Virtual Reality ( 虚拟现实, 仮想現実, 가상 현실)

 According to some really smart people this world is already a simulation and we are all part of a virtual reality world, but yesterday for my friend's 40th birthday I experienced the closest thing to actually experiencing another virtual reality world. I know technology exists now with the Oculus Rift and Meta Quest virtual reality machines to get your own personal virtual reality simulators, but we tried going into a VR simulator room for the low-low price (not really, but it was for fun) of $29.99 for 30 minutes of simulating an experience of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (starring the Rock DeWayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black, as well as the lesser-known Scottish actress Karen Gillian. We entered as a group of 4 and got strapped in with the necessary equipment (vest and headset) then randomly selected a playable character (I got Kevin Hart, aka Franklin Finbar) and entered the VR room. I was a little apprehensive about starting in case we had to go through obstacles and some sudden drops like a roller coaster, but I guess there are too many liability issues to allow for any physical risks while you're walking around without vision. The virtual reality experience is really realistic, it is really like entering a completely different world and now you've entered another body, like Avatar or the Matrix. Visually and audially, at least. There's music and surround sound built into the headset, and of course the visual is like watching a movie while moving around, and you can turn 360 degrees to see around you, making own decisions and not at the whim of a movie director to explore your surroundings. The other players are also physically the same distance away in VR as in real life, so there were times I bumped into surrounding players if we had to all fit in a small space or all "step on the platform or something. Spots on the "floor" helped us identify where to stand, and soft walls confined us to where we could actually go in the warehouse where the VR took place. But yea, pretty real. "Spiders" flew down from the sky and tickled us (probably some feathers) and we had to brave man-eating crocodiles (felt the wind coming from them) and if we "died" the vest would shock us simulating death. Pretty interesting expereince, and I thought once or twice about removing my headset just to disengage from the VR and see where I actually was, but I oddly didn't want to break the illusion of being in a different world, as the Jumanji world was so engrossing and more fantasitic than our "real world." 

If our "real world" is actually a simulation created by someone to see how humans would react, there are some real complaints we should have about playing with our emotions, heartbreak, grief, sadness, unbearable pain, etc., but one of the worst things about this world has to be lotteries. The illusion of being able to obtain massive wealth and contributing into a system that really rewards only a few winners (sometimes just 1, like the $1.22 billion dollar winner of the Mega Millions Friday night from Northern California) at the expense of thousands, maybe millions of people, willingly participating in decreasing their own wealth to fund one person, pretty much the antithesis of what we want in a fair society, where everyone is more equal and no one becomes drastically wealthier or more power than others, at the expense of others. (I readily admit I fall prey to the lottery conspiracy whenever the prize gets over $800 million or so).  We pretty much have ways of promoting massive wealth inequality already (see uber-billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc. - worth $237 billion or whatever it is based on their companies' stock prices), yet the lottos actively encourage that, and the players follow along because no one says no to a billion dollars (10-digit number). How many people have to suffer for that one person to win though? That's likely the message of Squid Game and its sequel that recently came out, Squid Game 2, the disgusting lengths that people do to win lottos, and really it's actually depicted more acutely with real contestants in "Beast Games," Mr. Beast's competition forcing real people to do crazy things and backstab, be ruthless for the pursuit of money. It's human beings at their worst, the naked pursuit of money and inevitable failure for 99.99% of all those going for it, with the chances for most lotto people functionally 0, yet that dream of winning fueling those 99.99% to continue with dire consequences. Oh, and in April each ticket for MegaMillions is increasing 150% from $2 per ticket to $5. Great, more money being fueled into what essentially is a poor tax, making poor people pay for one person to win (and the lotto system fueling it). Damn the lotteries, this should be a virtual reality, not our reality. 

JOMO

All throughout my twenties, I experienced severe cases of FOMO: Fear of Missing Out, wanting to be at every party, every wedding that I was invited to (not that many), every time friends got together, that I often tried to go to 2 Super Bowl parties at the same time (big mistake) because the friends realize at some point that you're going to another Super Bowl party, or another 30th birthday party, and you just can't be in 2 places at one time, and you have to commit to one or the other. Now in my thirties, though, it's been an opposite feeling: JOMO, or the joy of missing out, which according to Jeopardy and a cursory search of the internet, is actually a real thing: spending Friday and Saturday nights at home with MJ and not worrying about the world passing me by or whatever party is going on that I can't be apart of. With some rare exceptions, I end up being rather content, except if they are real friends who I haven't seen for awhile. Then I make my best effort to go. But JOMO is good for any clubs, bars, or any event that I'm not that comfortable at: lots of nigths "pissing the night away" (Tubthumping by Chumbawumba) that I now relish not having to repeat. MJ and I have gotten good at "missing out" on the big holidays too, just totally ignoring Christmas and Thanksgiving and visting my parents at different times instead of the usual holiday rush. It's great. Instead of putting pressure on making Christmas a bigger deal than it has to be, it's just been 2 days of rest and relaxation for us. The joy is most keenly felt in the wallet, where gifts don't need to be bought, no tickets to go see Taylor Swift, no European vacations with other people, no round of beers at bars to people who I barely know. In fact, our wedding marked a nice border line between my 20's and 30's, but also the FOMO and JOMO phases of life: after our own weddings we realize that life goes on after big parties, real friends will be friends no matter how many times you invite them to parties, going to events isn't always the huge thrill that my brain associates it with. I wonder if this is the case with pregnancy; are human beings all instinctively born with a FOMO chip of wondering what it would be like to be a parent? This would be a necessary part of maintaining the species. Or will it be a situation of JOMO and we have the joy of missing out on pregnancy and having kids even though everyone else seemingly is doing it? We'll find out! 

One other realization I've come to realize more recently: nails grown fast if you don't bite them. Sounds pretty obvious, but I've always had a habit of biting my nails, since probably 13 or 14 years old. It's my nervous tick, my go-to when I feel like I need to focus on something and get through it, kind of like me always rolling paper towels into a ball, it's just something I do as a habit, no utility to it or anything. Recently MJ encouraged me to stop biting as it's damaging my teeth (enamel has worn off the outer layer of my incisors, the 2 front teeth) and given that my dad wears a full set of false teeth now and needs them before eating, I should probably protect my teeth more. I'm Robert Yan and I'm a recovering onychophagist (nail-biter). I've been clean for about 8 weeks now. Will it continue? Hopefully; I have to stop myself sometimes as I instinctively just start biting when a stressful situation arises. Maybe I'm just lucky to not have an addictive personality, but I wonder if it's just a matter of willpower to quit doing something. If it's so easy, everyone should be able to quit drugs, quit alcohol, quit all the toxic elements of one's life, right? I don't think it's that easy and it depends on one's background, one's genes, what one did as a kid to develop an addiction, etc. I never drank coffee or ever got started with anything (except biting nails), so I never even had a taste of it. That's the key, I guess. Once your body is used to something, it can magically adapt to it and pretty soon you feel like that's how it's always been. (Maybe getting pregnant is like that too!) 

DINK

 No, Dink is not one of those new slang words Generation Z is flooding the internet with, like something is "drip" (in fashion) or IYKYK, bussin', low-key, "symp," etc., no DINK is actually a creation of the 1980s, I know, a long long time ago when people were actually born in years that started with "1" not "2" and it's an acronym for Double Income, No Kids, which was inspired by the yuppie culture (young urban professionals) but then accentuated during the Great Recession of 2008/2009 when people couldn't afford kids and just chose to go it without them. And it's increasingly popular now, with terms like "child free" instead of "child less" highlighting the joys of having no kids. MJ and I take the joys of DINK even further because we're DINKNP, no pets neither, no cat, no dog, no obligations. We have spent most of our relationship as low-responsiblity as possible, and even then it feels like life can be overwhelming at times and there are not enough days in the week (I'm writing this on Sunday night before a Monday where I'm going to work on Christmas Christmas Eve). As jealous as I am of seeing my friends' and co-workers' kids and creeping on Facebook, I think quite a few parents are probably jealous of MJ and I and our DINK lifestyle...until we eventually do have kids, of course. 

Some features of being a DINK: 

1.) wake up generally of your own accord, have fixed sleeping schedules. SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT! I've done that all my life with no breaks, so I guess I've been living in luxury. Just the other night I dreamed I was a pitcher for a major league baseball team making my debut in the big leagues. Ah what a night. And I generally wake up refreshed, don't need coffee, sleep is my caffeine. 

2.) I save up a lot of money. I'm not a gambler, I don't have crazy expensive hobbies, I don't get into trouble with lawsuits, I don't have a million relatives I need to buy presents to for Christmas. Money is passed through efficiently from my bank account to a savings or stock account, funneling through of course Middle (Wo)man MJ who sometimes has some needs (not crazy amounts!) but it's not a leaky bucket with lots of different holes, it's just the usual mortgage and tax, HOA, health insurance holes. Out of all those risky behaviors I listed, the biggest hole in the bucket would be the kid bucket because you're supporting a whole nother human being who doesn't bring in any income but instead only soaks up money, so water going through that hole only goes one way. 

3.) I have free time. I complain that I don't, but I do. I still have enough time to watch Jeopardy every time, subscribe to premium subscriptions to "stream my favorite shows," but also READ. Time! is mine to control. 

4.) MJ and I can drop everything and go anywhere in the world quickly. This is probably the best part of DINK, where I know some parents are just resigned to staying at home for the rest 18 years. 

5.) Not forgetting where the kids' stuff is. I forget things all the time and forget to do little tasks during the day, like leaving my phone in my pocket, forgetting the keys to the house, leaving chess sets at chess club, etc. It's like my brain has too many tabs open and I forget to close them all out and leave tabs open (I saw that on a sticker today and thought it's apt for what everyone does nowadays). The problem is, when having kids, you can't just leave the kids in the car, or forget to take them with you when they're needed. They become No. 1, and the keys and mail and phone and extra sweater will be forgetten even more than now. 

