Hoi Polloi (많이있다, 沢山あります, 有许多)

 Hey! Maybe there's hope for language people after all in a Google Translate world- the term "hoi polloi" means the general masses, commoners (I picked the word from Jeopardy), or as the Chinese/ Japanese/ Korean translators translated it as, "the many." But it generally has a negative connotion and refers to the non-special people like me, with synonyms like "the plebs," "the riffraff," "the masses." That's definitely what I feel like a lot of the time. 

I recently went to my law school reunion (10-year reunion was postponed due to Covid) and it... played out a lot like my high school reunion. The cool people who went to Bar Review and such talked to the cool people, and the others kind of scurried around looking for people to talk to. Few people came up to talk to me except the people who are perceived to be even "less cool" than I am. I kind of got this perception in law school, but it's definitely been confirmed throughout the years since: people will gravitate towards people who are cooler, and they don't want to reach down in popularity and be perceived as lowering themselves, for fear they'll be grouped in that lower class. It's very similar to picking out a lunch table at the high school cafeteria: where you sit defines which class you're in. And all my life I've been in the uncool level, the lower levels of the hoi polloi. 

Maybe others have gotten over it and made peace with it, but for me just once I'd like to be recognized for something by others, to not be ignored and be the center of attention; I've felt that very few times in my life: at my own wedding and kinda/sorta at high school awards ceremony when I was recognized. Otherwise I've just been totally swept into the hoi polloi, the little fish in a big pond, the consumer that companies are trying to market to, the bottom of the totem pole. Perhaps that's why I've always wanted to get on TV (including my current obsession with Jeopardy), to be known for something, and perhaps explaining why I get jealous and butt-hurt by famous people who seem to get famous for no reason, or worse for bad reasons. 

The recognition of my hoi-polloi status came as I was waiting to board a flight onto Delta Airlines recently and found myself once again in Main Cabin 1, along with literally the bottom rung of society- Delta really does a great job of grouping you by status, with the first class boarding first and sitting in the top seats at the front of the plane, and the hoi polloi near the back of the plane with the rest of the peons, so that I look around and the caliber of people around me are not stellar. You are the rung of society that you can afford to pay for or willing to pay for, and on most Delta flights I'm paying the and sitting at the bottom. I feel like the hoi polloi in the stock market too, where it feels rigged against the retail investor like me who doesn't have any inside information whereas Nancy Pelosi's husband is getting inside scoops to sell Nividia well before the big crash in the market. Many speculate the stock market is rigged for the rich and wealthy who just get richer off of it.....now I'm starting to see the truth in it. 

It is kind of depressing, really, when I get these realizations often, without much chance of breaking out of that anonymity, no matter what I do. It's unfortunate that in our society the winners get rewarded so much while the losers get nothing: just like Jeopardy, where the winners of a game get to come back and play again, the losers get very little money and are never heard from again after that game, and the ultra-winners who win tons of money get to come back AGAIN after their long streaks and play for another tournament whose winner yields a lot of money. The winning compounds into more winning. Fame is similar: get famous one time for ANYTHING and it will play for one's whole life; you're invited to things because people know you, you'll bring in a large audience, and because of that large audience you'll be selected for something else; you don't need to qualify to get on Jeopardy, you can just get invited to Celebrity Jeopardy! It's like George Carlin once said, "It's a big club, and you ain’t in it." 

The Year of Musical Thinking

 I've always known I was pretty weak at contemporary music, but it never seemed like an issue until a year ago when I, firmly in my study of all things trivia, realized it was one of my weakest categories. I was never able to identify songs on the radio, at trivia nights my friends could pick out songs that the quizmaster played after about 3 seconds while I was still pondering if the lyrics had started yet (speaking of lyrics I've always had a hard time deciphering the lyrics to songs, maybe because my brain usually focused on the melodies and individual notes when developing as a violin player in classical music orchestras. I understand that most people pick a favorite band or genre of music and develop eternal loves for their favorite bands during high school, but I was too busy reading "Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter" to spend hours just listening to mix tapes or CD's (yup I was early millenials before Ipods), except my tennis buddy Dan got me into Franz Ferdinand (I associated him with the historical figure whose death started WWI), which I liked but unfortunately they weren't the most consequential band. I do remember certain hit summer songs or catchy radio tunes that rang out, like "Backstreet Boys are Back,"Skater Boi," "I'm the Real Slim Shady," "Oops I Did it Again," "Breakaway" (Kelly Clarkson) and "Crazy in Love" in 2004. Yea, that was the era I grew up in. 

