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. 

Substitute Teacher (代课老师, 代理の先生, 대리교사)

 Tonight I got MJ to watch the Jack Black movie "School of Rock" for the first time ever.... cute movie, good trivia study material with different rock bands and songs, catchy music, and kids! Always a good formula for success, except even in 2003 (just 21 short years ago!) some of the humor would be unacceptable nowadays. Definitely a movie that still works though, and especially needed in times of anxiety and hand-wringing about kids. It also featured one of the most brilliant 3-week runs of a substitute teacher ever turned in by rock music lover Dewey Finn played by Jack Black, and it got me wondering what it would be like to be a substitute teacher. Well, I looked it up.... the pay is terrible, but most school districts in large urban areas kind of need them, especially with the amount of permanent teachers who have a difficult time now at school after the pandemic with distractions and social media and smartphones, etc. Just imagine if School of Rock had happened in 2024.... the kids would just all be on their phones while Jack tried to convince them to start a band. Also I looked up which school subjects are the most popular....apparently math and science teachers are in the most demand, which makes sense because people with those backgrounds usually can find a job in other sectors, while English and social science teachers don't have as many options to choose from and have to "settle" for being a teacher. I would love to learn science again the right way, especially chemistry and physics, because I don't think I was taught correctly in high school or at least didn't have the interest in it that I should have. I wonder what substitute teachers do nowadays..show movies? Try to teach something on their own? Go off of what the permanent teacher's notes were? Hard to tell. 

Recently I've been hooked no watching old "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" episodes which came out 1999-2002. (Guess I've devolved into literally living in the past through TV shows that came out in the "Glory Days" pre-smartphones). In addition to a good host, good questions, and good format to keeping viewers engaged with lifelines, etc., the show is significant to me because it marked the last time that ordinary random people showed up on prime time national TV. I'm not talking about the contestants of The Bachelor, or Survivor, who are usually culled by the TV executives to fit the demographics that they need, matching specific criteria, one of them being that they need to be telegenic and exude sex appeal or look like a model, I'm talking about ordinary office workers, accountants, teachers, lawyers, truck drivers, police officers, who got on through calling a toll-free number, answering questions, and then flying to New York. There was very little "culling of the herd" by TV execs to get exactly the right contestants they wanted, it was more by merit and open to all who qualified to get on TV. That just doesn't happen anymore, and game shows like Jeopardy are the last bastion of "real people" like me getting on any kind of national TV (although I suspect even Jeopardy has a little bit of filtering for people). Millionaire didn't do that.... they let everyone have a chance. What it got them was often casts of very, very, very white people who all looked pretty much the same (mostly white males, plus Regis Philbin a white male host), but.....IT STILL GOT EXCELLENT RATINGS. It came on almost daily eery week at its hey day and one of the highest rated shows on televison, showing that even as late as 2001 (I know, maybe ancient times by today's kids' standards) you didn't need to have sex, violence, etc., or made-for-TV characters or gimmicks like drag queens, D-list actors, comedians, etc. I'd argue that the audience resonated with the down-to-earth folk even more. If only they'd try it again ( I guess the business of TV has changed where it might never happen again). Here's hoping it will!! Or I'm allowed to time travel back to pre-2008 days in my current adult form (not my pubsescent years of acne and insecurity). 

Sibling Rivalry (兄弟姐妹间的竞争, 兄弟間の競争, 형제 간의 경쟁)

 Another term that doesn't have a great counterpart phrase in Chinese that rolls off the tongue as easily as it does in English like "sibling rivalry," this term showed up in a Daily Double clue in Jeopardy recently as a psychological term, describing what the theme of Succession was about among the Roy kids (shoutout to Succession that ended its run last year). I've never thought of sibling rivalry as psychological, more of just competitive drive and human nature, although I will admit I don't think I've ever had a sibling rivalry with my much younger sister, so I almost want to have one just to see what it feels like. I guess it's a constant drive to be the parents' favorite child, to get your parents' approval more than your sibling(s?) I never felt that necessary because well, I was 9.5 years older so of course I would have way more accomplishments at the time of life as Emily did, so it never really occurred to me, but I do think my sister lives a little bit under my shadow because my parents expect her to be what I was like..... which, not to brag, I did pretty well in high school, not so much after high school, but yea big shoes to fill. But I never needed my parents' attention that much, I actually kind of wanted less of it, just let me do my own thing, and pick me up when I needed a ride after school, supply meals, pay tuition, etc. I guess I took a lot of these things for granted, but it's not like I thought any deficiencies were due to them not paying as much attention to me as my sister. 

I wonder if MJ and I ever become parents, and somehow have more than one child, will we have a favorite child? Probably yes, and I guess parents just don't talk about it, but I guess kids can sense that rivalry. 

The earliest sibling rivalry in human history is probably documented in the Bible, the story of Abel and Cain, an example of something I should have known about as an adult but had no idea about until I watched Jeopardy a lot, and now it comes up like every other week. (This past week it was a question about taking one letter out of a pile of stones on a hiking trail and getting a man's name in the Book of Genesis, answer being cairn and Cain. I couldn't for the life of me remember "cairn" and 5 seconds is not enough time to think of all the male members in Genesis, but usually it's either Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Esau, so on and so on. Cain is not the go-to, but for Jeopardy purposes he probably is because that story of his rivalry with Abel and eventually killing him is so compelling, so juicy, and so....human, so typical of jealousy and greed and trying to get approval from one's parents, except the parent in this case is God. Cain kills Abel because God shows favoritism towards Abel apparently, probably a good lesson for parents with multiple kids to be equal and treat each kid with special care and without favoritism. 