These are the things I think about when taking the plunge and preparing for a child... taking the plunge and making huge sacrifices to all 5 key things above......that sounds like a lot. And rationally, why do people do it? From an objective viewpoint it's a pretty low cost-benefit analysis.....high, high risk of personal detriment to yourself in committing to a lifestyle that's irreversible (at least for 18 years or so) as opposed to just continuing this rather luxurious lifestyle of being an adult and enjoying all the good stuff of being adults (my own decisions, financial freedom!) and little of the bad stuff of having to take care of other people. Why do all my friends do it? They're not crazy, right? I guess love makes you do crazy things, and that's the one thing that's missing as a DINK......love from a child, pretty much irreplaceable. It reminds me of one year towards the end of my dodgeball competitive career when I had built towards the UDC (ultimate dodgeball championship) all year, but then got onto an overtime project at a law firm that paid a lot per day, and taking time off to go to dodgeball would have cost me 4-digit figures.....so I missed the first day of the tournament, and I'll always wonder what will be. It seemed like a good decision to take the money at the time, but years later I would give more money than I earned to go back to that time and play that first day, just to find out what would have happened. I think a similar inflection point is nigh for me now: I value my free time, my extra cash, my extra sleep, but I think at the end of my life I might look back to this point and be willing to give up all those extras to see what it would feel like to have a child of my own. That's the downside of being a DINK. 

Malapropism

 I was watching Pop Culture Jeopardy with MJ tonight (I know, big Saturday night plans- but we did watch Love Actually together before that, which was great to reminiscence on, and Amazon Prime actually has the cut-out sex scenes with Martin Freeman) and one of the contestants, on a question about a former governor from Minnesota who also appeared in Predator, answered, "Jesse James" instead of the right answer, Jesse Ventura. Even MJ knew enough that Jesse James was the outlaw (she called it "bang-bang person") from the 1800s and wouldn't belong in a pop culture jeopardy category (unless I guess there was a recent movie or documentary about it, definitely possible). But it's just an example of how normal people have malapropisms, the incorrect use of a word in place of a word that sounds familiar. Everyone has these, even the best Jeopardy contestants fumble with them from time to time, and I can now understand why: The sheer amount of information out there in the world, even just the trivia world of having to know certain things, is so vast that names get confused, certain things just sound the same. For example, Margaret Wise Brown is the author of Goodnight Moon, a famous children's book. But Tina Brown is the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, Daily Beast, etc. But Helen Gurley Brown was the first editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Confused yet? And just to top it off, there's a Rita Mae Brown who was an LGBT activist and writer for her book "Rubyfruit Jungle." These 3 are all expected trivia material for Jeopardy, so it's totally understandable to get them mixed up. 

Our brains (ok, I'll jsut say my brain) makes so many of these mistakes all of the time, and they would have continued to do so until I fixed them. Often in life we just let small things go because they're not important and not worth fretting about. But sometimes it IS good to nitpick details, especially if those details come up over and over again and you're always getting them wrong. I had to correct myself the other day that it's White MEN Can't Jump the Wesley Snipes movie about basketball and Jeopardy, not just "White Man" (there's only one white man character, Woody Harrelson in the movie, to be fair to my memory)... if I don't fix that there, I continue making that mistake forever. Lesson, I guess, is to learn it right the first time, because it takes longer to unlearn a mistake later. How to unlearn a mistake? I've been trying the "say it five times" of rote memorization, but also just write down my mistakes, as hurtful as it is to my pride, especially long words that I know I will have trouble remembering and probably fumbling one of the later syllables. Okeefenokee (swamp in Georgia), for example, or  Okeechobee (lake in Florida). They're like tongue twisters, these facts. 

Common relative of malapropism? Spoonerisms. Switching consonants of back to back words, for example, like jelly beans to belly jeans. That's funny. Often pretty funny when it's said in conversation, which may be why I hadn't tried to actively fix them before. My dad calls avocado a Colorado. 

I think about common errors I make in foreign languages- Chinese? Sure, plenty of words I get wrong with pronunciation that I have to correct myself, or someone else corrects me, Japanese, yup. Often people just brush past them because the listener knows what the speaker is trying to say, so the conversation just moves on unchecked. And yes, in regular conversation, if someone says "I might fade into Bolivia" instead of "I might fade into oblivion," do I know what they mean? Yes, sure, but I like to be precise, and I guess my inner English teacher might feel like correcting them (I do this to MJ plenty of times with stuff like "ours is good" versus "ours are good." I just wince every time someone gets something slightly wrong on an answer, because I know I'm going to make a similar mistake too. 

By the way, Beast Games by Mr. Beast is just horrifically bad and an obvious money grab ahead of Squid Game 2.......but that didn't stop me from making MJ watch 2 episodes last night. Mr. Beast.... weird dude. 

Spirit Airlines

 As chronicled on Jeopardy, Trevor Noah has a bit that he goes back to time and time again in his skits, especially on the Daily Show (back when Trevor Noah hosted the Daily Show and spawned the phrase "Na mean?" mean "You know what I mean?" which MJ and I have adapted in our daily conversation. Good times. Having never flown Spirit Airlines (I know, surprising, given my history of being a tightwad and trying to save as much as I could on any purchases and going with the lowest quality product) but I can just imagine what it would have been like and the type of people on those flights.... pure chaos. So at the end of the Spirit Airlines era (it went public in 2011, about when I started investing, and got all the way up to $85 dollars in 2014, indicating there was some promise the company would become a major player in the low-cost airline industry), and then cratered and is trading at $0.69 per share today. Just another reason not to dabble in airline stocks, despite United, American and Delta all having big stock market years..... the year to year volatility is huge and it's frankly just hard to run an airline, huge overhead, have to pay the pilots, the workers, order the planes.......if there's one industry I wouldn't want to become an owner of, it's airlines. Fun fact: I once owned Jet Blue stock (JBLU), one of my first stock purchases.... and the stock is trading almost exactly the same price as it did in 2010 when I first started investing, while inflation has increased more than 45%. 

It's probably hard for people to have nostalgia about plane trips, but there are some plane rides from my childhood that I felt alive, emboldened, or just had a really good memory. Maybe it's because they used to have full meals on planes that were not necessarily better but different from my parents' cooking, I sometimes craved going on planes to see what food I would get (Chicken or fish was a big decision for me back then!) and looking out the window at the clouds, taking off from the airport, and admiring all the busy-looking adults looking important and business-like (come to realize now that they were just slaving away at their jobs or trying to handle 3 kids on a cross-country flight, no easy task on its own) and boy oh boy, I was so excited to know what the flight movie was! Yup, that's right, back then there was just ONE movie for everyone to see on the plane, and the pilot announced it at the beginning of the flight. Like it or not, that's the one you were stuck with watching, no matter if you were a kid, liked cartoons, rom-coms, or Friends re-runs. Oh but I enjoyed those movies. 

Yesterday also marked my 23rd anniversary of coming to America, landing in America on December 13, 1991 (a George H.W. Bush kid!) Hundreds of flights later, I'm a veteran of planes and am just trying to get through from place to place as quickly as possible, but when I was 4 and a half years ago I was full of wonder, what this plane thing was, why my stomach feels so weird, why we had to switch planes in the middle (changed in either SFO or Vancouver, I forget) and whatever happens, follow my grandpa. My grandpa was as old as my parents are now, that's how the grains of time have shifted. I crave that feeling now, of adventure, youthful exuberance, not knowing what's going to happen next but being excited about the day, not knowing exactly where the plane was headed (somewhere called Chicago? I just knew it wasn't Shanghai where my relatives had sent me off) but satisfied that I had a destination, and that destination would have food and soccer ball chocolate candy. Now I can see my road map to my death, and it has some exciting things on its path but it's not nearly as mysterious and ignorantly blissful as I was on that plane coming to America. I didn't fly on Spirit Airlines; I had spirit on that airline. (I know, bad pun, but I tried). 

Hunger Pains (饥饿的痛苦, 空腹の痛み, 배고픔)

 My body has a weird way of processing hunger; sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night because I didn't eat enough during the day, and my stomach is screaming for the brain to feed it with something; and I give into those hunger pains which are caused by a hormone in the stomach called ghrelin. Ghrelin is everywhere in the middle of the night. But then, the next day after I wake up, the ghrelin levels (they sound a lot like gremlins, maybe they're only active at night!) seem to be always on a steady level, so that even if I eat something, my stomach still feels upset and a faint feeling of hunger pains lingers. It's like an unsatiable beast, no matter how much I eat it will not be tamed! And in the middle of the night I wake up really hungry again with hungry pains, and I have to eat to go back to normal and the cycle continues. All except LAST NIGHT, when I tamed the ghrelin/gremlins and decide to just go back to sleep hungry on the advice of my medical professional (MJ) and it worked! I deceived the gremlins and actually fell asleep without having to further distort my stomach, and sleep won the day! If it was like a Magic School Bus episode of exploring the human body, the melatonin army overpowered the rogue ghremlins and let my body shut off on an empty stomach. Probably the best case scenario; now I just need to for my whole life, which MJ has been doing (trained since birth, raised by wolves, apparently, is how MJ put it). 