Most people REALLY hone in on their music during college with tons of time in dorm rooms and supple minds ready to advance to the next levels of music, but along with my delayed levels of maturity in social life I also had a very immature taste in music, and I remember my co-workers at the summer camp I worked at scoffed at me in 2006 for saying my favorite song was "Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira, then "Umbrella" by Rihanna in 2007. Among the many things I want to go back in time and shake myself for the mid-2000s was "STOP ONLY LISTENING TO THE RADIO and pop stations! Do your own research!" 

No surprise, then, that whenever a 70s classic rock category comes up, how blank my mind went. As much as Jeopardy! can sound like a different language for the uninitiated, those music categories of famous band leaders, matching No. 1 hit songs to their artists, lead singers of each band, those were all foreign to me. I barely knew who the Rolling Stones were, thought CCR was similar to CPR, thought Tina Turner was wonderfully in love with Ike Turner, Whitney Houston was the awesome lady that sang the Bodyguard whom my parents named my sister's middle name after......such wonderful facts, that didn't deal with any of their music at all! 

So about a year ago, after the Squid Game euphoria had died down a bit and my stock market gains were still raging high (RIP), I decided to endeavor on the quest (not Questlove or a Tribe called Quest, which I found were two different things completely) to educate myself on non-classical music throughout the years, or what normal people call "music." First was discovering a resource called the Rolling Stone magazine, both the physical magazine and the online Top 500 albums list......that's a treasure trove of all the hit songs ever, as dense in facts as reading an encyclopedia or just staring at a map for hours. Installing the Shazam app on my phone has created another impulse to check my phone, but this time to gain the valuable insight of whatever song is playing, with the wonderful dopamine rush when I realized that a famous melody I've always known but never knew the name to was associated with a famous band. I subscribed to a music-heavy trivia podcast called "Trivia Time," plus the Omnibus podcast's John Roderick is in a band called the Long Winters and often name-drops other artists like Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit). And for the first time in a long time, I've turned on the local radio Kiss FM-equivalent radio station to see what's playing, and discovered why oldies stations exist: for the nostalgia and harkening back to better musical eras. All together, it's been one of the best self-prescribed classes I've taken, based on my own curriculum and with some of the best study materials ever, the glorious sounds of the last 100 years or so of contemporary music. I feel like it's the Re-Education of Robert Yan (contrast to the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill). And now after that year of musical thinking, once in a while, I can even get a $800 question on music right on Jeopardy. 

Free Fallin' ( 自由下落, 자유 낙하)

 If life is a "just a series of moments" like Matt Damon's character proclaimed in the Kevin Smith-directed movie "Dogma," then I've had my fair share of moments in airports (MJ confused the top layer of LAX, departures, with the downstairs level- arrivals and made me circle around in devastating traffic picking her up from the airport the other day), one of which was earlier this year in February when my friend pronounced it "not a great choice" to play Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'" at an airport.....I agreed because airplanes and airports shouldn't be talking about free falling, but the song may have been a premonition of the stock market, which has been in a free fall for the last month, and other than a few bear-market rallys that sucked me back in and kept my money in the market, in free fall since the beginning of this year. I feel like a drug addict when it comes to stocks: I've been down at the bottom a couple times before and sworn that if I ever made a lot of profit that I'd not be greedy and sell some to preserve profit so I'd never end up at the bottom again.........but of course when I got back on top at the peak I felt invincible, prideful, and that I had plenty of room to buy the dip and keep my money in the market......and lo and behold I'm now at the bottom again. Lesson not learned. 

