Fashion (时尚, ファッション, 패션)

Currently hooked on: "Yesterday Once More" by Karen Carpenter. Holy guacamole. When I'm hooked on a song, MJ is likely too, and so we just spend most of the day humming that song intermittently.  

I may be a bit of a Jeopardy snob, but like basketball or other sports, I like to see the game of Jeopardy played well, and "may the best player win." Which is why I was frustrated at last night's Final Jeopardy question, with all 3 contestants all with about the same score going in at around $10,000 or $11,000 and the category of US city names: "Adopted in 1845, the name of this state capital is a feminized form of a big body of water." A lot of times Jeopardy will ask a question in the first 2 rounds that is a specific person or item or name of something that I've never heard of before, so I will have no guess, plus the fact you only get seconds of time to think about the clue before someone else has rung in or the clue goes away, it's perfectly acceptable to skip on the clue and avoid losing points for a wrong answer, and contestants are not penalized for not answering (kind of like the SAT way back in my junior in high school days of 2004, although I don't know if they still have the same point system). TOTALLY different in final jeopardy, where you set your own wager, often ALL or a substantial amount of your total, you have 30 seconds to answer the clue, and there's no difference between a wrong guess and leaving the answer blank. SO JUST GUESS! In this case the 2 ladies in second and third didn't write anything, and the returning champion (a college student from Towson, Maryland, who might be more familiar with SAT-type scoring) actually scrolled down a guess, Annapolis (capital of Maryland). Answer was Altanta, which was a surprisingly hard clue for me too because I started with states in the Midwest due to the proximity of the Great Lakes there and focused more on the "capitals" part of the clue, trying to scroll frantically through all 50 in my head, but the rabbit hole the viewer should have went down was "big body of water"- when Jeopardy says "this end of the alphabet word" it usually is "Z," not just a letter close to the end, so big body of water had to mean REALLY big, like an ocean, and if you started going down oceans you'd have would up at Atlantic = Atlanta, Georgia pretty quickly. 

STILL! That's not the point! The 2 contestants need to write down SOMETHING, especially when it's narrowed down to 50, and they likely knew all or virtually all 50. Pick one that sounds feminie and just write it down! I finally settled on "Augusta, Maine" knowing it wasn't right and MJ made the better guess of "Olympia, Washington," which were feminine, but at least we took a shot! It's like a basketball team having the ball with 5 seconds left down 2 points, and just letting the shot clock expire without taking a shot. Erg! Frustrating, but I still love Jeopardy. Better than basketball and more compact, MJ and I can get through 61 questions in around 20 minutes. Efficiency. 

Fashion has always been a weakness of mine, both in breadth of knowledge as well as application (physical appearance), but I gained some appreciation of the role of fashion in history and American/world culture by reading about the most famous fashion designers, from Levi creating jeans for farm workers so they could work more comfortably, to Valentino creating wedding dresses, to Stella McCartney creating all vegan (non-animal) designed clothing, to designers producing dresses for fashion icons like Princess Diana (Gianna Versace), Michelle Obama, Jean Harlow, Audrey Hepburn (Herbert du Givenchy), etc. Many of the classy films I've seen with fashionable woman were designed by iconic designers, and they can shape what entire decades of people look like, so they really mold into the "fabric" (pun intended) of society and history. 

Fashion also is another art form. I know like the bare minimum of fashion terms like "haute couture" or "atelier" or "off-the-rack" (basically where I've lived for every piece of clothing), but I do understand that the pieces the designers come up with are more elegant and sophisticated than a T-shirt, some designers design one specific dress or clothing to fit the exact contours of a movie star or model's body shape to accentuate all the curvers, so there definitely is an art to squeezing a statement or an art form onto one's body. Also, fashion shows are pretty cool, models walking down the runway with so many birght colors, different materials, covering different areas of their body.....to compare it to my world it'd be like watching baseball players exhibit their best skills like hitting the ball really far, but also being able to throw the ball REALLY far and really fast, and catching balls that are REALLY far away from them. The best designers not only wow us but inspire us to think beyond the accepted fashions of the day. I just wish I understood that world better. 

Hedonic treadmill

 I learned a term yesterday that I can't believe I didn't encounter in AP psychology or any other psychological studies since: the hedonic treadmill, referring to the tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. 

