the audience that trans people can do anything, and she dedicated her performances to "that little trans girl nerd out there" not to doubt herself. Amy is a great representation of the trans community not only because of her accomplishment and the positive message that she's spreading, but also not engaging in all the negativity and vitriol online. There are just so many people on the internet with apparently too much free time on their hands shouting "Congrats dude!" and "Great job, Mr. Schneider," among other derogatory comments insinuating that Amy is actually a man. Really makes you wonder how bored or hateful or both some people have to be to go online and seek out this topic and express themselves like this. I can see if people have strong religious beliefs or ideas about biological differences why they want to express themselves, but attacking someone just because they are on TV doing well on a game show. It'd be nice if people had some empathy/sympathy/could imagine what it might be like for other people. 

I watched some more interviews with Amy and she apparently has a girlfriend now, but also an ex-wife who was supportive of her efforts to get on Jeopardy. I wonder how difficult that conversation was for Amy and his wife as she struggled with her own sexual identity and gender. I imagine that there were sacrifices made and a lot of conflict affecting someone who seems to be a very reasonable person and put together. Again, I have little exposure to the trans community except for watching "Orange is the New Black," a few trans facebook friends whom I'm not close friends with, and Amy dominating on Jeopardy. 

On the Jeopardy front, I have to say that as intriguing as Amy's domination storyline is going, it's a little frustrating to see her dominate every single game, getting off to a huge start against her 2 opponents, often taking an insurmountable lead by the end of the Jeopardy! round and easily clinching a run-away game by the end of Double Jeopardy! thus making Final Jeopardy moot, as she's already won. I often wonder whether the level of competition is just a tad lower and whether the other contestants are late on the buzzer all the time or just don't know and letting Amy rip right through categories like a runaway locomotive. This past week, she missed the Final Jeopardy question 4 out of the 5 nights (including a couple relatively easy ones IMO about Vincent Van Gogh's brother and a question essentially asking which 19th century American added a second "S" to his/her surname in 1838........I feel like 30 seconds was enough time to come up with Douglass, Frederick Douglass). So maybe Amy is fading, she's tired, and it's just a matter of time until someone dethrones her. Before that happens though, I'll be watching intently this week (starting tomorrow, MLK Day, a holiday but jeopardy will still air!) not just for the competition, but to learn more about her life as a trans person. 

Carbon Monoxide (一氧化碳, 일산화탄소)

Yesterday I had a heating/air conditioning technician visit our home and take a look at the heating system, since we've been experiencing a lot of cold weather recently (see previous post) and the heater apparently couldnt' keep up with the cold temps, so much so that we constantly felt cold at home despite turing up the target temperature. I know nothing about heating/ air conditioning (along with knowing nothing about car repairs, bicycle repairs, electric wiring, water, gas, basically anything that has to do with utility/ machine maintenance in daily activities, so a technician was needed, even if the appointment had been suspiciously delayed from Monday to Friday because the technician was "sick" (seems like a telltale sign of Covid), so I masked up and luckily the technician was also very diligent about it as well. 

I did NOT know that some air conditioning units, like mine, have a huge furnace in the center of it that looks like a double-piston stove, with a consistent fire heating up the central unit. And it's not the wimpy orange flame, it's the intense-looking blue flame that gets into temperatures I don't even think about. A little nervous about having flames like that turn on every time the heater needs to run, but if that's what is needed to keep the home warm, I'm reluctantly in favor. Next is that air filters needed to be swapped out every 3 months or so......which seems a little bit of an oversell by people in the air/heating industry like auto mechanics telling car owners to get their oil changed more often (JiffyLube always has a SURPRISE! Your car's air filter needs to be changed), but since this is the air that we're breathing in on a day to day basis and especially since I'm at home pretty much 23 hours of the day, investing in frequent fresh air filters seems reasonable. As a baby analogy since MJ and I hope to have a baby, it's like leaving the baby's diaper longer than necessary and letting waste accumulate in it......even if it's not yet ready to throw away, it just feels better to have a fresh bag in. (Unlike garbage and recycling, where MJ insists we fill garbage to the absolute brim before tying it and throwing it away, as the poor bag feels like it will vomit if it gets stuffed with just one more banana peel). 