I really enjoy meeting old friends and chatting with people whom I haven't seen for quite a while and catching up on everything, and often it seems like the hour or so flies by so quickly and I just have so much to say that I have to force myself to pause in order not to sound too desperate or cut off the other person, but one thing that I felt awkward about before the pandemic and now even after the pandemic: the hugging: the hello hugs, the goodbye hugs, the "I love you man" hugs, the congratulatory hugs, the obligatory hugs, the comforting hugs, the side hugs.... I fail at all hugs. I guess I just have a strong perception of how other people will judge me or think of me, and I don't necessarily want to hug and do it wrong, or in case I smell bad, or I'm not hugging too hard or not hugging hard enough, if I accidentally make contact with somewhere I shouldn't on the other person's body, it's all very difficult for me, and I often cringe at the thought of adhering to the social custom. One good thing in a sea of bad things about the pandemic.....I can make the excuse of not hugging anymore and fist bumping. 

"I used to feel something!" Anytime you enjoy an activity for the first time, it's likely the best time. But there's definitely times when you can ALMOST get that initial thrill back, it's when you haven't played dodgeball for a long long time (over a year), and you get that adrenaline pumping again and the competitive juices flowing. And by "you" I mean "me." It's like I tell MJ (MJ disagrees), sometimes we need to be apart from each other for just a little bit in order to miss each other, and then meeting again will become sweeter. Same thing for dodgeball, same thing for reading Chinese newspapers (oh hey, four-word idioms in traditional characters that I haven't seen for the longest time, how have you been!) and same thing for revisiting fun trivia facts......the first time is the "cool Marsha P. Johnson was one of the leading figures of the 1969 Stonewall uprising...." (a year passes) oh that fact came up again! Those type of minor facts can be really satisfying to re-learn and get that jolt of recognition again that I've seen this before, rather than going over the same clues daily, just expressed in a different type of clue like Lake Titicaca (one of the most used, next to Lake Baikal, Lake Superior, the Dead Sea, etc.) and yes, OK I get it Simon Bolivar and Che Guevarra were important historical figures in Latin America, OK yes fine I've hammered home by now that femur is the largest bone in your body. Tom Petty's backing band was the Heartbreakers; it still doesn't change the fact Free Fallin' shouldn't be played in an airport waiting area for passengers about to board a plane. 

Redemption (赎回, 償還, 구원)

 The word redemption is an interesting word, from the Latin root redemptio meaning "to buy back," with the dictionary defintion of the action of regaining or gaining possession of something in exchange for payment, or clearing a debt.

I haven't gone into debt due to stocks or anything, and I'm still "up" overall in my investments since I started seriously investing in 2018, but boy oh boy did I have a lot more (unrealized) profit at the beginning of the year than I do now. What I wouldn't do to get some redemption on those losses that I've incurred, and gaining back some of that lost capital. I often wonder to myself how I could have such a Pollyanish view on the market back in January of this year wen the market was at its all-time highs and I was feeling on top of the world: I guess most of is hindsight being 20/20, but also the market lures me into a false sense of security when it steadily goes up, making me think that it might do that forever, and then greed takes over. Also, it's a flaw I have with money similar to my flaws in opinions about life in general: I take making money in stocks for granted, but then get frantic and anxious when I'm losing money (which seems to be happening a lot this year). All that doesn't really explain why I couldn't just sell some earlier when it was clear the Federal Reserve was raising interest rates to combat interest rates, and I had told myself not to fight the Fed and to sell when interest rates were going higher. I guess it's just hard to hit that "Sell" button when I've been conditioned like a chimp to root for stocks going higher all the time. Looking forward, analysts are predicting still further pain ahead and maybe another 15% drop in the S&P 500 to 3300.....and finally, FINALLY I am considering drastically reducing my exposure to stocks before I lose ALL the profit I've made over the last few years. Urg. 