Most siblings I've met are all on good terms, either hanging out or speaking favorably of their siblings. I do know a few, though, who don't get along with their brothers or sisters and don't speak to them. That's tough, because unlike parents or grandparents, or sons or daughters, siblings are likely the ones who will be with you the longest, from birth to death, since they're always around your same age. They're always around, and they're of the same generation, likely with some of the same genes, same mindset, etc. To be estranged or not talk to a sibling for a long time or forever (or in Cain's case, killing them) seems awfully harsh, with exceptinos of murders like Ted Kacynski (his brother turned him in) of course. For most people, it's probably just a matter of not seeing eye to eye on something, some argument that got out of hand. I do hope everyone is able to turn sibling rivalries as a kid into sibling friendships, I'm curious what that's like. 

Passive Income (被动收入, 수동소득)

 I don't talk about finances much anymore, which is probably a good thing for my finances, because the times I care the most are when the stock market is dropping and my net worth is dropping by the day, exemplified by stretches in late 2018 (tech downturn), early 2020 (beginning of Covid), and almost all of 2022 (fears of inflation which might lead to a recession). Almost miraculously, though, Fed Chair Jay Powell flattened the inflation curve (something we didn't do that successfully vs. the Covid curve) AND avoided dipping the economy into a recession, and the stock market has been in full-on rally mode since the beginning of 2023. Hindsight is always 20/20, but the best time to have bought stocks was at the end of 2022, like a New Year's Resolution, after a whole year of brutal losses when I'd sworn off almost all stocksand started buying government bonds and supposedly "safe stocks" that weren't that risky; that's when it was time to go all-in and bet it all on something. For example, 2 years ago right around this time Nvidia, the darling of everyone's stock portfolio now, was at 112.......and today it traded up to around 120. A slight gain, right? No, that's AFTER it had a 10:1 stock split, so it's the equivalent of going up form 11.2 dollars to 120 now, a more than 1000% gain. Fortunes could have been made. 

And that's the story of my passive income in a nutshell: certain months and years when I've passively losing income, where every day I feel like I'm losing money while just sitting doing nothing and panicking, whereas the good times (most of the times) I don't even think about it because I feel safe, the wind's at my back, and nothing can stock the bull market, and I'm very very passive about my portfolio. And that's really what passive income should do, you don't have to actively manage it and can worry about other stuff, like "active" income. Most of the income I've ever made has still been active income, sometimes too active; I feel like I get a little too bogged down by it and fail to enjoy my life enough (or as MJ says, pay attention more to MJ). I also would like to increase my sources of passive income, not just stocks, which are nice and all but haven't delved into the world of real estate passive income, becoming a landlord or selling houses for twice the value I bought them at, which is what my homeowner friends are experiencing in LA all the time: hey my home value doubled after 2 years. Yay for us! I'm not sure that it's all "passive" though: obviously less maintenance than owning a restaurant or hotel or something (sometimes I wonder if those are the most "active" income ever because you have to put your whole soul into it, like marrying a restaurant because you're stuck with it forever....or until bankruptcy) and owning a house is also putting a lot into that investment, like paying property taxes, making repairs, putting in new air conditioning every few years, condo assocation fees. And it's not fun....scrubbing the shower floor is not fun, applying a new coat of paint in one's home is not fun (for me, at least..... I could see how others could enjoy that). Clicking "buy" on one's Etrade screen is fun and checking the golden eggs a few weeks later to see how they've grown is fun. There are no hidden costs (maybe a little of a commission if you buy a mutual fund and even some exchange traded funds) or at least any physical work needing to be....it is by very definition passive income. There's nothing like the feeling of getting a notification every couple months that "Etrade has posted a distribution.... UNH dividend." (maybe bad example, United Health has a measly 1.46% yield, Abbvie posts a much more impressive 3.24%) they're literally paying you to own the stock.... not a bad feeling after being squeezed for every nickle and dime by contractors, repairmen, the city from taxes, etc. as if you're sitting on a pile of good and you're renting the land you have your house on. 

I may have convinced myself through this post NOT to expand into real estate as another source of passive income. Maybe ask me next time the stock market goes into a bear market; I might sing a different tune then. 

Zero Dark Thirty (零 黑暗三十, 제로 다크 서른)

 I watched the movie Zero Dark Thirty in 2013 knowing it was the Bin Laden movie, a fictionalized account of events that led to the capture (and killing) of Osama Bin Laden, based on real events. Entertaining movie, scenes of torture, Jessica Chastain, mostly shot in the dark, a typical military movie. What I DID NOT know, however, is that Zero Dark Thirty is actually a military term for the time between midnight and dawn that is the best time to move quietly and without being detected, like the US Navy Seals (Seal Team Six) did to get the jump on Bin Laden and the compound guards, with minimal loss of life (at least for the US side). 

I recently learned a bit about World War II and just couldn't imagine actually serving in any military. The amount of discipline that is required to go through basic training, waking up at 5AM, being on a disciplined schedule, probably without smartphone use.... how do people do it, especially in this day and age? In World War II it felt like the world was at war so it was your duty to enlist and fight for the right side, fight for your country, fight for your family. I can't even stop nowadays for someone on the highway- MJ and I drove past a car that rammed headfirst into the protective railing seemingly seconds ago, with smoke coming out of the engine and the driver scrambling outside to collect materials. I could have stopped and should have stopped (even though I was a little delirious from visiting the fertility clinic for what seemed like a whole week straight)- I guess I'm a little shaken about my own personality and who I've become, someone who doesn't care about others, someone who is guilty of the Bystander Effect and assumes someone else will help the unfortunate car accident victim, someone who justifies not helping by the lawyerly mentality of thinking, "if do nothing I'm not liable, but if I do something but incorrectly I might be liable." Not all of these things are displayed in just one decision to help someone in distress on the side of the road, but over the course of time I'd like to think I hold myself to a higher standard. And what is there really to do when helping someone, unless there is an immediate need to pull someone out of car and/or there's an active fire? Not sure I could do much except call 9-1-1. I HAVE actually called 9-1-1 to report deer on the highway or impediments, so I guess I know the protocol there. I think the best thing to do if I haven't driven by today's driver was stop ahead of the driver, block off the lane to make sure everyone stopped before the scene and went around, ask the driver if everyone was OK, and then just wait for the first responders to arrive. 