Another thing that the technician recommended was a carbon monoxide detector, to guard against carbon monoxide poisoning. I didn't know we needed one, nor heard of anyone ever getting one. The technician responded that he recently went to a home where there was a small leak in the gas pipes of this old woman's home who had kids in the home, and unbeknownst to everyone carbon monoxide was leaking out gradually, so that if they had slept one more night without the pipe getting fixed they probably all would have gotten sick and gone to the hospital, even possibly died. "All it takes is one; you hope you don't ever need it." He said. Normally I'd be skeptical, but I felt like (unlike most other service industry interactions where the serviceperson is just chatting you up to get the tip, that this technician was genuinely being nice and giving advice that he would tell a friend, not just a customer.) And the incentives didn't align: he told me to buy carbon monoxide detectors from online or at other stores, not his company or anything. So he wouldn't benefit from that advice except maybe from a good review from me. Can't hurt I guess, and I am a bit nervous about carbon monoxide after having slept in my car on numerous occasions without remembering to roll a window down to let in fresh air; who knows what could have happened if I let the motor run and also shut the windows. I may have cheated the death by carbon monoxide gods already! That'd be tempting fate to run afoul of that situation again. Every year, apparently 430 people die from CO poisoning in the US. That's not a lot in a country of 340 million people, but one is too many, and it seems like it's an easy risk to mitigate out of one's life. 

On that note, it's a good idea to check furnaces and stoves to make sure it's fully off each night before going to bed; with the way we multi-task all the time it's inevitable to forget once in awhile; for me it's leaving the freezer or refrigerator door slightly ajar. By the time I realize it, all the ice cream has melted and I'm crying over spilt milk. 

Bitter Cold (苦寒, 厳寒, 매서운 추위)

 When I was a kid growing up in the "mean suburbs" of Chicagoland, I somehow convinced myself that Chicago's cold was a special kind of cold, that there was nothing like it and I was "toughening myself up" for the future in other environments, that other extreme cold places wouldn't feel so bad after experiencing Chicago. In my mind the Chicago winters chilled to the very bone, the wind had eyes of its own and would get past all protection you had on, past the scarves and hoodies into your face, and water defied the laws of physics and turned into ice faster in Chicago. Whelp, I hate to break it to the child version of myself, but cold places feel pretty similar anywhere you go, and cold is cold is cold. Winter is just this entirely different beast than other seasons, and one thing I didn't notice before is how quiet it is during winter: the lack of people outside, the lack of animals outside especially birds chirping and dogs barking, the lack of helicopters in the sky and leaves blowing in the wind (they've all been blow off by the dead of winter) makes for a pretty quiet scene outside, eerily quiet, like the world has come to a stop during winter and all inhabitants should be indoors hibernating like polar bears. I will say that Chicago's winters had the added dimension of "wind chill factor" which could really turn the weather down substantially, like 10 or even 20 degrees in addition to how cold it already was, and I've never felt that extra burst of bitter coldness anywhere else in the world. Maybe if I go to Wellington, New Zealand (supposedly the windiest place on Earth) in dead of winter they might top it, but perhaps I was onto something back then. 

It's no wonder, then, that the population of the United States is shifting west and south: census data suggested that people were moving away form the Northeast and Midwest to places like Florida, Texas, Utah during the pandemic. Part of that of course is due to the pandemic hitting the most densely populated cities first, as well as the (ahem) less rigid Covid rules in red states like Florida and Texas, but some of that has to be due to the weather. It's why Canada is so much bigger in area than the U.S. but has much fewer inhabitants; the British got the less desirable land as a result of the American Revolution and the War of 1812. I am at a loss as to how people can live sustainably in such frigid conditions year after year, knowing that there's a 100% chance there will be a long winter of at least 3 months where going outside will be a hassle, heating costs will go up, roads will be more difficult to navigate due to snow and other weather conditions.....and the nice skiing only goes so far to compensate for the downsides. It was a certainly a factor when my parents moved the family from Illinois to sunny L.A. when I was a teenager: sure job relocation had a lot ot do with it, but it's hard to say no to L.A. when it's in such a desirable location. And for a guy who does not much like the outfit and clothing game, I get no joy or added satisfaction from having to buy a winter set of clothing and heavy outerwear. There must be some kind of cold-defying gene in some of the Americans whose ancestors came from cold-weather Scandinavia, something my ancestors likely didn't pick up in Southeastern Asia. 