Unfortunately other than hunger pains, I dealt with more serious pains on 12/11/2024, a pretty bad day in the history of Robert Yan. On the even of 12-12-2024, no less! Sometimes all the training, practice, hard work, and good vibes come together to create a magical day where it all pays off, but some days it's like a House of Cards where everything goes wrong and everything comes tumbling down (House of Cards, good first season, I just couldn't finish it knowing what eventually would happen to Peter Rousseau and Zoe Barnes and what Frank Underwood would do to them. Sad stuff, even for a fictional show). Yesterday was a House of Cards day. I got stuck out in the rain, my sock got wet, I woke up early to catch the train but missed it because I forgot where I put my cell phone and spent a crucial 3 minutes frantically scrambling around looking for it, by which time the train had left and I was resigned to take the next train. This after having a ghrelin-induced bad sleep the night before. But all minor compared to learning that MJ and I will not be having a baby as a result of our latest attempt. Doesn't mean we have stopped trying, but this was our to-date best shot at it with the best odds of success, and it still didn't happen for us. This time I had maybe the worst thing, the thing with feathers (Emily Dickinson), hope. The tough thing with trying to get pregnant is that you get weeks of lead-up, of thinking maybe this is the time (I've been secretly hoping to replace my grandpa's life force with a new life force after he passed away 3 years ago in some sort of weird circle-of-life scenario) we finally succeed, and it only takes about 5 seconds to get the bad news that it's not happening. I guess all bad news is sudden, there's no leadup, no one wants to prolong the bad news or have any build-up, unless it's something chronic like cancer that increasingly gets worse. No, the bad news comes pretty quick and just totally tears down everything that I'd been privately hoping for (buying a new house, picking out name) but rationally guarding our hearts, as they call it. It's also tough because I realize that MJ is going through her 5 stages of grief, going through bargaining stage ("I wish you had done something about this"), anger, depression, etc., whereas I have to put on a brave face because she deserves her time to grieve as she's putting her body on the line and in some sense going through it for me, but I also have no time to grieve, to let the 5 stages of grief play out, I just have to be strong and take it each time (and we've done this more than a few times now) and each time a little bit of me is heartbroken, like that Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now" from "Love Actually..." I've looked at pregnancy from both sides now, and I don't know how much disappointment and thinking I might be a father soon to not becoming one to maybe never becoming one I can take. Maybe it's melodramatic, but I am losing hope and losing confidence, and maybe some cosmic force is telling me parenthood is not right for us. In the middle of my jog today I just yelled out in the middle of the street (hopefully nearby people didn't hear me!) some curse words for the situation, a real breakdown. I don't think I've failed, I definitely don't think MJ has failed because she's had to put her body on the line for us this whole time and has bravely done things I might not have been able to do, it's just this feeling of being left behind, of being exactly where we were 3 years ago, coupled with a lot of wallowing in self-pity. It's not as physically painful as hunger pains, the pregnancy pains have zero physical pain (for me, MJ might feel some) but a lot of psychological pain. I don't wish it on anybody. 

Petrichor

 Asian languages don't have the concept of petrichor or at least a word of it, which means the scent you smell after rain falls (usually after a long time of drought) caused by the wet soil. I too have witnessed the smell of petrichor, and it's not unpleasant; it doesn't depress me like rainy days themselves do. I always thought it had something to do with earthworms or some other living creatures from the soil, but there you go it's got a distinct smell. Apparently it has the same word as "ichor," the blood of the gods, and in many ways I can see rain as the life-giving substance that all life needs: as much as I dislike rain because it causes traffic, blocks out the sun, forces the use of umbrellas, causes puddles which are a runner's worst nightmare, and basically just messes up my plans, rain is essential to life on Earth, much like oxygen, nitrogen, pretty much any essential element. 

I bring up petrichor because it's one of the scents that emphasizes how important smells are to moods and daily life. The human body actually gets accustomed to the same smell all the time and gets desensitized to it, which is why we should always shower even if we don't think our own bodies smell bad; it may be that you just got used to your own body odor and others are being exposed to it for the first ime. Except MJ; MJ doesn't really have a natural scent (unless I've gotten used to it) or else she hides it really well. It's also really helpful for marketing campaigns to have really favorable smells; I walked into a Whole Foods today and instantly felt a little uplifted, a little more upbeat, maybe it was the Christmas music (auditory senses another big trigger) but scent definitely played a role and enhanced my mood to buy. Also I like the smell of oranges and you can kind of smell how good certain fruit will be from the outside, like Mandarin oranges or pineapples (MJ has a big thing for pineapples nowadays and always has one waiting). As for this idea of pheromones and ovulating women giving off a certain pheromone that raises the testosterone level in men who pick up the scent.......studies have shown that there might be a correlation (not very conclusive), but nowadays it's probably hard to pick up on any of that with the amount of artificial fragrances in the air that allow me to smell someone else on the street from yards away because they're doused with fragrance (see previous rant about this topic), but yea there might be something to be sad that one everyone smells too good, it desensitizes everyone's noses, and no one ends up smelling that good anyway. A race to the bottom.

What I DO crave is having a new home smell. Like a new car smell (there are car fresheners sold that play on that aesthetic), new homes also have a type of smell that I can only describe from being in other people's new homes; MJ and I have only lived in new apartment buildings and been the first ones to live in certain apartment units (we've actually done that three times).....and it's pleasing. So maybe that's why we're aspiring to buy a "new construction home," plus all the benefits of course like not needing to get things repaired (theoretically for a few years), not living in other people's filth, not smelling stuff that OTHER people left behind. Now come to think of it, yes of course you can deep clean a please, paint the walls, have it smell differently and make it like new, but there's still no denying you're living in someone else's home that has their air, the remnants of their dead skin skills, etc., etc.... I get why MJ doesn't like staying at hotels lower than 4 stars that don't do a thorough clean now. It's not petrichor, it's people odor. New home would be ideal (even if it's a little past our budget). 

Mezzaluna knife (圆顶刀, 메잘루나 나이프)

 What an elegant name for something, "mezzaluna," evokes images of classical music, like a direction to play softer, or maybe the middle section of an opera house called the mezzanine, and if it had been any of those I'd probably have heard it before the other night on Jeopardy when I heard it for the first time: a mezzaluna knife is a curve-shaped blade used for cutting veggies, and not just cut, to "mince" (there's a difference! Mincing has a lot more minor cuts and making product into small uniform pieces). And it has 2 handles for both hands to use in making it as precise as possible for cutitng the green onions, chives, parsley, garlic, ginger, and other herbs and spices MJ likes to use for her cooking. Me? I use one of 2 knives in the kitchen: the "small knife" and the "big knife." Literally only two. You'd think that after having watched "Culinary Class Wars" (streaming on Netflix, and Season 2 expected for late 2025) that I'd be more into chef-like duties, and trying out different recipes, acquire fancy knife-wielding skills, figure out how to gut a fish and de-bone without getting any of the flesh mixed in, but no, I guess I'm just interested in the existence of activities rather than actually doing them. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possibilities in life, like in the same "In the Kitchen" category there was "blanching" or "par-boiling" veggies which is just not something I've ever had patience for. Watching the Bear and Jeremy Allen White yelling at Ayo Edibiri is stressful enough, I am not ready for MJ and I to have that type of relationship in the kitchen (to be clear, she would taken on the Jeremy Allen White role of head chef yelling at sous-chef me). 

Not that the kitchen itself is not imporant to me. I think of all the kitchens that I've ever lived in.....whether there's been an island, or any of the other types like parallel, straight, L-shape, u-shape, open, and galley. I really haven't thought about that at all before, but as MJ and I consider moving into a bigger space MJ wants everything bigger- closet space, number of bedrooms, living space, storage space meaning cabinets, (bigger jewelry) and most likely, more kitchen space to put those mezzaluna knives in (it's probably because I don't use many kitchen tools at all that MJ hasn't complained about getting more kitchen space, but as we get more stuff I'm sure it'll come around. All the places we've ever lived in have had rather cramped kitchens (the not-big-enough-to-have-a-type kitchen) because we've had pretty much cramped everything just given that we don't have pets nor kids, but maybe those are coming? Whenever I look at those fancy decorate pictures of available homes for sale (likely showroom pictures and home staged so it's not exactly what you're getting), at least you can see the structure of what the kitchen would look like, or the amount of space allocated for the kitchen. Some kitchens are just awesome. And some homes are just awesome. Sometimes I wonder when I'm doing work on a weekend, "why am I even doing this? I could be watching "House of Cards" on Netflix, great first season that is perfect for current times because it takes place in D.C. and the first 100 days of an administration) but then I'm reminded, more money = more ability to purchase a nicer house. And maybe even a mezzaluna knife. 

Chippendale furniture

 MJ has a lot of needs, and one of those needs is for more furniture. I, being the minimalist who wants less of everything, has opposed expanding too much furniture, but I do like walking through the IKEA showrooms to imagine what a room could look like! Cabinets are key.... they store a bunch of the odds and ends that end up on our tables and leave less room to walk and eat (we probably need more or larger tables too). Furniture is kind of like personal fashion.....at some point I should probably expand past business casual or bust: dress pants, or just wearing shorts and t-shirt around the house when I'm not at the office. There's really no in-between. Furniture also needs branching out, and one type that Jeopardy writes about is Chippendale furniture, a style originating from the 18th century London furniture maker Chippendale maker. Yes, of course there's the joke about the male strippers in Vegas, and then there's also the animorphic chipmunks called Chip N' Dale. But yea, apparently my parents own Chippendale style furniture without even knowing it....I believe they just went to a showroom back in the day called Haynes Furniture or something (I remember a lot of furniture stores back in the 1990s that just aren't around anymore, kind of like Kmart or Sears department stores. Sad) Chippendale is apparently characterized by having cabriolet legs, that bend in an S-curve in an artistic way to achieve some elegance instead of just a block. Of course, those curves got traded in later and MJ now prefers the more solid sleek rectangle design without any frills, so Chippendale is out (and if it's out for MJ, it's out for Bobby). Next up: learning more about kitchen appliances! 

Today I turned down one of the best food offers in all the world. It took all the strength in my body to do it, and I knew if I just clicked one button and spent a negligible amount of money (literally the same amount that I spent in 1997 for the same item at Cass Junior High cafeteria), I would in a few short minutes be enjoying the sweet delicious taste of a......Costco Hot Dog. Plus drink for $1.50! A better deal does not exist in America. Seriously, what can you buy for a $1 nowadays? A little girl with her leather-jacket wearing mom pushing her around to attract sympathy on the train took me for $2 for a pack of gum on the subway a few weeks ago. A newspaper is $4.00! (not even the special Sunday Times edition). I sent in my expired CA Fasttrack transponder (a light device you stick on your car) through USPS and it cost me $6.00! Lunches used to have a baseline of $5, now you can't get away with spending less than $10.00/ $12.00 to get full as an adult male. $1.50 is just nothing in this world, and yet I have to remember sometimes that when it comes to food, the best deal for my wallet is not necessarily the best deal for my body, and that's where I drew the line. (Plus, MJ also had a face that said, "You can get it but I don't really want you to get it." It's the opposite of when we got to the furniture store and she says not to get it, but her face says she does want to get it). Regardless, buy Costco stock. I've been handsomely rewarded since 5 years ago, the profits could go towards buying hundreds (maybe thousands?) of those $1.50 plus drink hot dogs. 