I wonder in the future if the human race needs to fight wars anymore, or if wars need to be fought between human combatants. Seems like with the new technology of finding any one person anywhere in the world with face recognition technology and drones, technology might outsource even military jobs of you know, being on the frontlines. All the lives being lost fighting for a cause or an ambitious world leader's personal vendetta might no longer be needed, maybe wars are just fought economically, or through strategic probabilities, like you submit your model of what would happen if I unleashed all my weapon power on you, it says victory is 99.8% likely, and the other side just submits to that? May seem silly but probably preferable to the enormous loss of life on the battlefield as well as the amount of innocents dying like in Gaza or Ukraine. 75 million people are estimated to have died in World War II including victims of genocide, civilian casualties, etc., the US lost just 400,000 military and not many civilians but don't say "just" to the US soldiers who passed away on the battlefield or lost limbs, came back never the same. 37 years old would be really old for soldiers, the life expectancy was not high, yet I still feel like a kid. Maybe, just maybe, our first priority for the use of technology and resources is to cure medical issues first but then modernize warfare: make it like Zero Dark Thirty and stealth operations that limited death and the horrors of war. 

Brown Recluse Spider ( 棕色隐士蜘蛛, 갈색 은둔거미)

 Pretty sure Asian countries don't have this concept of brown recluse spiders because they only live in North America! The Chinese above is just a rough translation. Apparently it's venomous and has a violin-shaped mark on its back. Be on the lookout! May have to go to the hospital if stung by one, although I'm sure plenty of people (like me) have a fantasy of being stung by a radioactive spider like Spiderman did and become a superhero, one of those things we get trained as kids to think like and never break out of that paradigm, like thinking snakes are bad or that beautiful people are good-natured and caring. I've often found a negative correlation between beauty and consideration for other people. I just like to stress to the general public because this beauty-first society is being even more pronounced today with smartphones and social media, beauty is not everything, please pay attention to the people who are not beautiful, because they in fact need attention (just like animals, don't just give money to the best-looking cats and dogs! There are plenty of ugly dogs that need your attention! And other animals that aren't dolphins or horses that don't fit our standards of aesthetically pleasing physical forms like all kinds of bugs! Bees are probably the most important creature that people don't like because they're always buzzing around......they're so very important to the ecosystem of plants and flowers and nature's cycle. They're pollinators! Fertilizers! I wish humans had the equivalent of bees to help with fertilization, MJ and I (and I mean 99% MJ) wouldn't have to go through all this time and effort. Worms! MJ hates worms, rats, anything on the ground essentially that is dirty, but they're also really important. Don't hate them just because they don't conform to our beauty standards! 

I'm starting to formulate a theory on it called "The Tyranny of the Beautiful: How beautiful people run the world and we're just living it. It's the world's sanctioned discrimination of people: we're not allowed to discriminate based on age, sex, religion, race, skin color, sexual orientation, basically anything type of groupings anymore, EXCEPT physical appearance. We're allowed to do that, and human beings do it in spades, voting with their eyes, their attention, their money, their preferences when hiring people, their preferences when selecting people to get on TV, etc., etc. I understand some people have it hard growing up a certain demographic in America (I actually think the hardest are people who are born blind, or with some physical disability or disease, but those get lost in the shuffle due to everyone playing the victim card in society nowadays), but ugly people like myself do actually grow up having a hard life, and it's only getting harder. Honestly, that's a small part of the reason I've considered NOT having kids, is I know how hard it can in this society that values physical appearance more than almost anything (maybe money?) and to give my kid a negative start out of the gate. But MJ is beautiful! So maybe that will make up for my deficiency in that department. (I believe, btw, this is called getting the Darwin Award- voluntarily taking onself out of the gene pool, a form of natural selection). But seriously, it is an issue. No one does studies on it of what percentage of people go through depression, social isolation, lower self-esteem, and just lower success in life based on the factor of physical attractiveness, but I have to imagine the graph would show a huge causation. I was baffled when I was a kid sometimes why I was left out, people I knew stopped hanging out with me, I always got quietly rejected by girls I was interested in, I never heard anything back on those Survivor/ Amazing Race audition tapes: it's this quiet, unspoken acknowledgement by society that, "yea, sorry but you're not attractive enough." I'm the brown recule spider. Never getting its due, never mentioned as anyone's favorite animal. 

History Buff (历史爱好者, 歴史マニア, 역사광)

 I'm no history buff by any means, there are plenty of people know American history better than I do, but I LOVED AP American History in high school, I'd argue it was probably my favorite class ever (except maybe Evidence in Law School where we just watched Perry Mason clips to see where the lawyers should have argued for hearsay) and the teacher wasn't even that great, it was just the substance: whenever I got home from school and started doing my homework, I would always start with the history reading because I had actually been looking forward to that, it wasn't work to me. Chemistry and physics and writing papers were always a drag to me and where I learned there was just something topics I wasn't interested in, but HISTORY.....that's where it was at. The stories of people, of battles, of real people who did real things whether right or wrong, that's where I got hooked, similar to learning about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Chinese history, I was really into it. If only historians got paid more, I definitely would have studied history in college and pursued a career in it, whatever career there would be. The problem is there's no money in history, most industries actually don't WANT you to remember stuff, they want you to spend money NOW and in the future. History is full of old technology and old products that no one wants anymore, what's coming up is always the here and now and what companies want consumers to focus on, whether it be the new iPhone, the newest car models, or even, the newest campaigns for president. I was just reading about the 2012 election today.... just 12 years ago and 3 elections ago! Anyone remember who Michelle Bachman was? or Rick Santorum? Those were going to be major players in teh Republican nominees for President to take on President Obama, until Mitt Romney won the day and the year. Now they're afterthoughts. Definitely part of it as everything post-Trump is different than it was pre-Trump, but also for the Democrats I just recenty saw a picture of one of MJ's friends with Julian Castro, the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Obama and contender for 2016 Presidential nominee, and he's been kind of buried too. 