Redemption might be what Adnan Syed is feeling after finally being freed from prison this past Monday, after the prosecutor in his case moved to do so after finding evidence to have been withheld. It's been a long time since 2015 when I first listened to the podcast, but this recent news got me going down rabbit holes again: is he innocent or guilty; if Adnan is innocent, then who did it? Assuming Adnan is innocent, I'm not sure redemption is the right word because he can't regain those years of his life in prison, from ages 17 to 41, those are the best years of one's life, to just sit in a prison cell for something you didn't do; there's no amount of money to buy those years back. But then I think about it again, for the victim, Hae-min Lee, there's no redemption for her life that she lost due to a murderer who killed her, ruining a promising life. Some things are just so unfair, putting my losses in the stock market really into perspective as trivial, self-inflicted, and not worthy of me pouting about and trying to redeem when others can't redeem. As for the theories out there, a lot of people talk about a serial killer, the Hae's current boyfriend at the time Don, etc........for me the biggest thing is that Jay Wilde, Adnan's ex-friend, KNEW WHERE HAE'S CAR WAS and pointed it out to the cops......there was no way he could have known about that unless he was involved somehow; the cops couldn't coach him to know that (like they did many other things apparently during the interrogations) because the cops didn't even know the location there. So Jay had to have a.) either helped Adnan do it like he claimed, b.) commited the crime himself, or c.) commited the crime with someone else and is covering for that person. It's so bizarre that Jay isn't more directly questioned and grilled by someone to finally reveal the truth, because his lies have been shifting back and forth, back and froth, and he clearly was the one involved. FORGET EVERYTHING ELSE, he's the key! Oh and now that I have a more detailed understanding of the geography of Baltimore, a lot of things in the podcast are fleshed out, including that drive from Woodlawn High School to Leakin' Park, Patapsco State Park, etc. 

Finally, I wish I could get some redemption for "Tian Tian," an immigrant from China who moved to Monterrey Park but came down with late-stage brain cancer and was hospitalized earlier in July, her parents had to come from China to come take care of her but had no funds to handle living expenses and other costs, and they found themselves destitute with nowhere to live and eating small meals every day. Just a devastating story that I found in the local Chinese newspaper (Yes, newspapers still exist! And my grandfather loved reading them; yesterday was the one-year anniversary of his death), and now Tian Tian is recovering but still unable to speak, which is better than the doctors' prediction that she would be in a vegestative forever....I wish I could give her redemption and let her gain her life back, but as it is I could only donate money to help redeem some of the costs of living at least. It really is heartbreaking how cruel life can be, and for some it's impossible to find redemption. 

The Queen (皇后, 女王, 여왕

 Last week was a big week for celebration of the life of Queen Elizabeth II, who died at the ripe old age of 96, almost the exact same age as my grandfather who passed away last year. Perhaps I associate my grandfather and Queen Elizabeth as similar figures in my mind, of people I've known since birth who are a constant source of consistency in the face of a changing world. Through all the ups and downs of my own life, my grandpa had always been the same steady rock who I could rely on to always be there, and I'm sure the Queen played a bit of that role for many people in Britain and around the world; she was everyone's grandmother. But now just like my grandfather, the queen is gone, and a little piece of oneself is taken along with the death of an elderly person; a lot of memories and a general sense of stability. 

Sure, the queen had a lot to be criticized for; she didn't get along with Princess Diana, she didn't get along with Meghan Markle, her regime's "colonizing" history has been scrutinized (I've been seeing a lot of that word "colonizer" used by woke activists recently and it makes me a little uncomfortable, especially if it's used perjoratively against any white people for doing anything....doesn't that just become a racist word similar to the N-word?"), and do people in modern times even need a queen anyway? Does the royal family really need all those castles and parades and royal weddings all supported by the taxpayer's dollar (or for the British, the pound I gues) Done well, I think a queen or royalty still has a role to play in society, in an era where too many people idolize bad behavior and make leaders out of people who act badly or are popular for no good reason, we still need leaders who lead by exemplary behavior, not perfect people but at least trying to do the right thing and promoting civility in the world, unlike Donald Trump or various other media influencers who leech off the gossipy nature that we all have in order to promote themselves. Real leaders should be revered for doing the right thing, trying to improve the world and act for all citizens of the world, not just for themselves to get "likes" on social media and promote their own brand. Queen Elizabeth definitely checked a lot of those boxes, no matter what some of her negative record also shows. 