Of all the things I could be watching right now with all the subscriptions available to me (Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and who knows what other subscriptions I forgot to cancel that are charging me much more than $1.50 a month) PLUS my co-worker endorsing "The King and I" as his favorite musical because there are so many syllogisms in the songs, that I could be consuming, I'm watching a 2015 HBO show called "Togetherness" with Mark Duplass and Amanda Pett and Melanie Lynskey. It's just so realistic of a show, the arguments that they get into on that show almost mirror exactly the "disagreements" MJ and I get into. They also do couples therapy and make it seem funny, which in real life it's probably not but definitely something to look into. 

Cobra (眼镜蛇, 코브라, コブラ)

 COBRA in the US stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, aka Continuation of Health Coverage Act, that allows workers to keep their health insurance that they had while on the job even after they leave the job. It directly applied to our case when MJ left her job, which was providing the health insurance that we were both using, so it was a good idea in theory to keep that insurance and have continuous coverage, but in Exhibit 178 of things they don't tell you in adult life, COBRA was not the right fit for us as we would have had to pay much more for the insurance on our own than just going out and buying some insurance on the open market. A friend who ironically used to do a "cobra" hand motion told us unequivocally not to get COBRA. The plan we have now is not cheap by any means (I just paid the balance for this month and I am giving thanks that I have enough money to cover those costs) but we get the gold plan and we have quite a lot of doctor's visits and fertility clinic visits that it covers (partially, we always still have some co-pay) but COBRA, by all accounts, would have been worse. 

I realize I've never been cognizant of living through the year of the snake, which is coming up in 2025. I guess I was just so caught up in everything in 2013 I didn't even think about it, and 2001 it was that rough transition from 8th grade to freshman year in high school, not a fun time for any kid especially a nerd like me. The sanke in the Chinese zodiac is known for its wisdom, creativity, intelligence. Sounds fine to me! Is there any animal that gets as much negativity for being relativity harmless as the snake, at least in western society? Every movie, TV show, book, story, etc., usually has the snake as the bad guy.... has any story ever started out with the premise of the snake being the good guy, or even the hero's sidekick? MAYBE Jackie Chan's adventures where the snake talisman (based on the zodiac) graned Jackie invsibility? I'll admit, I flinch a little when I see a snake on the ground too, either in the wild or in a zoo.....they don't look pleasant. And the slithering, slimy thing is creepy. Other than that, they seem like cool dudes. Except.....yea the cobra is intimidating, there's no quibbling about it. The hood on the back of their head usually has an eye or something to scare away predators, and the way it coils up to appear larger than it appears can give you nightmares. Apparently, not for the Chinese..... although not as good as having a baby in the year of the Tiger or the year of the Dragon, snakes are considered baby dragons, so just one step down! And the way snakes could shed their skin and regrow it symbolized fertility! (I think MJ would be fine with having that shedding ability to shed a few pounds, not scales). And I imagine (no article linked, just conjecture) that snakes could eat mice and other small animals that feasted on the crops for farmers while eating none of their own (although, watch out if they got into the chicken eggs) so snakes could have been a net gain. Bring on the Year of the Snake! (We just got done with Thanksgiving so still a while away until Chinese New Year on January 29, but "bring it!" anyway.) 

Also, the Cobra design on cars is well regarded, with a sleek design like the AC Cobra driven by Carroll Shelby, the race car driver who designed cars for Ford. 

Risk (风险)

Risk is a board game by Parker Brothers that I used to play with friends, but I never mastered the strategy: something about taking over Australia early on so no one can attack you, and gaining large land masses in Russia like Kamchatka and the Okhotsk. 

America does not understand the concept of risk, or has a distorted view of risk; it's evident all over the decisions people make, what we prioritize, how we spend money, etc., and it's just accepted knowledge. Is it risky to eat a diet full of fast foods that are high in salt and fat (apparently the only 2 ingredients that KFC founder Colonel Sanders divulged as part of the 11-part original recipe) yes, but we do it anyway because of that momentary gratification of mouth pleasure of the food going in and chomping down and satiating the taste buds, and billion dollar industries profit off of that misunderstanding of risk, while millions of Americans risk years, maybe decades off of their life because they consume too much of that type of food, via cancer or other types of diet-related diseases (heart, liver disease come to mind depending on if your vice is food or alcohol).   

I have a fundamental bias in tolerating risk as well: often dwelling on "what if I lose money" on a stock when I should be taking every risk I can for stocks that have potential to go 10x up; even if I have 8 stocks that go to zero after I bought them (I'm looking at you, Luckin' Coffee, Virgin Galactic, Dollar General, Plug Power, and on its way there, a company I never thought I'd say this about, Target)... all I need is one stock that "decadruples up"(my term for being worth 10x its original value) and I've made up for those other stocks plus some more. So the wise bet is to actually invest more in the US Market, damn the torpedos and go for high-risk companies like Nvidia, Tesla, and (recently) Cava, Reddit, and Palantir before they made their big move. It's like Jeopardy daily double wagering: if you're more than 50% right on the Daily Doubles, it's usually correct to go all-in. It's like if you thought your odds of winning at blackjack were more than 50% (they're not)- you should always go all in. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson recently went on Bill Maher's show "Real Time" (great show if you're just a casual follower of politics) and discussed human beings' inability to calculate risk... he doesn't trust humans! And I agree. It's almost impossible to calculate the odds of something happening in the future to the exact degree and then make a decision based on it. It's like you're asking every person to be an actuary and make split second decisions off the cuff. Assessing risk is in every decision we make; lately my biggest risk has been whether I've eaten enough at night to fill my stomach so I don't get up in the middle of the night hungry and have to eat to get back to sleep- but then again I don't want to overeat and gain more weight that I've put on lately.  I also have to weight the risk of typing something on the Discord forum that my law school friends type and getting my opinion through versus alienating one or more of them in discussing politics.... always a difficult calculus. It's almost an overwhelming tasks as human beings to always be assessing risk, but just like the stock market, it can be fun when the rewards come in. I think there's a thrill for human beings that because we're always trying to mitigate risk, be safe, be cautious, that there's a huge rush when going against the grain and taking that big risk and have having it pay off (even if it's actually a reasonable risk to take that we didn't realize until we took that risk), as long as it's not like risking your whole life to chase grizzly bears or something (see the film "Grizzly Man," a documentary by Wernar Herzog). 

So embrace risk! Take a night away from working or studying to see if a night out will refresh your body and soul! Instead of just venturing into the previews of movies and hearing about movies, actually commit to the 2-hour long (gasp! So long!) Deadpool and Wolverine movie! and damn the opportunity costs! You might feel like it's a risk well taken.    

Chicago Pile-1

 I missed a Daily Double in Jeopardy on Friday about the first nuclear chain reaction, which occurred in 1942 at the University of Chicago and credited to Enrico Fermi (although it was a collaboration of various scientists at the time), and which kicked off the Manhattan Project which was needed to beat the Germans who had a head start in creating a nuclear bomb. "Chicago Pile-1 was the nuclear reactor that helped to change the course of history and not some "Man in the High Castle" dystopia where the Nazis and Japanese split the U.S., so pretty high stakes that everyone should know about. It could be a prequel to "Oppenheimer" if Christopher Nolan ever wants to capitalize off of 2023's co-Movie of the Year (unlikely Nolan does it) but like most science movies, it probably wouldn't go forward without some eye-catching actresses like Florence Pugh bring the sex appeal or star power like Matt Damon as Leslie Groves or Robert Downey Jr. as Levi Strauss. More embarrassing than missing the DD question was the fact I wasn't more familiar that Fermi conducted that experiment at the UofC, in my own backyard as a kid, and I distinctly remember going on a class field trip to Fermi Lab, although I don't remember anything and was probably lost in my own world of whatever kids think about. I guess I'm not the only one whom science was lost on. Unfortunately, America doesn't care about science. Science fiction? Oh please, bring on more Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, E.T., etc., etc., but when it comes to real science? It's the opposite of sex, it doesn't sell. 

I think part of the problem with science is that it is hard. Truly it is. Computer science is hard; engineering is hard; physics was the hardest class for me in high school and I cut out all science from my curriculum by college, even though my parents both rely on science for a living! It's much easier to explain to other people about Donald Trump or a TV show or what food tastes really good than explain equations, experiments, quasars, etc. But at least, through learning trivia (which is just barely brushing the tip about a subject), I understand the general overview of scientific developments; that's something everyone should priortize much more. Science news should be the front page of every newspaper, newsfeed, news blog, Tiktok video; if we devoted more energy and priority towards healthcare and the environment, we'd be prioritize much more resources and get a better outcome than having everything be about politics, or sports. Ah, sports, the bane of our existence but so tempting to talk about. Bread and circuses. Some movies talk a big game about prioritizing science, like "Black Panther" with using vibranium to create new scientific advances in Wakanda, but no follow through from the general populace, including me. MJ and I have been watching "Millionaire" too and geography and science questions getting a smattering of right responses in the "fastest finger" questions, but when it's about NFL QB's, EVERY SINGLE contestant got the question right. Millionaire also had a bunch of celebrity editions like "Comedians" with Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Jack Black, and "Classic TV" edition with Florence Henderson from the Brady Bunch and Sherman Hemsley from the Jeffersons, even "Supermodels" got an edition (Heidi Klum and a bunch of other very attractive ladies, perfect for television). Where are the Scientists edition or World Leaders edition? The sports stars, singers, movie stars, and most celebrities all get great reputations for just doing their jobs, but scientists like Fermi never get their due except in academic circles and world leaders are one of the most criticized groups of people, no wonder we can't get any good candidates anymore (see Hobson's choice entry). 