I have to admit that as bizarre as this sounds, it has obvious applications in my life: Even after strongly negative events like my grandfather passing away last year, I slept on it for a few nights and sadly went back to a relatively stable of happiness, going back to my work the next day and just returning to normalcy, no drastic change in my life or some sort of epiphany about the meaning of it all. It's like my body/brain just got back on the treadmill and kept pumping out life and gettng back to the business of it. On the flip side, and this is where I think the hedonic treadmill reall applies, even if a really awesome thing happens for me, I accept it in the moment and am really happy about it, but then that new reality becomes the new normal and I'm already on to the next thing. Even if made 10% in stocks the previous year, I'm not content with that gain, I'm already looking forward to the next way to make money. Probably happens with money for most people, the more we make, the more we want to make more, no matter how hard we try to gain in increase in happiness, we remain the same level of happy. (Maybe that's why people say money can't buy happiness, because even if you do get more money, you're not that much happier!) Also, no wonder some lottery winners try to win the lottery again, they're not satisfied with the money they won the first time! 

It also makes a ton of sense why we enjoy things the most the first time.....that first dodgeball game I played, the first season of fantasy baseball, the first awesome detective novel, that first excitement of learning a new language. After that first experience we get used to that happiness level, and anything that's similar to it won't give us that jump from never having it to having it. (Sounds so much like drugs, I'm so glad I never got into drugs and built up a tolerance for things so that it'd take more and more of a drug to get a high). 

Sensory overload is another form of hedonic treadmill, where we keep wanting to get the next Youtube video, the next Facebook news feed item, move on to the next podcast. 

The definition I heard on the Omnibus podcast was actually in eating foods, where adding more and more salt or making food spicier will eventually run out of utility as we get too used to the strong tastes of those particular additions. I kind of already knew that, where we get addicted to sugar and keep wanting more and more sugar and build up a tolerance to it. MJ needs more coffee to get the effect of waking up, where my tolerance is super low. On the flip side, MJ has also tried to keep our diet low in salt, something that I never paid attention to in my twenties but definitely recognize the necessity of now. Salt can make tons of food tasty and appeals to our taste buds, but oh boy does it do damage to our bodies if consumed excessively, as well as causing us to run extra laps on that hedonic treadmill and not being satisfied by light, organic-tasting dishes. (There's a good food that works well without salt, you guessed it: tofu). 

My takeaway from this concept is to appreciate the good things that happened every day, every month, every year! I am definitely guilty of being one of those people who never "counts his blessings" and take the good things that happen to me for granted and only obsess over what I didn't get, what I can get next to make myself happy. Maybe get off the treadmill once in a while and take a shower, let the mind and body recover and enjoy itself! 

Go West, Young Man

 A famous quote by Horace Greeley, an American author and newspaper man of the 1800s, I always misinterpreted this quote as meaning "go and have adventures as a young man" instead of its actual meaning of manifest destiny. It's still a valid message, though, and only as a soon-to-be-exactly-in-his-mid-thirties-man stuck at home working for the majority of his life, it's a great reminder to try out new things and experience as much as possible, because one day we won't be able to due to time restrictions, baby responsibilities, job duties, physical changes, or simply just being set in one's ways and not being able to go back to that mindset of tearing up the world.

I value all the ASB (Alternative Spring Break) trips I took during college and in law school, but at the same time I berate myself for being obsessed with the March Madness basketball tournament back then that I snuck away from the group in Seattle and Orcas Island (two great areas) to go to an Internet cafe to check my fantasy basketball teams and complete my bracket. Fantasy basketball is fake and college basketball will live on, but those ASB trips and times of youthfulness and hanging out with other college students with similar ideals is once-in-a-lifetime. Not my proudest moment. Similarly, in my mid-twenties I lived for 2 months in late summer in the city of Philadelphia. I worked 40 hours during the week in the city, but otherwise I had all the free time in the world to explore the city, run to University of Pennsylvania (great campus location), run to the Museum of Art and climb up and down the Rocky steps, run along the Schukyll River (still not sure how to pronounce it). There was one Saturday I felt really adventurous where I rented a bike and rode it all the way to Valley Forge, the famous Continental Army campsite during the winter of 1777-1778 led by George Washington, which was a 26 mile journey from Philadelphia. An unforgettable journey, just enjoying the sights and sounds of the trail and being free as a bird; little do you know at those times how rare those moments come by and that you'll look back fondly back at that experience, even though at the time I was thirsty, sweaty, and fighting a dying iPhone battery. At the end of the 2 months I had an option to stay in Philadelphia for longer to explore, but due to some unimportant agreement I made with a law school friend of living together in L.A. I decided to go back and leave the adventure behind. Little did I know that I closing the door to my adventurous life behind. 