Monarchs are also important for trivia purposes and make for good trivia questions, just like U.S. Presidents and the sequential order of presidents, the list of British monarchs is a cool timeline of rulers that combines my interests of knowing what happened in history and when, and important people, except English monarchs have repetitive names and shifting allegiances, families marrying into other families, wars between those families for power, etc., it all becomes very confusing, not to mention who is next in line for succession. And England has had several female monarchs! (unlike America's thus-far patriachal society). The 2 big queens to know of course are Queen Victoria (of the Hanover family) and Elizabeth II, but then there's also Elizabeth I of the Golden Age (daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII), Queen Anne who died without a clear successor leading to the end of the Stuarts, Mary Queen of Scots aka Bloody Mary, and Lady Jane Grey who ruled for just 9 days. Not exactly all exemplary people of course, but all lived during interesting times. It must be hard to be a woman and rule a bunch of men and give them orders despite their reluctance; Britain's queens seem to have had the most success in history. Long Live the Queen! (There probably won't be a queen of England for a long time now, since Charles III is king who will pass down to William upon his death and then William's firstborn son George......and then who knows). 

Bookstores (书店, 서점)

 Streaming video, Tiktok, Vine, Vimeo, video games, Youtube, audiobooks; with so many different forms of media available nowadays, it might seem amazing that people still go to bookstores, but recently I've been to a few and....business still seems booming. The caveat is that the ones I went to were the Barnes and Nobles in the middle of campus on a prestigious national university, and also Strand Bookstore in the heart of Manhattan in downtown New York City, but still, I'm sure booksellers aren't complaining that people are still walking through the doors. The biggest draw for some might be the ambience and quaintness of a bookstore; people like MJ don't necessarily want to read or looking for any specific book, they just like being NEAR the books and feeling intellectual, feeding off the energy emanating from the books. There's also the organization of different titles from "fantasy/fiction" to "new bestsellers" to "all-time classics" and the visual effect of seeing all the books grouped into those categories, with all the fancy covers and colors to marvel at and just pick up a book and leaf through. There are actually nonfiction books that show different colors of books that have the same effect: you see the physical image of the book with its spines, as well as advising on all the cool bookstores around the country (some with cats walking around in them, which you can't go wrong with, cats just make everything better apparently). 

On this particular New York trip, it was also a great sanctuary to wait for awhile to let the heavy rain let up; there's of course museums, restaurants, and other indoor venues but a bookstore gives you something to do without necessarily having to BUY anything. It was one of those New York City days that made me realize New York is great for a day or two here and there, but not a place to for me to live all seasons of the year. Walking through New York on rainy days just highlights the messiness of the city and introduces various variables like walking into puddles, being squeezed on city sidewalks, having to slide wet umbrellas into umbrella bags, diving into the damp stungy tunnels of the New York City subway system. Sorry NYC, you're not yourself when it rains. (This might of course be the aforementioned effect of having gone to NYC so many times that nothing is new anymore, so I might just need a change of scenery for awhile). 