Kind of just goes to show or country sacrifices learning from the past in order to focus on what's next, what's new, what's trending on TikTok, not pausing to think that a lot of stuff that's new and hip now is just going to fade away really soon. Chappelle Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, flavor of the months for now, who knows how long they'll be relevant. 

Got off topic! Yes I love history and any book in the library or bookstore with a "timeline of events" on a certain topic is going to get me hooked, especially if it divides the history up year by year, like what happened in 1973 or something like that. I once embarked on a project to read every Time magazine from every year.....I didn't get very far, but it's eye-opening what gets reported and what's newsworthy back then. I did not know, for example, in 1991 the Persian Gulf War was happening, and the actual military phase of it just lasted.....43 days, from January to February of 2021. Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Saddam Hussein had been in the public spotlight since all the way back in 1990 until 2003 after he'd been blamed for having WMDs and found and killed in a spiderhole. Every generation has its crisis and things that pervade the generation. It changes so dramatically, what everyone is worried about in a particular time period and then ten years later it's almost completely different, like everyone's memory got wiped, we reset the game, and we're starting over as new characters in a different level of the game. Donald Trump was at the center of another attempted assassination tonight in Florida on a golf course, and it just feels like we're living through history. It's fascinating that all of this stuff will one day be history, and I'm living through it. History is such a wonderful study of how we all lived through a particular time of Earth's history. I'm just suprised more people don't want to examine it further. 

Surnames (姓, 姓, 성)

One of those things that humans have always just done but may not apply anymore is taking the husband's surname. It's common in almost every civilized society: in the U.S. most women take their husbands' last name upon marriage, and then their kids take the man's last name. In China most women keep their name even after marriage, but the children take their fathers' last name. My last name is Yan because my father's last name is Yan, and it's just always been that way. 

In older times, a practice of coverture, women were considered the property of men, which nowadays would just be completely wrong and frowned upon at least in western society and especially in America. Most people in my friend group don't have the wife taking the husbands' last name, and neither did MJ and I. It's also just less paperwork to have to change all of MJ's bank account information, school records, passports, social security accounts....seems like a hassle to me just to take someone's last name. (In The Sopranos, there's a big scene where Richie Aprile tells Christopher Moltosanti to give Adriana his name, as in to marry her..... another outdated reference). I get it was a big deal back in feudal times or fictional Game of Thrones times (based on the War of Roses England time) because noble families married with other noble families and had "legitimate heirs" so giving someone your name as a noble family was important to legitimatize the marriage. 

One of my lifelong friends recently introduced his 2-year-old son to me as First name..... last name of his wife, which I was a little surprised by at first, but then realized it made a lot of sense....the woman does most of the work (if not all, really, let's be honest gentlemen) and if she wants the child to have their family's name, that's definitely something that can be negotiated and not stuck by the tradition of always taking the husband's last name. That's actually the best way of liberal thought working by the way, not some of this "woke" ideology that goes way far to the extreme. I'm not against liberalism, it's just that it has to be applied correctly and actually make sense... this is one of those examples where a age-old tradition that was established based on principles of a different moral system and understanding about family strucutre no longer applies and should be replaced by a new system. I fully sign off on this being a new development in society, unlike some of the other proposals that we should pump the brakes on. 

In our case, (if we ever have a child and get the honor of naming him/her), MJ's name is easier for Americans to say anyway. Yan is just difficult. Americans just don't know what to do with that -an at the end (they have no problem with the Y!) and they never get the Chinese intonation right anyway. Lee is a much more universal name (Americans, Chinese, and Koreans all have the surname) and Americans say it much closer to what it actually sounds like in Korean. Plus, it's my only shot to ever be related to someone named Bruce Lee! 

Tea (茶, お茶, 차)

 Recently I've taken up ordering tea at sit-down restaurants to avoid looking too cheap and getting that awkward look from the server of, "ok I'll just give you some waters then" when the answer you know they're hoping for is, "oh we'll start with a round of drinks" to start racking up the tab. I've been doing it a fast-food restaurants too though, where most of most famous chain restaurants have some sort of unsweetened tea option available, except......Costco. When I get those $1.50 soda and hot dog options, there's just not many tea options. It's disappointing. However, because of this new tea inclination, I've learned that different restaurants use different types of tea: McDonald's uses orange pekoe tea, for instance, while Starbucks uses Teavana shaken black tea, but most restaurants just use a standard Lipton tea. That's why it tastes pretty much the same everywhere, but.....in a good way. 

My fantasy baseball league commissioner just sent me a box of teas as a present, and even the box smells good, like a fresh batch of teas. I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about teas, but it seems like a good habit to get it, between all the different kind of drinks I could be into from coffee to alcohol to diet sodas to non-diet sugar water (aka any time of sodas produced by the big corporations Pepsi and Coca Cola), I think teas is probably the least damaging, and gives me a slight kick of stimulus that's not water or milk, the only 2 things I usually drink. (Oh and sparkling water). In fact, certain teas like green tea have these catechins that are antioxidants reducing inflammation and improving heart health. Why hasn't America had a Big Tea revolution and fad/craze like pickleball or the "broccoli masks" I just heard about that help skin health? Maybe there's just not enough of a demand for it, or maybe it just doesn't make much profit: There's a reason I get the ice tea, which is just $5 instead of the $10 alcoholic drink at all restaurants. Much more profit in alcohol from just the drink itself but also the bad spending decisions made after it. I've never regretted getting the teas. 

My law school friend just had wisdom teeth removed in his mid-40's. Ouch. Definitely not something I'd want to try, but maybe one day I will have to: I often wake up to cold sores because the previous night I was involuntarily biting down on my gums and my wisdom teeth got in the way. He did NOT look comfortable. 