And did I mention the static? I've become OCD about avoiding static now, as I've gotten zapped enough to develop a flinch to it. It's not that physically painful, it's just unpleasant and is really kind of jolting; the worst moment of my day is turning off the car after driving somewhere and thinking of all the static that the car's picked up driving around in the cold, then stepping out and knowing I have to touch the car to shut the door. It's similar to the flinch of needles: the pain itself isn't that bad, but it's just the matter of subjecting myself to it and making myself inflict discomfort on myself; it makes me wince just thinking about it. I'll sure be glad when temperatures get above freezing again. 

Look Back at 2021..Wait, Further. 2011

It's normal for people to look back at the year we just had and reflect, celebrate, and/or commiserate, but for me it's fun to look back at 10 years ago and what I was doing: 2011. The Year of the Rabbit. The year I graduated law school. It's easy to say now in hindsight, but seemingly one of the "golden years" in American history, a time of (at least compared to now) relative peace, the infancy of social media where people were still posting cute pet pictures and just vacation destinations on Facebook, an Obama first term was wrapping with the killing of Osama Bin Laden being a major feather in hat in May 2011, and the U.S. economy was finally, FINALLY, easing its way back to recovery from the 2008 economic collapse. 

Youtube has these videos summing up the best hits of each year, and it's a consensus in the comments: 2011 was a GREAT year for popular music, just hit after hit after hit. This was when I listened a lot to the radio too, and for good reason: so many songs were so catchy and still pop right back into memory as soon as they come on. J-Lo, Katy Perry, Beyonce, Lil Wayne, Eminem......titans of music who are still on top in 2022, but......does anyone know what happened to Taio Cruz? Or Lupe Fiasco? Or Rebecca Black? Time is not kind to one-hit wonders I guess. 

2011 was also probably the last time to get in on the ground floor of a HUGE 10-year + bull market run after the market had hit lows in March 2009......people were worried about Amazon being "overpriced" back then.....and it just kept shocking analysts over and over again. I was a young 20-something who just went through 3 years of law school and 3-years of undergrad (albeit at the cheaper state university option) and was unemployed, so I couldn't invest with any substantial size of cash, but man that was the opportunity of a lifetime to make life-changing amounts of money if you invested in the right stocks (and really, a lot of stocks were the "right stocks" in terms of going up and multiplying in value). No wonder so many people got rich; wealth was easy to find in the stock market in the 2010's as long as you didn't get scared away from ever investing in by the 2008-2009 crash. 

It is really quite a shame that human beings cannot time travel. Obviously the logistics would be ridiculously complicated, but I'm not even talking about trying to change history like kill Baby Hitler or something, just saying it's a shame we can't flip the channel after a devastating year for so many people like 2020 and when the calendar turns, just dial up 2011 again, to lift everyone's spirits and give everyone some hope for a year, allow for some prosperity, then maybe take some of the bad with the good. 2022 is now the 3rd year in a row we're going to be dealing with Covid-19 (2-year anniversary of it hitting the U.S. is coming up!) as we're now in the deepest recesses of the Omicron variant (M.J.'s hospital seems to be redirecting all its resources, including workers' labor, to dealing with Covid patients now, somewhat of a relapse of March 2020 emergency numbers), the blood donation agencies are so desperate for blood they've resorted to calling me directly every day since I'm a consistent donor (I don't have enough blood for all of them!), the heating and venting technician I scheduled today couldn't come because "he got sick" over the weekend, now the code for "tested positive for Covid." My fantasy football commmisioner put his signature line as, "Stay positive, test negative." Hard to stay positive in such dreary times that seems to be a persisent black cloud over everything for 2 years, like it's Seattle during the rainy season except it lasts for 2 years and has no signs of stopping. And it's not like one day there will be a miracle and Covid will just disappear (as former President Trump suggested was a possibility in 2020), it's going to be around with us forever, like an uninvited house guest who has hostilly and openly declared he's setting up camp in the living room. 