Some lasting thoughts about Denmark: there's a lot of smoking outside in Copenhagen, so you'll undoubtedly encouner second hand smoke in the city and cigarette butts just lying around, but the homeless population seemed very limited; not as many people just loitering around, whereas I can't walk a few blocks in an urban area in American cities and not be asked for change, etc. MJ mentioned that Danish people "take their dinners very seriously," which I scoffed at, but apparently, yes, there's a designated dinner hour where many go to restaurants and then start drinking alcohol, with a noticeable dip in the population outside in the streets, not to ghost town levels but enough to be noticeable. The dollar didn't apparently go as far as we thought, neither... I don't think we were going at a particularly bad time for the dollar/krone exchange rate (in fact, a five-year chart showed that the dollar has actually increased in value as compared to the krone, but seemed prices were pretty hefty......MJ and I were so hungry one day we went into a Chinese restaurant and sat down and almost ordered what would have been a $30 dish of Mapo Tofu, but luckily the service was bad, our seats were near the exit, the door was open, I made an executive decision and we skedaddled out of there. I'm still not sure whether we've even had any "traditional Danish cuisine," as it's not very well known in the U.S., outside of "smorreboad" (smorgasboard). There's a bunch of meat plates that are considered Danish like meatballs or sausages, so MJ's vegan preferences held us back from those, but we did find the local market's pre-packaged sushi selection surprisngly fresh compared to the U.S. selections. 

Something Rotten in the State of Denmark (丹麦, デンマーク, 덴마크)

 MJ and I continued our intermittent world tour, heading to our 6th country in the span of a calendar year over the Labor Day weekend....Denmark. Nothing truly remarkable about Denmark, but we noticed a recurring flavor in the food that I couldn't quite place...some sort of herb, spice, or other that was tinted in a lot of the dishes in Denmark's food. It wasn't terribly tasting, but it didn't enhance the food neither, and I'll forever have that taste impression of Denmark, and have the lasting impression that I wouldn't be able to last eating just Danish food. 

It's amazing how quickly the world has gone back to Covid, actually; getting on Copenhagen's public transportation you'd think that the pandemic never happened, with everyone carrying on without masks everywhere in crowded spaces breathing right on top of each other. Amazing to me that after what seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime crisis in March 2020 that would be with us in our lifetimes forever, 2 years later it seems just an afterthought and most people have moved on to the next daily stressors, like the war in Russia, China possibly invading Taiwan, the monkeypox, etc. The world goes on, and the news cycle must go on; the show must go on! 

Denmark, as expected, was very friendly for bikers, with bike lanes everywhere, but plenty of foot traffic and ways to get around didnt leave us feeling the need to rent bicycles or anything. The shame for the city is that there's no distinctive landmark in the city sky line, nothing iconic to get visitors to hang their hat on as THE place to go......the closest for us was the Round Tower, a tower in the middle of the city that offered views all around, and going up wasn't a hassle (unlike some towers where you have to climb stairs and be out of breath, the Round Tower built spiral ramps all the way up to the top to facilitate the climb: other tower builders, take note. Tivoli Gardens turned out to be the biggest disappointment, as what I thought was comparable to Disneyland and Epcot Center as a massive cultural center turned out to be a small walled-off enclosure of a few roller coaster rides, carnival alleys, and a pond with gardens growing around. Not exactly one of the 7 wonders of the modern world; I walked around for half an hour and already had enough. No wonder Rick Steves's book on Denmark is paper thin, more of a pamphlet than a book: either a.) he hadn't been paid by the attractions in the city and/or b.) he just didn't see much to write home about. 

The best spots were when we left the city center and took a train up the coast of the North Sea to the historical Kronberg Castle where the Shakespeare play Hamlet was based off of, then found the neat art museum in a secluded area confusingly called the Louisiana Museum.......definitely not a swamp, this was one of the most popular tourist spots and worth the trip from the U.S. to get the sea views, the beautifuly designed gardens, the well thought out exhibit.... it was like the Getty Center of Denmark, except instead of having been there 20+ times in my life this was my first exposure to it.......and that's the whole point of vacation, is to see stuff for the first time. I loved it. 

Often on vacations like the one we just took, things get to be a blur and there's so many new sensations and stimulations that it becomes mental overload and takes a while even after coming home to sort out; but I'll always be excited about arriving at a new place, feeling like there are so many possibilities to explore and see for the first time, and just feel free to expand and move about knowing that for now I have time, money, and not that many responsibilities (yet). As MJ says, I really do live a NICE LIFE.