Shogun is a really good show and deserves its 99% Rotten Tomatoes rating and is a good way to hone my Japanese which I've neglected for awhile now that I have no one to speak to (see Loneliness Epidemic entry) but I really gotten question this trope of white men going to Asia and falling in love with a beautiful Asian woman.... it happens all the time in Western media, most famous being the Last Samurai with Tom Cruise, but with other shows too like "To all the Boys I've ever Loved, Lucy Liu's character in pretty much every show or movie she's ever been in...." all us Asian men have for instances of getting with white woman is Glenn from the Walking Dead getting together with Maggie. Even on a show about shogunate Japan in the 1600s which has a plot that's great of its own merit with a power struggle to become shogun and epic battle scenes, there needs to be a love story about a white guy forming a forbidden bond with a Japanese woman. I get that's what it takes to get a Western audience (Hulu subscribers) into the show, but it's kind of pandering to those people and further pushing that trope of emasculating Asian men, even on a show that's set in Asia. Literally zero other men on the show get a love story (the main character played by veteran actor Hiroyuki Sanada from Lost, doesn't have a wife or any time to have love interests because he's fighting to the death all the time), and all the Asian men are busy beheading people or scheming.....no one is loving except the one white guy on the show, who's kind of playing the white savior role of saving the Asian people. Just for those reasons I can't give this show 99%.... take off a few points to 96% please. And taking it as a gut punch to us Asian men, who already have difficulty in this society as it is without having to be reminded time and time again we're not that valued except for our tuition dollars to colleges that we can't get into and for our tax dollars working in low-mid level white collar jobs with white bosses. 

Except for Jensen Huang of Nvidia! You kick their asses! And help my portfolio get stronger! 

Loneliness epidemic (孤独流行病, 孤独の流行, 외로움 전염병)

 One of the biggest issues in America and probably the world is not Covid-19 (made a resurgence this summer), the opiodic crisis, or any number of obvious candidates people could name off the top of their hands, a silent killer is this loneliness epidemic a lot of people like me have been suffering since work has largely become WFH, and people can access everything they need from the Internet with little need to go outside and talk to people. The apps and smartphones are great for convenience in ordering groceries by phone, playing chess on your phone, having team calls on the phone, ordering take-out from the phone, online shopping by phone....it's like the best things about the new world are also what's causing the loneliness epidemic. 

I just had an in-person meeting with my the attorney team that I've worked with for over a year now, and I realized: this is what's meeting. I finally got to know what my teammates looked like, what they sounded like in real life, if they can take a joke or not, if they're rude, if they're polite, where they live, what kind of car they drive, what they like to drink, what they normally wear, how they respond to a hot day in L.A. Basically I learned in one hour at the Corner Bakery in Pasadena more than I've learned from a year's worth of communicating on the Internet and through Zoom meetings. I can't be the only one that feels this way, although I have a unique combination of having a small family, few relatives in the area who live in the U.S. much less in the same city, not living in the same city or state as I grew up in, parents who are pretty anti-social, and not being the target attraction of any particular social group: I'm a dispensible part of any group, no one's actively texting me going, "hey, let's hang!" I get that. But at least before the pandemic, I would see a group of people every day Monday-Friday, and get to chat about something, a reliable source of communication and a nice wall to the loneliness. (Granted, even before the pandemic there were co-workers who would never talk to me even though I tried to talk to them, and never try to initiate contact with me. I think those people are probably handling the epidemic better than me). I guess I just have a trait of feeling needed or talking to people, yet somehow finding myself at the public library or bookstore all the time, one of the most isolating places you can go. I guess I'm just a walking contradiction. 

I think likely part of it is I've always worked at jobs that featured a big office with a large selection of people to talk to, often working in the same room with people where conversation could start at any time and it felt like a communal environment. I worked as a camp counselor where I talked almost incessantly to kids, then went to law school where discourse about assignments and life was abundant (I probably peaked in terms of social interactions in law school, boy would I love to go back to those times, without the studying for law school exams), to working on large teams of attorneys who had similar backgrounds as I did (and often spoke the same number of languages and could go back and froth in those languages), to suddenly just cutting off those connections for good and being exclusively at home from Monday-Friday in a room by myself. I can adjust pretty well to most situations, but after 4+ years of isolation and then being reminded me the past life just made me realize how much I miss it. And how lonely I've been all this time. 

Constitution (宪法, 憲法, 헌법)

 There are 2 definitions of constitution, one is a set of laws that governs a country, like "The Constitution" in the U.S. that gives the general framework of our laws, but which has come under fire recently for having been written by white slaveholders in the late-1700s with sexist and racist ideas throughout the document. Fair point, but it's also set forth the government of the most successful country in the world today, if not in human history (arguable, hard to compare obviously). The actual Constitution is actually not where I thought it was: the Library of Congress, which I would have seen since I just listed last Christmas; no it's in the National Archives, where it was transferred from the Library of Congress its original home before Nicholas Cage and team set out to steal it in the National Treasure franchise (jk). There are 27 amendments to it, the first 10 being the most important, but also the 13th abolishing slavery, 15th giving black people the right to vote, 19th giving women the right to vote, etc. I'm learning most of this through "The Year of Living Constitutionally," another brilliant non-fiction book by AJ Jacobs who once endeavored to do a personal goal of mine, read all the way from A-Z of the World Book Encyclopedia. 