But guess what? Celebrities aren't celebrities forever; the 2000 classic TV version is filled with people who the young generation wouldn't even know today; Cindy Williams (Laverne and Shirley), Adam West (Batman), Valerie Bertinelli (One Day at a Time). They probably wouldn't get recognized in the street today. Science? The benefit of science is that if you do something great, they remember you forever: Galileo, Jonas Salk, Einstein, Goddard, Stephanie Kwolek (kevlar vest). Those inventions last til the end of history, and so might Fermi and Oppenheimer, for better or worse: nuclear chain reaction leading to the nuclear bomb. That effects the entire human race. Gotta know about them. 

White coat hypertension (白大衣高血压, 백의고혈압)

 Also called white coat syndrome, white coat hypertension is when a patient's blood pressure measurements are consistently higher in the doctor's office than at home. MJ experienced this yesterday during a visit to the doctor's office, where her readings were higher than the expected 120/80 (systolic/ diastolic numbers). It was a pretty stressful visit to decide our next step in fertility, so I get it....even the nurse told MJ not to be nurse, but totally understandable that patients would get nervous about upcoming procedure, or impending probe into one's body. I'm not sure how blood pressure works, but I'm pretty sure my blood pressure was high for an extended period of time when driving in traffic to get to work in L.A. (mostly pre-pandemic)... mine was probably blocked-traffic hypertension or bumper-to-bumper hypertension. Oddly, when I go to give blood, I'm pretty stressed too about it because I don't like the needle prick of the finger (step right after blood pressure is to check hemoglobin) and I don't like impending needle or multiple needles going into my arm, but my readings are fairly normal, maybe I'm just dull to it now. Luckily for me, lack of hypertension probably means I don't eat too much salt or have an unhealthy lifestyle, as those would be causes for hypertension. 

Salt.....is not talked about enough in the American health system. Sugar is a huge problem because there's just so much of it in soft drinks, beverages, orange juice, even some type of milk and coffees (a good reason NOT to add sugar to your coffee- MJ is very much a black coffee person but we do sometimes get cappucinos and lattes), but I feel like people are aware of sugar being a culprit in weight gain, unhealthy habits, they just choose to indulge in it (another reason NOT to choose to get a dessert when the waiter offers it at a fancy restaurant). I learned about another beverage the other day I didn't even know about called "Yoo-hoo," which is literally just described as a "chocolate drink," it's just chocolate and sugar and water I guess. At least they're honest. Salt feels more like a silent killer as everything in food has a lot of salt, and restaurants just dump as much salt as they can into food as long as it's tasty. MJ and I often say that certain desserts "cannot be bad" if they're like terramisu or some sort of cream, puff, have vanilla, chocolate, etc. Well a lot of foods get a cheat code if they just put plenty of salt in it, it appeals to people's tastes, and they just keep eating it. I haven't gotten McDonald's fries for a long time, but I now recall seeing their kitchens full of the deep fry machine as well as dumping a load of salt into the fries and just mixing it around, and now understanding why people said to avoid fast food. All fast food restaurants rely on these salty conctions. Talk about white-coat hypertension, this is white-castle hypertension, or yellow-arches hypertension! I wonder how much extra boost on the systolic rating you get just from consuming a meal. "Fancy" restaurants I suspect use the SALT cheat code too, but just not as prominently and blatantly, leaving a little nuance for picky eaters who you know, care about nutrition. At this point, though, I feel only safe eating a raw piece of carrot or kale, at least I know people didn't douse that with salt yet. There's definitely something to be said about having that "fresh" feeling in your mouth after eating as opposed to the sour aftertaste of sugar and astringent aftertaste of salt. 

Hello Jadoo (안녕자두야)

 As the premiere of season 2 of Squid Game inches ever closer (December 26, 2024), I'm reminded that in this day and age the best way to learn a language, Bobby's time-tested strategy, is to watch movies/videos/TV shows in that language with subtitles. Obviously you have to know the basics of the language first to pick up basic words and the structure of the sentences, but starting from an intermediate level the most sustained way to learn is to watch videos, because it keeps you having fun. Human beings learn more when they want to learn something, and they want to learn something if they're having fun doing it. That's why I advocate for any Korean learners to watch Squid Game with the original Korean audio capturing the raw emotions of Gi-Hyun's quest for revenge against the faceless cabal that created the Squid Game and the desperate pleas to unite the contestants, and I also advocate for an animated series on Youtube I've been watching called "Hello Jadoo." Jadoo is "plum" in Korean, but it's a pretty cute-sounding name in any language. Jadu is living the life of a 1990s-2000s young girl going to school with a salaryman dad and "determined" mom (kind of archetype of the scary strong-willed mom) and 2 younger siblings (a rare thing in Korea nowadays- one couple having 3 kids). In a time when there's an overabundance of options to focus your eyeballs on, at least with Korean shows you know you're learning and using your brain to try to make connections between English and Korean, even if you're not actively doing so. (Instead of letting the Golden Bachelorette or the 88th season of Love is Blind wash over you). I think I also like Jadoo because it depicts the kind of family I would want, an ambitious and fun-loving but also considerate daughter who seems to be enjoying her life, despite having to vanquish various conflicts like sibling rivalry, bad grades, classmates who pick on her, and money issues all before the episode is over. Luckily, each episode is only about 10 minutes, so she's able to solve everything in about half the time American sitcoms do (about 20 minutes running time). 

What you watch on TV does have an effect on you (just ask the people who watch political shows like Fox or MSNBC), but especially as a kid. I grew up as a kid watching family-friendly shows like The Cosby Show, Home Improvement, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, etc., come to think of it all shows that have a large nuclear family, something I didn't really have so maybe I was subconsciously yearning for one, or I wanted to be part of that family that looked like they all had each other's backs). I recently have talked to a lot of Americans older than me (either in their 60s or 50s) and they grew up with a completely different set of shows from a completely different time that shaped their worldview and prefernces, with shows like MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) that was set in the Korean war but was more of a reflection of the anti-Vietnam War sentiment back then, or Westerns like the Bonanza, Beverly Hillbillies, and even prime-time soap operas like "Dynasty" was a thing. I really like the title of some shows like "Have Gun, Will Travel" that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the show. In many ways, looking back as a kid, I probably learned a lot of my vocabulary and expressions from watching American shows, I just didn't know it, my brain just absorbed it as I was watching. Which is why it's important to regulate what you watch, don't just let it vegetate, give it some good foods like language learning and......trivial shows, to learn something. My grandmother on my dad's side once came to America and spent several months with us, and she watched A LOT of American TV, and I'll always remember she told me it was to "get more learning." She was a Professor in China and lived through the Cultural Revolution, had 4 kids.... smart woman, shoulda tried to learn more about her. Instead I was a little too rebellious at that age, like Jadoo. 

Ramona and Beezus

 One of my favorite trivia categories is children's books or children's authors because a.) I'm good at it, and b.) I enjoy being reminded of my favorite books to read as a kid. I read a LOT as a kid, so there are plenty of good memories, something I can't really relate with MJ because she didn't grow up in America and didn't get exposed to that part of American culture at a young age like young age with classics like "Number the Stars," "The Giver," "The Phantom Tollbooth," "A Wrinkle in Time," "Where the Red Fern Grows," "Maniac Magee," "Bridge to Terabithia," not to mention the entire Harry Potter series that hit right in my sweet spot of wanting to become a wizard. Some of these books might not be "children's books" actually, more young adult, which is another category I'm a big fan of. I never got to "Dear God It's Me Margaret" because well.....I wasn't a girl and that book is great for girls finding themselves in their teen years. One of my favorite books series about girls though written by a woman was by Beverly Clearly, the Ramona and Beezus series, which spawned so many different sequels (Ramona and her father, Ramona and her mother, Ramona the Pest, Ramona Age 8, etc......) but Ramona was just so relatable of the typical American childhood in.... checks notes..... Kickitat Street in Portland Oregon. 10-year-old me had no idea where Portland was, but Klicktat street sounded just like Park Crest Drive in Darien, Illinois where I grew up, and Ramona's adventures were like my adventures, and she thought like a child, which I did too. Cleary had a great talent for writing from the perspective of a child. The movies didn't do great (did you know Beezus was played by Selena Gomez in the 2010 movie?) and Ramona was Joey King who is only now just 25 years old and went on to be in something called the Kissing Booth. 

What I miss about being a child is not having to lie so much; I was so free and without stress and pressure. It's not like I'm a compulsive liar, but all adults have to lie to some extent, like if we get stopped by someone trying to sell you something, you lie and say you don't want it, you have to lie to kids about their pets dying, you have to indirectly lie to keep secrets, you have to lie during a job interview that you want to stay at that job forever. And these are just the noes that everyone accepts; everyone has something that they're lying about. Ramona and people in her world would answer the phone when it rang, unquestionably, to see who was calling and want to transfer it to her parents or maybe it would be a phone call for her! How wonderful. Nowadays nobody answers the phone anymore without seeing who's calling, and if it's an unknown number you just don't answer, one step short of lying by representing you aren't there, and for good reason because that unknown number is probably going to try to lie to you, part of the territory as an adult. And also, being a kid meant you could ask to be friends with anybody, and adults are friendly with you, people want to be your friend, you have your whole life in front of you, so many adventures await. As an adult I feel like everyone just trudges along in their life and pass right by you pretending to not notice you. I went to an American Red Cross to donate blood and the nurses there just totally ignored me except for the most standard questions. I've gotten this from grocery store clerks, DMV check-in people, basically any place that doesn't rely on you to give tips or are beyond caring about their job and don't have incentive to be nice to you. This nurse stuck the needle in my arm and then immediately spent the rest of the time I was there talking to another nurse who worked there, complaining about the hours she had to work, being stuck there for too many assignments, etc. Never once did she ask how my day was, though I would have gladly talked and listened to her problems too. It's like I'm not even there, and I was just a fountain of blood to draw from and then just have me go on my way. I often wonder how Ramon Quimby fared as an adult (maybe a sequel called Ramona Quimby, age 38?) and how her life turned out, her inner thoughts about how she viewed the world now, would just be skeptical and cynical of everyone like I kind of am or would she still have that energy she had and treat everything with excitement and as an adventure. Or maybe she'd just be on her phone all the time. Who knows. Maybe I'm just trapped in that child world in Klicktat, Oregon, forever wishing the world was as it was as a kid, answering all phone calls eager to know who's calling me. 