Don't get me wrong, 2011 had its fair share of challenges too. The Arab Spring, Fukushima Daiichi incident in Japan coupled with the earthquake, the Anthony Weiner scandal, among others, come to mind, but 10 years later we've almost forgotten some of those: we will never forget the Covid pandemic, ever, and just like in 2001 where everyone remembers where we were when 9/11 happened, we're all know where we were in 2020-2022 when the pandemic happened: stuck at home, mulling over the bad news, for more than 2 years. 2011 never felt so far away. 

Jukebox Zero

 What was I doing in my childhood that I missed out on all the great hit musics of my generation? Granted, I didn't grow up in the Golden Era of music (polls seem to indicate most think it's the 1970's or '80's, with the 90's signaling a shift from rock and roll and the grunge rock in the late 80's to R&B and pop music. My knowledge of pop music seems comically trivial compared to my peers, as I really only remember the biggest, catchiest hits like Britney Spears "Hit Me Baby One More Time" because kids at Saturday Chinese school kept chanting it at each other, or vaguely remembering that everyone wanted to be Eminem in 7th grade and this mysterious character named Slim Shady. Nobody in my circle of friends or classmates talked about the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana, Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, etc., etc. Was I in the most music-culturally deaf school/community in the world? I remember knowing a bunch of band/orchestra hits because I was in the orchestra, so "John Williams" and "Hans Zimmer" were household names for me as well as classical composers Mozart, Beethoven, Tsaichovsky.... but I just never picked up CD's or hung out with friends who listened for hours to music; we just focused more on video games, sports, WWE wrestling, and other juvenile pursuits. My heroes were sports stars, not rock stars, and my parents were way too new to America to ditch their Chinese music stars to switch to alternative rock and join the Woodstock generation. So I had nothing; the first pop CD I ever bought was Pink's "I'm Not Dead" Album in 2006. My freshman college roommate listened to a fairly diverse set of music like the Mommas and the Papas, but he was more into movies and becoming a comedian, so healthy portions of stand-up comedy by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy were on the play menu every night. In my spare time as a kid, I usually stuck my nose in a book, did my homework (why did I do that???) or listened to Cubs sports radio, and rushed out every morning to get the Chicago Tribune......only to flip to the sports section way too early. 

My lack of backgournd led to a big gap in knowledge for me, unfortunatley, and it shows when I watch Jeopardy. Whereas 28-game winner Amy Schneider is quickly climbing the history books (10 games away from tying the Amodio Rodeo!) and making a conscious effort to pick pop music categories first, I cringe and promptly blank at the $200 question (supposedly the easiest question), "California Girls" in 1985, the year he left Van Halen. Who's that, I wonder.... California Girls sounds like a Katy Perry hit, while I know there's an Eddie Van Halen but it can't be that obvious and this isn't "Dumb Answers" category where the answer is usually in the question itself. Only until "David Lee Roth" is revealed do I realize I've heard the name (and seen him on the Joe Rogan podcast) but totally missed out on that time in music history when Van Halen was at the top of their game with "Jump" and "Eruption." 

Now that I'm going back into music history, I'm learning that so many of the hits that I vaguely remember playing at bars, restaurants, and football stadiums all have names attached to them and familiar artists, (or sometimes one-hit wonders), and I'm starting to actually recognize some of them and placing names to the songs, as opposed to just admiring the rhythm or the melody of songs when they came on and just moving on, like I used to do. "Jukebox Hero" by Foreigner, for example, is a distinct melody that's been hammered into my head since I was a teenager, but I just recently looked the song up and found a bunch of other Foreigner hits like "I Want to Know What Love is...." I've of course adopted Lionel Ritchie's hit song catchphrase "Hello....Is it me you're looking for" whenever MJ walks into the room, which I'm sure was a thing back in the day, only like 40 years ago. How do other people remember all the titles and bands and members of the bands? I guess it's one of those things you have to FEEL, not just memorize. It's a lot easier to have lived through that music era and felt those songs in your bones then to try to go back retrospectively and organize them like I'm doing now. That said, it's better late than never, as I can go back to any decade I want and play all the best hits of that era and it's like a flood of recognizable hits just flooding into my brain cells, almost overwhelming my ears with cultural references and clips of songs I've heard in other places or names of musicians I heard other people discussing in passing so naturally they felt like common idioms or household names. I didn't know "John Paul Jones" wasn't just the guy who fought in the War of 1812 against the British but a famous musician for Led Zeppelin.....Wait there's 2 legendary blind African American singers who had hit after hit, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder? Why was Otis Redding really sitting on the dock of the bay? 