On a more positive note, I went back to Philadelphia this past weekend as part of cherry blossom viewing (which I realized was a little too early), but the river's still there, the Robert Indiana LOVE statue is still there, and I even found new things to enjoy (the Barnes foundation in the heart of the city is spectacular, as is the vegan Chinese restaurant right next to it). But if I hadn't taken that Valley Forge bike trip or even agreed to go to Philadelphia on that work trip in the first place, I'd never have forged (get it?) those memories in the first place, which is why it's important to "Go West, Young Man!" when you still can.  

But then again, don't go TOO extreme like Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos. In what must be the umpteenth portrayal of her life and creation of the blood-testing company because her life is just so weird, Amanda Seyfried plays her in the Hulu mini-series "Dropout." (audiences must love scandal, because FX's American Crime Story is out too at the same time with Impeachment, the story of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton). She was 18 when she went to China and participatedd in a Mandarin immersion program (great direction!) but then dropped out of Stanford, started her own company at age 20 and raised money from investors like Larry Ellison and Don Lucas... but also was clearly out of her element and made bad investments along the way. 

IKEA furniture assembly

 No matter how much they get mocked like in the movie "Five Hundred Days of Summer," where Joseph Gorden Levitt and Zoe Deschanel lie down on IKEA furniture, or the popular joke not to take your significant other to IKEA because it's where a big fight will happen (getting types of furniture appears to expose the couple's flaws and differences of opinion on things like color, type of wood, type of furniture they want to get), IKEA is an institution: the blue and yellow colors (coincidentally also the colors of the Ukraine flag, an often-seen symbol nowadays in defiance of Putin and Russia's advances against Ukraine), the Swedish meatballs, the popular showrooms that I like to wander around in dreaming that one day our home can be as well decorated as their rooms (or at least, as neat and without boxes lying around). 

MJ has moved on to some other (higher-end, aka more expensive but also admittedly higher quality) brands of furniture for our new home, but she's still willing to visit old pastures at IKEA for particular shelves.....her favorite now is the roller shelf (IKEA name they give it is Novorasok, which sounds like the Russian city Novosibirsk, a major city on the Trans-Siberian highway) that has 3 layers, holds all kinds of stuff, and you can just wheel it away scott-free to another location within our home; if only all our troubles could just so magically be wheeled away. They're also pretty handy to use during moving, which we've done plenty of times and learned the hard way from. 

There's one more institution of IKEA that sparks some joy at least temporarily: the assembly process. It's like a building-block exercise for adults who still crave the years of Lego and the sound of those pieces that go "click," (Lego also started in a Nordic country, Denmark, and Tetris was made by a Soviet software engineer, making me wonder if they have some expertise over in that area of the world to get people to enjoy building). Case in point, I just helped MJ assemble a "Novorasok" where the hardest part was pushing in a plastic screw into another screw to fasten in the wood pieces together, and it hurt my thumb to push the screw in as hard as I could, but it was all worth it when I got that satisfying "click" at the end of the push signaling that the screw fit in correctly, a sound of accomplishment, success, and passport to go onto the next step. Human beings all crave progress, and IKEA's "click" and its instructions providing step by step instructions really plays off our satisfaction at being able to follow even the simplest of steps. As someone who never worked well with his hands or did well in home economics or wood shop class, it gives me a cheap thrill to be able to assemble something, ANYTHING, that yields a usable product with utility. Even if my thumb hurts the next morning. 