As I write this I'm getting another spam call that I just let go to voicemail. The way of the world. 

Hobson's Choice (霍布森的选择, ホブソンの選択, 홉슨의 선택)

 I may have overstated my position in the last post. MJ pointed out to me that she was offended by my last post about who we elect as President not mattering that much, and that I'm only saying that because I'm a man and don't face the problems that women face. I won't say that I agree totally with this, but I do see it from her perspective: women's rights are highlighted more in this election than others, especially with abortion being a hot topic as well as IVF rights, a topic men like me have the prvilege not to talk about. Just like gun rights though (Harris has steered to the middle on gun control and says she owns a gun too and is not here to take away people's guns), Trump is actually pretty close on abortion issues as the Democratic candidate despite Republicans being traditionally against abortion and trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, which they did in 2022 with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, a decision that was caused mainly due to the Supreme Court being packed with Republicans who had held the majority and actively tried to overturn Roe v. Wade as a stated purpose, something that was attributed to Trump when he appointed justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh during his presidential term. So I can see what MJ is upset about, but also on that particular issue, Trump in the future is not saying he's going to implement a national abortion ban. 

While definitely not meaning to offend anybody including my own wife (and the entire country of woman), I think my rant against the election was generated mostly by the Hobson's choice that I feel we're forced to choose between, a saying that's similar to choosing between a rock and a hard place: neither choice is appetizing. Never in my adult life have I felt less encouraged to vote for a candidate, neither of whom I feel is qualified to be president, for various reasons. (The first time I really got into an election was in high school Kerry v. Bush, then 2 Obama terms where Obama gave hope for the country and spoke eloquently and intelligently about ideas that he was undeniably a good candidate for president, even if political opponents disliked his plans). I think it's partly due to me getting older and realizing the intractability of the world and U.S. politics of being trapped in a loop and consequently becoming more skeptical of anything that goes on in the hunt for power, and partly it's due to elections just being fundamentally different now with the internet, social media, and attitude of the country and the world.The democratic process has now become solely a popularity contest, not a job interview between the candidates and the voting public, which is problematic because there are just too many uneducated voters in the country influenced by various news outlets, lack of knowledge about what's true anymore. In 2004 I used to go down a list of fundamental issues and the candidates' position on those: abortion, foreign policy, economy, the death penalty, gun control, free speech issues, assisted suicide, climate, human rights (use of torture, etc.), education, health care, all of which have become minor issues or not discussed at all because they'e been dethroned by the personality of the person and whether the person is a "threat to democracy." I have a very close knit group of highly educated lawyer friends who often comment on news issues, and even they just end up debating all of the flaws of Trump, everything he gets away with, how crazy he is, etc..... it's too tempting to just focus on all of this flaws, and thus the real issues get obscured). Which, I realize, is a reason itself to vote against Trump is that no matter how you feel about it, he makes it about him and not the issues. 

If during a job interview I realize both candidates interviewing for the job have fundamental flaws, I can reject both and reach out to a larger pool of candidates, but not in an election. I feel like someone else has culled the possible list of candidates to just 2 and then forced me to interview those 2 people and forcing me to choose one no matter how badly I don't want to. So I'm just hoping to survive the next 2 days, watch Jeopardy, go to work without fearing rioters will cause trouble, wait it out in my bunker, stock my freezer with enough supplies (apparently this week many people are bringing back early pandemic times and preparing for the worst) and hope America's collective Hobson's choice isn't as bad as we fear it will be. 

Politics and Prose (政治, 政治, 정치 and 散文, 산문

 I dislike politics. I don't like office politics, friend circle politics, home owner association politics, baseball franchise politics, anythign that has to do with certain people having power over other people, but I ESPECIALLY dislike politics now. And right now, 2 days before the Presidential election, is the epitome of all of dislike, when everything anyone does gets politicized, when all of Facebook (besides the Dodgers winning the World Series and the Dwayne Wade statue memes) is just people discussing all the benefits and downsides to either candidate for President; I think it's talked about so much for the same reason there are office politics: people love to gossip, and the race for the highest office in the country as well as arguably the most powerful position in the world is just an excuse for people to gossip on the grandest stage. It's a way for politicans to give ordinary citizens "a chance to participate" even though your one single vote has a statistical value of zero influence on the election results, but gives you the illusion of doing something, perhaps for a good cause. (I know a few co-workers who instead of working this weekend, spent it in Pennsylvania knocking on doors for the Harris campaign, believing it to be "much more important" than their jobs.) Is it though? Setting aside the fact that knocking on doors to solicit votes seems unlikely to change too many minds this late in the election, are you really doing it for a good cause, or just perpetuating an election process that's too long and too costly as it is? Especially this year with the 2 candidates that are available, the talk is much less about policy than what the 2 candidates stand for and personal issues, so it's taking time up from actual fixing anything, more just talking about 2 individual people. Election propaganda will make it sound like my life is going to be drastically different depending on who wins, that it will be a utopia if one candidate wins and a living hell if the other side wins. I don't think it's going to affect me myself that much if either one wins, personally. Eventually it will affect the United States and which direction we go with climate change, immgration policy, use of A.I., etc., but me personally in the next 4 years? I'm not going to be moving out of the country or anything if one candidates wins or the other. 

Politics and Prose is a witty name for a bookstore in the D.C. area; I just love bookstores. They have a veritable cornucopia of books I want to read, everything, everywhere, all at once. It's like they have the exact blueprint to my mind's desires of what to absorb, especially on an off day at work, and I could just sit there through a zombie apocalypse or something even if the world goes to hell or (even worse for some people) the Internet for some reason just stopped running. The only downside to a bookstore is that people don't talk each other necessarily, it's a place for reading, not conversations, but that's almost better: often conversations at restaurants, the mall, public places just involve people trying to get you to buy something you don't need (extra dessert, extra hand lotion, squeegees) that you have to politely refuse. Bookstores don't want anything; no obligation to buy, no sales pitch about what book they want you to buy (there are definitely books that bookstores make the most money off of, usually the hot new trendy fiction bestsellers by renowned authors that they can mark up higher instead of the bargain book section that they know hasn't sold for a while and that they need to get rid of before the next batch comes in), and importantly no need to pay tip. It's honestly one of the last public places I can go to and feel comfortable (maybe museums) and not feel gross for contributing to the American capitalistic ways. 

Politics and Prose has the right idea, but here's my re-naming based on my preferences: 

"Less politics and More Prose!" Have more people read more books rather than get engaged in politics, have an overload of information and noise through the election, and then it suddenly stops and society doesn't care about it anymore. Prose is forever; elections are temporary. (My sister Emily pointed out a similar flyer on the street advocating for tattoos using similar logic: Tattoos are permanent! Politicans are temporary). And what they have in common for me: I don't care for any of them! 

Mac Miller

 Recently there has been a disturbing in the music industry: substance abuse. It's nothing new; Elvis is the most famous example of death by substance abuse (I thought people were joking as a kid when they said Elvis died on the toilet, but he actually did......because of a heart attack caused by drugs). Mac Miller was a young rapper who died in 2018 because of a long history of substance abuse........at age 26. Really sad, just a kid and already exposed to so many different substances that affect your body, when your brain hasn't even fully developed or just finished developing. Recently one of the former members of One Direction, Liam Payne, died after taking too much drugs and jumping off the balcony to his death. It feels like something to do with the music industry that propels singers to substance abuse, or it's substance abuse that makes their music so great....kind of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. I'd like to see some studies done to see if the drugs do actually help creativity and artists come up with better songs (it anecdotally did help the Beatles create the White Album and especially songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds") or that's more of just an excuse to dabble in the nose candies/ succumb to temptation. It's sad.... a lot of the deaths that went unexplained in my youth can now be attriuted to drugs, especially those of younger people who didn't really have any chronic medical conditions or didn't have a tragic accident. A lot of the "drowning accidents" not just of celebrities but of people you hear about are often due to some drug-induced incident, like Whitney Houston dying in the bathtub due to drowning caused by a heart attach caused by cocaine use (I know, kind of a lot of steps to get to the drowning, but that's what happened to a relatively healthy 48-year-old. Mac Miller is just this generation's Jim Morrison, or Amy Winehouse. Take care of yourselves! Just like a famous Mac Miller song, "Stay," we want you to stay, and not just end up a Jeopardy clue about "this alliterative deceased rapper." 

I don't think my body could handle drugs. Heck, I could barely handle a few beers at the tailgate to the Chicago Bears- Washington Commanders game this past weekend. An epic ending to a pretty disappointing game: The Bears didn't score a point until late in the 3rd quarter, and Washington's offense wasn't much better. As a skeptical sports fan, it's become harder and harder for me to understand why the sports mania runs so deep, filling up stadiums across the country at a time when you can watch the games at home with better camera angles, don't have to be stuck at designated seats next to fans of the opposing team, for a team that is literally there to make money off of you. I understand the allegiance to a college team because your formative years made you remember all the great afternoons watching the game with college friends, but pro football teams are purely just of your own choosing. Why pay upwards of 200-300 dollars for a ticket to sit in traffic to get into a stadium, root for a team that doesn't care about you and only want your money, doesn't pay you dividends or anything (unless you own a share of the team, which no regular person does), just bragging rights, and you have to go out and spend $100+ on the latest jersey (I thought about shelling out on a Caleb Williams jersey to wear to the game but predictably cheaped out and got the $20 generic Bears shirt) and get the "privilege" of paying through the nose for beers and special "crab fries" that are extra salted and extra fatty to ruin your diet? I'm suddenly in the anti-sports camp I guess; I think a much better investment in Sunday afternoons, a precious time of not going to work and spending time with family, is personal investment, spending time with each other (just not at a football game). Like there were families who went there with their 3-year-olds or newborn babies! Is that necessary? Are you giving your kids memories of football games (unlikely) or just showing your allegiance to a fandom by even getting your kids indoctrinated to the religion of sports? Too harsh? 