MJ and I recently went to a doo-wop concert by a group who had played in the musical "Jersey Boys," the story about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (I had always associated Four Seasons with Vivaldi's composition for orchesra) and they played a bunch of throwback songs that they assumed everyone knew.........I didn't. And one of the performers mentioned he was so proud that his mom dated Smokey Robinson; I had to look up Smokey Robinson. Still learning! Hopefully I'll one day go from being a foreigner to music, a Jukebox Zero, and transform myself into a Jukebox Hero. 

Emergency Room (急救室, 救急処置室, 응급실)

 I get confused by what certain acronyms in the English language, like Cpap (just learned this was continuous positive airway pressure) or EKG, or HHS (Health and Human services), but one ubiquitous acronym that everyone knows is the ER, or emergency room. I remember zero experiences with actually being at the ER luckily, but obviously it's a very important wing of the hospital. I just picked up the book "E.R. Nurses" by James Patterson (new release! in 2021! which means it covers the Covid outbreak) and the plight of nurses during the pandemic seems even grimmer than I thought. Some of the stories about life in the E.R. for nurses is really jaw-dropping and depressing for anyone who's not used to the environment of a hospital, but the sad thing is E.R. nurses get accustomed to all the injuries, the constant rush to the next emergency, like putting out little fires everywhere. Descriptions range from "patients coming in with Covid had at one point about a 50-50 chance of dying," "every single Covid patient who went on the ventilator died," and one ex-military nurse who said he never got nightmares after coming back from the war, but he got nightmares every night after spending time at a Chicago ICU during the pandemic. 

And those were just the stories about Covid.... there were other stories about psychotic patients, a serial killer who came to the hospital with a machete, lots of "coding..." (much different from the document coding I do or the computer coding of other industries) which I now get means a cardiac arrest happening to a patient, which means an emergency that requires the attention of a bunch of nurses and doctors or else the patient might die right then and there. And I get the distinct feeling there's poop.....lots of lots of poop, urine, vomit, and other disgusting body functions, and that's AFTER getting over the sight of blood. It might be a little bit of a skewed picture because the book takes the most vivid and graphic scenes out of the nurses's experiences, basically highlights of their war stories, but I don't think the stories themselves are exaggerated very much; they seem very believable. They certainly seem more believable than the TV series ER, my only previous experience with life in the ER. ER did have real diseases affecting people and blood, operations, emergencies, etc., but they glamorized the operations to neat packages of conflict and resolution all packed into one compact hour. Emergency shift nurses work for 12 hours, often 13-14. And while it's true that unlike other posessions like teaching, where the work continues after regular hours are over, nurses don't take any work home with them and the work stops once they clock out, it seems like the mental baggage from dealing with sick patients, death, and people generally having the worst day of their lives takes a toll on nurses outside of work. And the work often goes longer than expected; can't take breaks and often have to stay longer to finish the work. This description of experiences matches pretty closely with what MJ has had to deal with, in a non-ER unit at the hospital: long hours, lots of work to do, lack of staff to help. 

If it was possible to have more appreciation on top of the already heightened appreciation I have for nurses, I do now. They have really stressful jobs that got even more stressful during the pandemic, where honestly these are jobs that not everyone is fit for, have the emotional stability and fortitude to handle. And yet we expect nurses just to hang in there and keep at it while other jobs in the world are much less stressful and burdensome. It's funny how the world works sometimes; nurses often are at the front lines of life and death situations and comforting people in their last moments and coping with emotional family members, some of the most important things in people's lives, in a job that doesn't get paid nearly as well as some of the cushy jobs in America like bankers, lawyers, CEOs, white-collar workers who don't ever deal with that and require first-class air tickets, fancy corner offices in the big city, etc. while looking down at the "proletariats" or working classes of the world. Something about that is messed up, upsdie down somewhere, people's priorities and perspectives of other people are really messed up, and they need to read stories like the E.R. nurses's stories to get a wake-up call. I sure did.