The second, less common definition of constitution is how one's body is, so if you have a good constitution you don't get sick much. I do have a good constitution in that sense, but I do NOT have a good one when it comes to getting angry. I have anger management issues, as I believe I've expressed here more. I very, very rarely get upset at strangers/ outside company (one exception being today, actually) but unfortunately am prone to "lose it" with the people closest to me. Today's exception was when my parents and I went to a beach in Ventura County (ironically called Hollywood Beach) and as soon as I got out of the car (I had admittedly been feeling motion sick in the car sitting in the back seat while my Dad drives in his herky-jerky brake for no reason sort of way) and just gotten on to a narrow sidewalk (maybe fitting the width of 2 people) when a man from behind me said "excuse me." I turned around and the guy is on his bike passing me, which is OK I guess even though you're on a sidewalk for pedestrians, but then he says, "you gotta watch out." I guess I got triggered by his remark, as I had the right of way, and also 2 days ago a totally unrelated incident in Century City got super upset I was in the left lane even though I had to make a left turn soon, and he stuck his middle finger at me as he passed by while honking. Maybe still holding a grudge over that incident, I decided to speak out about it to this biker who gave me a lecture about watching out even though 1.) He was on a bike on a sidewalk, and 2.) he did not call out "on your left" or make any efort to let me know he was behind me until he had passed me. I yelled out. He stopped his bike and confronted me. Outside of pickup basketball where things get a little chippy and physical sometimes understandably, this was the closest I've ever gotten into a physical confrontation. My mind went numb, and I snapped back at this biker, although I don't think I yelled. Many times I just bite my tongue and let it know, but sometimes after those incidents I feel humiliated that I was so weak and probably let my race of Asians down making our whole race look weak, so I had to say something, and I stuck to the argument: "I have the right to use the sidewalk as the pedestrian." The argument continued, and the thing is arguing with someone who had the audacity to do something like that in the first place, they're not going to be reasonable or suddently change their mind, it's just going to escalate cuz they're that type of person, so eventually I just kept walking without saying anything, and he got a last few shots in but just left. There were plenty of witnesses around on a public beach during Labor Day weekend, but it definitely could have gotten physical or threatening to do so; I think I was right to stand my ground and assert my rights though. Sometimes you just can't let everything go. 
Now, anger problems with my close family members.... that's something different, and triggered by a whole host of other issues, that I'll address in a separate post, but it's safe to say I've always had anger issues as a kid, my parents never provided the proper way to deal with it (my dad in particular perpetuated it by the way he got upset at me if something went wrong) and I've habored some trauma from that, coupled with my own issues of repressing my anger until it boils over and I lose control. 

Multiple Choice (多项选择, 多肢選択, 객관식)

 Recently during the Jeopardy hiatus I've been missing the daily kick of Jeopardy questions that comes with it, so I've been rewatching a show that was my earliest exposure into the trivia world (or was it jeopardy in the old days after school a 4PM in the Chicagoland suburbs? I'm not sure) but the late Regis Philbin's voice really brought back some memories. Talk about the "hardest working man in show business," Regis apparently once had the record for longest time spent on US televison, in part due to the hourly episodes of WWTBAM from 1999-2002, airing DAILY on network American television. Boy what a time to be alive, a game show with difficult trivia questions and people winning thousands, maybe even a million dollars, every night of a whole TV season, and being rewarded for their general knowledge (I wouldn't call it intelligence necessarily, more ability to absorb and recall information, which is mostly what trivia is). Nowadays network television isn't what it used to be in popularity, and even if it was I feel like people would be more interested in The Bachelor, Love is Blind, and other matchmaking shows, drama shows rather than learning facts. Jeopardy is the last bastion for trivia lovers, and really the last resort for people like me to get on national TV if not for committing a crime or some chance event. 

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had a great format because each question after the $500 question essentially doubled the size of the pot, ($32,000 to $64,000), and that's not even factoring in the "minimum winning levels" past $32,000 where you couldn't leave with less than that after passed $32,000, as well as factoring in the fact if you got the quesiton right, you have a higher expected value to get to the million dollars, so that swung the odds in the contestant's favor to go for it. If the contestant was 50-50 about a question, narrowing down to 2 choices, then game theory says the contestant should go for it, even it's a blind guess between 2 choices. There were plenty of times watching where I yelled at the TV (retroactively from 20+ years in the future) after the contestant had narrowed it down with the 50-50 life line (or somehow was between just two) to GO FOR IT! But of course it's not my money, and Americans and poeple in general are irrational about money: For people who need every cent to get by in life, I get walking away with a certain amount of money, especially after the big stock market crash of 2000 wiping away people's fortunes. Then again, though, you walked into the studio with zero dollars, it's essentially a lottery, they're not taking money away from you..... it's all funny money for the game anyway, and a million dollars at that time (and even now, to an extent) is lifechanging money, $32,000 is not. For every contestant who walked away without guessing, you can think of it as taking their money and running, but you can also frame it as they're voluntarily giving up their chance to double their money right then and there, but also giving up the chance to continue to life-changing money, which $32,0000, or $64,000 or whatever, certainly is not. As their financial advisor (which I certainly am not qualified to be), I would have advised them to go for it. (especially if they're young with no kids, you have your whole life to make money if you don't get it). 

Who wants to be a millionaire is similar in many ways to Jeopardy because it tests some of the same material (which musical is about a performer named Louise who became a stripper? Answer: Louise), how many Von Trapp children were there in the musical Sound of Music, which was the only president not to be nominated by his party for a second term (at the time, now we have Joe Biden joining the record books! A: Franklin Pierce) but what's fascinating about is the format of multiple choice versus free response of Jeopardy. MJ loves multiple choice! And I get it: multiple choice gives you a fighting chance at a question even if you have no idea about what the answer is, and you don't have to reach deep in the crevices of your mind to come up with the name of a fish, a river, a Seven Wonder of the World, etc., so coming up with candidate answers itself is tough to do for most people. So yes I'm saying multiple choice is easier than free response. But of course that means the questions could be made harder whereas Jeopardy routinely offers some softballs like "which state is the Sunshine State" or something. Multiple choice also eliminates any wrong answers that you might have had that were not included in the given choices, in this case narrowing it to 4. It also allows you a chance to analyze all 4 choices to see what were the 3 in common and the 1 that sticks out, analyze the words given, the dates given, to see if it triggers something in your crevices. Not all questions, but definitely a good portion of questions, I would not have known after the question, but knew after the choices were given, like what's another name for "cerumen"- a.) earwax, b.) sweat, c.) saliva, d.) blood. I had some inclination of hearing that word somewhere, and it's in fact deep in my notebook of trivia questions I've compiled over the last 3 years, but I couldn't have come up with it unless........I just had a feeling when earwax came up that I had heard, that feeling of "bell ringing." At the same time, I think of the other ones in process of elimination, I've never heard of other names for sweat and saliva, and if there was one I wouldn't think it would be named cerumen. Plus, I would NOT have been able to answer the question backwards: If someone asked me on Jeopardy what was another name for earwax, I wouldn't be able to produce "cerumen." I don't even know how to pronounce it, I've never said it in a conversation in my life. But multiple choice, you don't need to say it for the first time ever on live TV, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do in a pressure-packed situation. But you don't need to do that in multiple choice, you just pick the one that's there (especially good if you'are a visual thinker). The beauty of multiple choice, on so many different levels. 