Happy Halloween and Happy Election! The next week or so is going to be.... hectic. 

Rapid City

 Rapid City, South Dakota is not well known; I've never bought any products from companies based in Rapid City, I've never seen ads for jobs there, I've never met anyone from there, I've never read of anything significant in history happening there. No major political party will go there to campaign and gather votes. At 78,000 people, t's not even the largest city in South Dakota, a notoriously unpopulated state (first is Sioux Falls). And that's the exact type of city that Jeopardy loves.... just big enough to matter, and just close enough to an important landmark (it's called the Gateway to Mount Rushmore) to matter. Rapid City is also the city that my parents and I passed by on the way to Yellowstone from Chicago when I was really little, like before-my-sister-was-born little, one of many road trips, some to Boston, some to Disney World in Florida (from CHICAGO! Man my parents really enjoyed the freedom of driving around America after being confined in cities in China). That's probably why I developed such a love of road trips: looking at maps, going places I'd never been before, charting out a route, sometimes through obscure cities like Rapid City. Also the open road is really a nice feeling of freedom and possibilities as opposed to being stuck on the I-405 going back and forth on your commute feeling trapped in a little bubble. 

Sometimes I pass by Jehovah's Witnesses stationed outside the train station or other urban centers, looking friendly and ready to chat. To their credit, they've never approached me or yelled out at me with their message, they've been very polite and respectful of others' time, and not tried to guilt me into talking them as I walk by. That in itself is kind of a good marketing tool for the Watchtower magazine group..... that actually makes me interested (not interested to stop and talk with them, but I could see it being a good selling group for others). They always come as a group, showing solidarity (not just one guy yelling into the void), they seem well dressed especially if it's a cold day, indicating comfort and stability, and they always have literature, I'm always down to read. But do they have to stand outside all day? I mean these people are out there as early as 8AM or so and still there in the later afternoon....quite the dedicated pitch. 

Pro tip for future elections: vote in a swing state if you want daily messages from numbers you don't know telling you to vote in that election 4 years later, even though you haven't lived there for 3 years. This is why people dislike election season, but also if you want to avoid it go to a solidly red or blue state, where politicans don't spend any time. On the bright least I don't live in Pennsylvania, which has become the No. 1 swing state in America, and has a sharp contrast between the rural areas and the big cities.... someone recently told me between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh it's basically the Deep South. That's where the dichotomy comes from. 

MJ and I went to watch the 1993 Tim Burton "classic" Nightmare Before Christmas tonight with accompnaying musical score played by orchestra, and we..... didn't enjoy it that much. It's like that time we watched Kubo and the 2 Strings.... we didn't think a Disney-backed kids movie could possibly be bad...... it wasn't bad but it didn't make me feel good. Is it a comedy? A drama? A horror movie? Is it a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? Is it a musical? All of it is kinda garbled in there, that and some genuine scary things for little kids like vampires, zombies, and a guy walking around with an axe buried in his skull. What kind of audience was Tim Burton going for here? It's decent in the concept of a new type of cartoon/ visual effects, but I don't see how it gets a large following still 31 years later when it should have gone the way of movies like "Brave" or "Brother Bear" (aka not classic hits). Not everything can match my tastes, I guess. Some people like Nightmare Before Christmas and hate going on road trips; I am the opposite. 

Happy Halloween! 

DYFI

 TIL I learned about "DYFI," or a commonly asked phrase in California apparently that I was never privy to: "Did you feel it?" after earthquakes were reported. Either I got extremely lucky, or I just have very low sensitivity for sensing the ground beneath me shaking. I've never felt an earthquake, nor have I ever expereinced a tornado, a fire, or any other natural disaster that they trained us for in school; I guess I'm just a blessed person. There was even an earthquake inside Dodger Stadium one time, all the baseball players felt it, and I didn't feel it. I've never been part of a hurricane evacuation, or blizzard. Not that I'm asking for it, but if you lived my life you'd think the Earth was perfectly fine, nothing out of the usual or lifethreatening happening, ever. 

Hurricane season in America is apparently August- October, and this year is especially active with super-hurricanes Helene and Milton. Hurricanes are rated from Category 1 to Category 5 (5 being the strongest) on the Saffir-Simpson scale. There was talk of adding a "Category 6" hurricane due to the severity of Milton that just passed. MJ and I have only been on the residual end of hurricanes, but even hundreds of miles away, you can feel the rain and thunderstorm and the power of the weather. The weather taketh, and the weather giveth away. My parents are now in Maine during fall leaves season catching the beautiful orange and red of Acadian National park and all the foliage changing colors and lobsters and lighthouses, a nice peaceful trip for my mom who's been battling cancer all this year and last year. 

The last week or so I've been forced to put my phone away for work, and I realized how much of a load off it is, the days just feel completely different, my eyes feel different because they're not as strained looking at a rectangular screen in my hand all day, my ears feel different because they're not listening to incessant political ads and cell phone games or learning academies guaranteed to increase my score on the SATs (what??? why am I getting those ads 20 years too late?) and most importantly, my mind feels different, like I don't wander off and think about "who is fighting at the next UFC event?" every few seconds which leads to more inquires which branches off into more inquires, all of which are answered by using my phone to get the answers. It's no way to live life, just sitting at home every day on the phone. I imagine it's similar to what opium users in China did, never even leaving home anywhere due to everything they ever wanted being right around them at home, just living off of them and depending on them. I realized for the last few months slowly but surely I had been increasing my usage of the phone, my screen time was going up, and I was being less productive in other endeavors (like studying trivia, a better use of time, or studying languages) because I was so engaged with the phone. It's a silent time-killer.The downside of course is that I don't get to see all those trending hashtags like "DYFI" (Did you feel it) about in-the-moment stories like earthquakes, but the upside is, I don't really care and don't really need to care anyway. If I felt it I felt it, and if I felt the middle of it, I would be dead. I don't need to feel it. 

"Manic Monday" (躁狂星期一, マニックマンデー, 조증의 월요일)

 "Just another Manic Monday...." is an earworm that I've heard for many years now from the song "Manic Monday by the Bangles (from the duclet tones of Susanna Hoffs!) but I learned from Friday's Jeopardy episode (I bragged to MJ that it was a Bobby episode- meaning if I was on the show, I would have won the game because I knew FJ and all 3 Daily doubles- but who knows how I would have performed on stage with stage fright, I know it's probabaly easier at home) that the song I know and love was actually written by Prince, yes the artist known as Prince but full name Prince Nelson Rogers from Minnesota who wrote songs that became hits not only for himself but for other bands, like "Nothing Compares 2 U" for Sinead O'Connor, and "Stand Back" for Stevie Nicks.... he has quite the influence on other bands and singers, enouh hits that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had a question with 4 possible choices of songs that were originally written by Prince... all seemed plausible. 

"Manic Monday" was a song about work on a Monday morning and wishing it was still a Sunday, lamenting the rat race lifestyle that a lot of everyday workers have....I haven't had that for awhile. Sure, like most people Monday is the return to the work week after the weekend, but I don't really feel the physical pressure of Monday, as I roll out of bed like every other day and have no heart pressure-raising bus or train to catch or need to be out the door by a certain time. This week, though, I gave myself a little stress test: commuting to work on a Thursday, by (gulp) train. Unlike the private confines of your own car, a train exposes you to the masses of humanity, to hundreds of others within 100 square feet of you all sharing the same space, breathing the same air..... some germaphobes swear they won't do it, some commuters swear by it. Me personally I can do without it, knowing how many people have sat in the seat I have, or that someone in my vicinity will suddenly open up a box of fried chicken and start eating while everyone else in the car has to smell the fried chicken while NOT being able to eat it, or someone will talk loudly on the phone about their root canal operation last night or what they thought of their dentist, or just general loud music, or people putting their feet in the aisle, all things that have happened to me. It's a crazy world, full of different variables, stressors, catalysts for anxiety, one could even call it.........manic. And don't get me started on the subway! I can't believe I spent a whole spring/summer in NYC commuting using the subway, and why are there always people who rush to get into the train, only to stop right at the doorway so they can be near it, but then everyone else trying to get on have to get around them to get into the middle. You really get to see some of the ills and shortcomings of people on a subway. 

The other "manic" nature of it is the time.....getting to work exactly on time, now that I've been able to spend 4 years without having to do so, seems like an impossible task bordering on trying to land an airplane onto a helipad during a thunderstorm with high winds.....how do people do it? I don't even know if I'm going to wake up at a certain time, even with an alarm I might sleep through it or ignore it, or take a bunch of time going to the bathroom, getting something to eat......trying to project when you're going to get into the door of your office from where you are in the morning when you get up (before you get dressed, get ready to leave the front door) is so difficult, especially knowing EVERYONE IN THE WORLD is also doing that same thing on Monday morning, so trains, buses, roads for vehicles, everything is crowded. For someone like me who values every second and every minute and tries not to waste any time, it's way too manic, way too unpredictable, raises my blood pressure way too high. So yea, Google and Amazon employees plus all the tech companies trying to get their employees into the office, you better negotatie all the perks you can, more than just free food, maybe parking validations, gyms at the office site, good coffee machine (MJ would love that) before committing to go to the office....before you settle for just another Manic Monday! 