Also, I reiterate my stance on abolishing daylight savings time: MJ was reluctant to go to work at the hospital (more reluctant than she normally is) because there might just be an extra heart patient whose condition got just a little worse from having to switch clocks during daylight savings time and "springing forward," thus losing an hour. That losing an hour really is devastating; it's just like stocks; we're all happy to gain an hour or gain money, but that thrill dissipates easily, and is much outweighed by the agony of loss (of money in stocks) and of losing an hour, which we did this weekend. NOT WORTH IT! 

The Magic of Tofu

 2 consecutive posts with "magic" in the title...seems like I'm resorting to deseperate measures to try to get the stock market to turn around, but there's still no bottom in sight after Putin invaded Ukraine, and inflation problems abound in the market, gas problems are at all time highs (remember when oil was trading at negative 37 dollars in April 2020 right after the pandemic? That was a good time to go on a road trip.......

Last weekend, MJ and I went to one of our favorite restaurants in one of our favorite cities.....Chicago. We've had the dry chili pepper chicken dish many times there, but we changed up the menu this time with a slight substitution: chicken to tofu. Flawless transition, didn't miss any of the dry chili taste we came for, and at the end of the meal we felt guilt free. The waitress serving us gave us a quizzical look when we also ordered the Mapo tofu (this was a Chinese restaurant after all and I don't think she was used to people ordering 3 dishes without meat in them), but the U.S. and the world in general seems to be warming up to the idea of having less meat consumption. I've always liked tofu, especially the way my mom cooks it with with chives, but I never appreciated its ability to replace meat as a staple protein. Ironically, I grew up in the state with the highest production of soybeans (Illinois), but I was always too obsessed with meats like chicken, beef, and pork to give tofu its proper due. Now as MJ has transitioned to (almost) completely vegan, our refrigerator is consistently stocked with boxes stacked on boxes of tofu. Now armed with a Tofuture Tofu Press (listed as low as $9.99 on Amazon!) it's actually a pretty satisfying feeling to press all the excess liquid out of a regularly packed square of tofu and get the compact, firm texture that my taste buds at least can pass off as a meat substitute. I find that many vegan products, be it Impossible foods, beyond burgers, and a bunch of Whole foods vegan brands, use soy as the meat substitute as well, 

Actionable advice? Maybe buy soybean stock? I wouldn't bet the farm on it with the way the market is now, and given the drastic 80%-90% value in the stocks of Beyond Meat and Oatly just in the last year, maybe hold off. Or maybe just hold off on getting stock advice from me, who foolishly held on to stocks even after the Federal Reserve announced a tightening plan in November, when the market peaked and has been steadily going down since, trimming a lot of portfolios violently. Oh but Lockheed Martin (defense stocks) and gold has been going up! 

Speaking of Chicago, I've mentioned this before, but I lament my inability in younger years to appreciate the splendor and gem right in the middle of Lake Shore Drive that is the Art Institute of Chicago. The area around it is full of beauty including the Bean on one side, Lake Michigan on another, fantastic architecture of the Chicago downtown, and then the newly developing South Loop area (including Soldier Field on another). And that's before you even walk in, rivaling the environment of the likes of the Met (Upper East Side, Central Park), the Whitney Museum (the Chelsea district in Manhattan), the Getty Museum (set atop a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean). MJ and I stared at the giant mural painting of Paris on a rainy day, by Gustave Caillebotte, a famous painting that I've seen many times before but never cared to examine more carefully, wondering if we had gone past that road in actual Paris. If the movie "Night at the Museum" had a spin-off (it had an ill-fated sequel already) to "Night at the Art Museum), it would be a delight to have it set at the Art Institute with the characters from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks explaining what they were doing in the restaurant, the American Gothic dentist and his wife giving interviews while holding the pitchfork, and the parkgoers on that one Sunday on the Isle of the Grande Jatte (by Seurat) wearing their fancy clothing and having a monkey on a leash (that was a little jarring and weird, to be honest). I think my appreciation of the museum likely reflects my transition to a more refined taste of liking more sophisticated ideas and concepts like art, music, movies, and other entertainment for their literary/artistic merit rather than just for the very human instincts I try to placate by consumming action films, comic books, etc. And maybe the tofu also reflects my refined taste, in a culinary way! But then again, later that night after the Art Institute I also watched UFC mixed martial fights where men competed in savage, violent hand-to-hand combat against one another, so who knows.