Oh and I loved the fastest-finger questions: always putting 4 different things in order, usually chronological order of what came first, time-wise, which is in my wheelhouse of remembering when things happened in history. I would have loved to get a crack at that show too (now that I'm much better than my 13-year-old self watching blankly about old TV shows I've never heard of like Hill Street Blues or Starsky and Hutch). it might still come back with Jimmy Kimmel! But no more fastest-finger questions, they just select contestants now to go directly the Hot Seat, I guess they don't want to risk having a dull contestant anymore or one that doesn't fit the demographic requirements that network TV needs to cast on their shows! 

Thirteen Lives

 I think for a lot of people, there's life before the pandemic, and life after the pandemic (and life during the pandemic). But usually people point to March 2020 when everything shut down as the natural dividing line between 2 types of lives. Before March 2020, I lived a life very much on the go, always looking for the next thing, reporting to work at least 5 days a week, very goal driven about making as much money as I possibly could, and life passed at a breakneck pace (or so it seems looking back on that lifestyle). I didn't focus on the world around me, as it was more about learning languages and playing dodgeball, almost in that oreder. I don't think MJ and I traveled to to as many places as we did neither, as I wasn't curious about it all, it was just noise. I had such tunnel vision that I missed out on one of the most compelling stories of 2018, the story of the Thai soccer team trapped in the caves. I did remember hearing brief updates about it interspersed with scores from the World Cup going on in Russia that year, but I may have just mixed it up with the Chilean miners from 2010, a completely different situation. To me Thailand was probably half a world away, with no connection to my world, and Thailand was not one of the languages I was interested in. That was also the summer of stocks taking off and my first summer of investing heavily in the market, so instead of international news I was trying to find the next Amazon, or next Microsoft, etc. 

My post-pandemic self is interested in learning about the things I missed pre-pandemic. I just watched the movie "Thirteen Lives" by Ron Howard starring Viggo Mortenson, Colin Ferrell, and Joel Egerton, and man Ron Howard does a great job at recruiting real life events and making us care about the characters. From Apollo 13 to Backdraft, I'm hooked by the real drama of these events, however accurate they are. There's some debate about how accurate some of the details are, and of course every movie is going to have some artistic license, but in general everything is true: a group of cave divers came to rescue the kids from an impossible situation where the floods had blocked off the entrance and divers had to swim hours just to get to the kids. They first had to find the kids (already 10 days in), then realized there was bad oxygen in the cave so they had a limited time to get them out, and of course impending storms would make the floods worse and make it even more impossible. I did NOT realize how close the kids were to not making it out alive, and it was kind of a miracle just to get any of them out at all, with a brilliant idea being born out of necessity to use anesthesia to conserve air and get them to not move and have the divers pull them out like cargo throught the caves. And somehow it worked, a medical device + escape story! Truly a made-for-TV event except it was real. And the cave collapsed on itself a few days later due to the rain and heavy flooding, so all the help from the rescue teams and the volunteers in the area keeping the water out of the caves really made a difference. Everyone involved was a credit to mankind. And I was just at work during the whole time, blissfully unaware of all the details and just only focusing on myself and my selfish circumstances, trying to make as much money as I could for myself. 

Thirteen Lives, for me at least, reminds me that there are more noble purposes in life than just going to work every day, and people who actually specialize in cave rescues (I'm sure there are all sorts of niche rescue workers like firefighters, volcano rescue teams, desert rescue teams, etc., but this was something I never heard of) and people risking their lives to help others. That team should have made international news and hailed as people of the year, but instead it probably went to some musician or politican or movie star because everyone loves popularity- just checked, in 2018 Time's Person of the Year was "The Guardians" of truth, so not bad, but in 2023 it was Taylor Swift, and I'd argue these rescue divers put a lot more on the line like their own safety than Taylor Swift ever has. (Just one man's opinion). The anesthesiologist/ rescue diver who checked the health of the 13 boys in the cavey, Richard "Harry" Harris, became lieutenant governor of South Australia, so I guess he did get a hero's welcome and credit went where it was due. Reminder for me to breathe the fresh air once in a while, read the news, get inspired by something, it's not always bad headlines and political news and the latest junk on social media, sometimes, once in a while, there are inspiring stories that make you feel good about life and want to make something out of one's life, more than just trying to make it through. 