The Overstory

 The Overstory, besides being a catchy title punning on a literary work and the top layer of a forest, is one of the few contemporary novels that Jeopardy contestants have to name the title, whereas other clues usually gave the name of the novel and ask for the author, or some other iteration, but The Overstory is its own level of importance, having won the Pulitzer Prize for author Richard Powers in 2018 and telling a powerstory about preservation of trees and the environment. The story is well-adapted for a movie already already with various story lines and character arcs including a paraplegic Indian computer coding mastermind (think maybe Karl Penn or Dev Patel) with a war veteran (think like Jake Gyllenhaal or Mark Wahlberg or something) with disavowed academic who is just on her own in the wilderness (think Reese Witherspoon) and a loving couple who are unable to conceive a baby but put their efforts instead into the environment (think any iteration of Ryan Gosling- Emma Stone types). I'm not a good writer, but I'm a decent reader, and even an unpolished boor like myself can discern what is exquisite writng with the prose and quality of plot, although not as much dialogue as I would like liked (remember I am a big stickler for dialogue in stories), but the trees and urgency of the global environmental crisis and deforestation drives the plot and gives plenty of impetus for the reader to keep going, as well as plenty of literary references to classic works (Powers is a writer, after all, and makes plenty of references through his characters reading certain books in their storyline like Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche). I also like that Powers probalby wrote from his own experiences, as he lives in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains according to the author bio flap, adhering to one of the earliest tips for writing I ever got: "write what you know." The energy and knowledge of the topic shines through in specific situations, not just about environmentalist tree huggers and geographical descriptions of the Pacific Northwest/ Santa Cruz Mountains near San Francisco but even in just the short one-page summary of the couple going through infertility problems and the pain and agony that couples face trying to decide whether they should continue trying to have a genetic baby or "settle" for adoption (the book characters ponder whether to move to Russia or China where there are ample babies who need parents). 

I also like reading about real (as real as characters in a novel can be) people with real problem, instead of all the narratives and social media narratives we are fed that provide a warped sense of the world nowadays. One can easily be manipulated just staying at home and being fed versions of the world through a screen without ever actually talking to real people anymore (especially with the 2024 US election just a month away now- gulp). I almost looked forward to jury duty this past Monday at my local courthouse, just to see what normal people look like. Instead of a self-selecting population of people I usually run into like at Costco (lots of Indian and Chinese/Korean Americans looking for good deals) or the crowd at Mom's (people taking their diet seriously with fresh veggies and usually vegans), jury duty is just a random group of people who live in the city who are U.S. citizens and have an address on file with the DMV. That's pretty much everybody over the age of 18 (and under the age of 70 for my particular county, it turns out who are exempt from jury duty). And the mix of people was about as ecletic as you could get: not supermodels, not social media influencers, not people whose stories have been curated by the media to get the type of spin that they want, just normal people living their lives, all a little irritated at having to report to jury duty at 8:00AM on a Monday morning (although the $30 in jury pay for the day might alleviate those compliants just a tad) A good portion of people were overweight, a big tell that we're not operating in TV land anymore, this is what America is now, and people reading books, waiting for instructions from a government entity. This is not "normal" in America now; people don't wait and people don't wait for instructions. So as much as I dislike jury duty as a concept and think it's a waste of time for a group of normal citizens to determine the guilt of a random person's incident, jury duty nowadays might be one of the only ways to get people like me to experience a gathering of real people, to be amongst my fellow citizens. And I guess the jury population doesn't include homeless people, so I'm not REALLY getting into certain areas of the population, but this level of working class, middle class, feel like real people to me. I don't care about the problems of the elite or the celebrity class or the manufactured problems of those who don't necessarily deserve all that attention; I care about those in the working class who are ignored and not heard from, like me. I want to hear their "overstory." 

Jarlsberg Cheese (贾士伯格奶酪, ヤールスバーグチーズ, Jarlsberg 치즈)

 I'm slowly realizing that we have too much variety in America. There's just too much of everything: too many types of cars, too many Netflix TV shows to choose from, too many blogs to read, too many podcasts to listen to, too many types of alcohol to drink, too much everything. This isn't just a problem for trivia nerds like me because it expands the amount of information that we need to know, but it also is just too much for the consumer to handle. It's too hard to evne know what to pick. There's ESPECIALLY too many cheeses in the world: Jarlsberg cheese, the cheese of Norway, is something I'd never even heard of, much less experienced, before watching Jeopardy. Then there's Roquefort (KING of cheeses, as if that's a source of pride), Brie, Edam, Gouda, American, Swiss chess, Camembert, feta, Parmesan, ricotta, colby, cottage, and those are just the ones I'm vaguely aware of, I'm sure there's hundreds more. And none of them will be consumed in our family because MJ's vegan (she only eats vegan cheese) and I think all cheeses are pretty similar, and don't add much different from one another. And they're not that good for you. Also Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures don't really have cheese in their diet, so I didn't grow up knowing anything about cheeses, didn't have pizza, didn't have Mac & Cheese, so I didn't have to make that awkward choice when the Subway guy asks you, "what kind of cheese on your sandwich?" and out of embarrassment just say "American" because that's the only one I know. America also allows way too many chemicals: The FDA allows food manufacturers to use more than a thousnad different chemicals to manufacture their food, some of which are banned in other countries. Kellogg's makes their cereal for Americans differently than the ones they make for Canadians' different ingredients. STOP eating all these exotic foods and desserts and treats and things. Restaurant foods are yummy BECAUSE they put all these extra chemicals in there on top of butter, mayo, and all kinds of stuff you don't think about because you're just admiring the taste. Stick to a strict diet that you know is healthy; that's the real choice to make. 

There's way too many types of cars; I think there should just be 3 selectinos of cars in each class of cars: 3 types of sedans (Toyota, Honda, and GM each get one), 3 coupes, 3 pickup trucks, 3 SUVs, 3 minivans. That's it! More than that is just promoting big business and too much for consumers to handle. 

There are too many TV shows! Not even counting the Youtube channels, there are at least 8 streaming sites with various arrangments of movies, packages, bundles, premium plans, etc. This is like the 3rd time I'm mentioning Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 4 posts, but the reason that show got such good ratings is because everyone watched the same shows, everyone could talk about it. I could ask in a random room "anyone see who got voted off Surivvor?" in 2000 and someone would definitely know. Now you get blank stares, and people have even sworn off TV. The last shared viewing experience was Breaking Bad 2013 series finale, and then 2019 Game of Thrones the collective let-down of Season 8 the Final Season. 

Having too much choice has a name: it's called choice paralysis, choice overload. Even on Saturday nights (tonight) I often agonize over how to spend that precious little time: should I go to a football game, watch the MLB playoffs, work out in the weight room, go to a live comedy show, go to a classical music concert, drive to the next city over, call my mom, watch the latest UFC fight....someone on Reddit said it best, "if I only had an hour left to live and could watch any TV show I wanted to, I'd spend a half hour scrolling through to pick which show. 

Chekhov's gun (契诃夫的枪, チェーホフの銃, 체호프의 총)

 Tonight's Jeopardy episode had a category called "Possessive Names" that featured clues about famous people as the possessive and things that belonged to them, like a "vulnerable point" was "Achilles's heel" and the argument that you should gamble on the existence of God (because if you're right the upside is so big, and you don't want be wrong about the existence of God if you're betting there isn't..., called Pascal's Wager- I don't necessarily agree with this, by the way, if you take it too seriously and devote this existing life to God and get too embroiled in religion, con men, religious cults, etc.), and one I didn't get called "Newton's Cradle," an example of something I've known existed since I was 7 years old but didn't know the name of, it's that weird scientific toy that some people have on their work desk that has a set of balls in a row and if you pick up the ball on one end and swing it into the rest, the ball at the other end springs into the air, falls back, and hits the row of balls, causing the original ball to go back in the air, and so forth. Awesome evidence of Newton's 3rd law: for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. 

Anyway, the one most interesting to me, and easiest to visualize, of that category was "Chekhov's gun": the idea that if you have a loaded gun on stage, then at some point during the play it must go off. Chekhov being the famous Russian playwright. This makes a lot of sense in the physical sense and is all too real in America: a lot of guns exist in America and quite a large percentage of them are probably loaded ready to be fired, and if a gun is already loaded, it seems almost nonsensical for those bullets not to be fired.... it's just a disaster waiting to happen. That's America's gun problem, and gun control isn't being discussed at all in this year's presidential election because both major candidates are in agreement: they're not taking away the guns. Kamala and Tim Walz both own a gun, and she apparently is going to fire it if she needs to. In fact, it's one of the only issues Kamala and Trump agree on! Amazing. 

The other, more philosophical idea of Chekhov's gun is less applicable in the real world: that everything happens for a reason (often said by religious people, I wonder if they are more apt to apply Chekhov's gun to real life).... that if I dedicated a lot of hard work to a cause, some good must come out of it, or if I bougth this set of golf clubs, I must become good at golf, or if I like this girl, she must like me back and we live happily ever after.... these things often make sense when watching a movie when viewers can almost guess the plot after seeing just the first few minutes of a movie or TV episode, surmising that "because this guy broke up with someone named Summer in the first part of the show, he must meeting someone named Autumn later" or something like that. Unfortunately, real life does not work like that..... things often don't follow a continuous story line, and things that happened previously in life coudl just be nothing, wasted, nothing comes up of it. In the movies after all the time I've spent studying trivia, we're conditioned to believe I would have made it onto Jeopardy already.......In the movies all this learning of who "Edward the Bear" is (Winnie the Pooh), what the largest archipelago in teh world is (Malay Archipelago) and who wrote Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson) would all eventually become useful in a Slumdog Millionaire-like moment when it all comes together onstage as I accomlish my dreams, but reality is that most of the knowledge I've gained will literally be trivia- good for nothing. After all the time and effort MJ and I (mostly MJ) have dedicated to having a baby, you'd think we will eventually have a baby, or should have had one already... but it just hasn't happened yet, and I'm sure there are some unlucky couples who went down the same path we did thinking they'd eventually succeed only to give up in the end. (Hopefully we're not one of them). Maybe, just maybe though, as we continue to live our lives and go through new experiences and new challenges, we'll find little areas where things do come full circle, and we're rewarded for our efforts...and Chekhov's gun, like so many real guns in America, actually goes off.