Robin Williams

 Jeopardy recently had a category called "A 90s Kid," perfect for kids who grew up in America during the 1990s, in my opinion the best decade in history, right before 9/11, economy was on the up and up (America was actually running a surplus instead of increasing deficit like we are now), minimal wars, the CHICAGO BULLS, etc... it was great being a '90s kid. And part of being a '90s kid was the prevalence of Robin Williams the actor in my life. I had no concept of Robin Williams in his prior comedy career or his previous movie roles in The World According to Garp, Good, Morning Vietnam.... I just remember him in many of the movies made for kids/ families that I saw at the time: Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, Flubber, Jack... I remember specifically growing up with him on my screen many of the times and after growing up, still renting movies from Blockbuster (remember Blockbuster?) specifically to watch him, in movies like One Hour Photo (kind of a dud) and Insomnia. In most roles he was funny and made me laugh, even in serious roles like Good Will Hunting, and MJ often sites Dead Poets' Society as one of her favorite movies. (I remember my 7th grade English teacher had a poster of Dead Poets' Society in her classroom all the time, not sure if it was inspiring her teaching philosophy or more she just liked the movie or Robin Willaims. I guess one of life's deepest mysteries, I'll never know now). Not a single time watching his movies did I think that there was a deeply disturbed human behind the actor, who had a cocaine addictions in the 1970s and was struggling with alcohol and depression. Finally, the depression caught up to him in 2014 when it all became too tough to take and he took his own life by hanging, same way Anthony Bourdain died, another icon and guy I looked up to.

    In my adult life, I've come to understand that despite having a difficult childhood due to my weight and ehtnicity and overall appearance, I did not suffer from many physical problems or emotional problems, a very lucky break for me that I get to miss out on depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, or any number of various afflictions that can occur to a person. You can have addictions to a whole parade of horribles, from drugs to drinking to smoking to pornography to chocolate to painkillers to gambling. I realize that I'm pretty ignorant about these symptoms and diseases until it actually affects me, which is the case with trying to have a baby. But yea, depression is a really tough one because you're fighting against yourself, and you don't know when that bad side of depression is going to hit and life like a roller coaster of highs and lows, the most thrilling of highs but the deepest valley of lows. That may be why I don't see "I love you" as much to MJ, I just don't get those emotional highs as much and I'm not seeking them, but I also don't suffer the emotional lows and hitting rock bottom, I'm more of a go-cart stay on flat land kind of guy. Robin Williams was apparently not. His highest highs and lowest lows allow him to generate his talent to being a movie star and actor, and even the lows helped him craft stories about himself, but also eventually caused him to kill himself. 

    I'm now going to pay homage to Robin William's art by watching The Birdcage, another movie from those glorious 1990's (1996) where Robin plays a gay couple with Nathan Lane. Ah 1996, another election year, one for which I don't remember as much day to day drama as 2024. The good ole' days of getting home from school, finishing my homework, and watching Robin Williams come from the world inside a board game along with rhinos, hippos, and elephants and fight to beat the game so he can escape that world. And then watch that movie over and over again until I had to return it because it was the only selection I had, no Netflix or Amazon Prime or streaming services to have infinite choices from. The simpler times of life. 

Wrong Way Corrigan

 Douglas Corrigan was an aviator who had the misfortune of coming after Charles Lindergh's famous transantlatnic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, but in 1938 Corrigan did someting almost as famous in just the absurdity of his actions: He took a transcontinental flight from Long Beach, CA to Brooklyn, New York, and then he was supposed to take the flight back home to Long Beach, but instead due to "mechanical failure" and supposed misreading of his compass he wound up crossing the Atlantic and landed in Ireland, thus completely going the wrong direction he was supposed to go (indeed, almost the opposite opposite) thus earning himself the nickname "Wrong Way" Corrigan. He's probably one of the best cases in American history of someone doing something weird and off the cuff not for any award or merit or practical purposes, but just to get famous for doing something that absurd, the philosophy of "if I'm not going to be the best at something at least I can be the most memorable." It's now become a common technique in social media with prank videos of people rubbing people's hands on escalators, the Australian break dancer at the Olympics named Ray Gun who did an absurd dance that got zero points but everyone couldn't stop talking about her, more than even Simone Biles or Noah Lyles or any of the other major winners who got celebrated for their achievement. No, I think people have picked up on the fact that it's hard work to be the best and not everyone can make it, but it's not as hard and anyone can do something crazy and get attention, be the modern day "Wrong Way Corrigan." Just ask the "Hawk Tua Girl" who became famous overnight much like Ray Gun for something completely without merit but people just loved. 

As American society is going "Wrong Way Corrigan" with the people it chooses to give attention to, I feel like in some ways my life is going "Wrong Way Corrigan." For quite a while I always had a clear purpose in mind, to learn Japanese, become the best dodgeball player I can be, learn Korean and be able to converse in Korean, earn as money as I could at work to save up money, and then most recently learn as much trivia as I could. Those goals kept me hungry, kept me driven, kept me centered on my quest if you will towards a clear end point. Recently, however, I've felt more lost than anything, just because all my goals have stalled, have been completed, or I lost interest in them. I've lost the need to learn as much Japanese as I could, I'm no longer active in the dodgeball community and I've lost the hunger to prove myself in a kids game with no Olympic Games or really any recognition in the general American culture as a real sport (doesn't help that I'm 37 years old), earning money never gets old I guess but it's more of a "compelled to do" rather than something I get up eager to do in the mornign, and trivia.... still learning but starting to realize how little TV shows want someone like me to get on the show. Oh yea and fantasy baseball....why am I still stuck on it, even though I missed the playoffs this season and should be disattaching from such a trivial game with no meaningful practical application? I spend my days essentially working on my computer, getting distracted every 10 minutes to look at my phone for the next dopamine hit whether it's a chess clip or news item of someone "owning" someone. Oh and chess......I might be going wrong way in skill level, in some ways I'm improving my speed chess game but in other ways I might be worse than I was in high school, when I took it more seriously and didn't make as many mistakes because I was so locked in and wanted to win so bad. Now I'm just doing it casually, hae nothing to lose, and make sloppy mistakes. Going the wrong way in life.....I think at some point many adults feel it and feel like they've peaked, leading to a midlife crisis, but I don't necessarily think that's what I got, I just feel like the whole world is passing me by, and I'm just stuck in slow-mo or quicksand, or worse going the wrong way. 

Speaking of aviators, this weekend I went with some friends to the Camarillo Air Show in.....surprise, Camarillo, where my parents have lived for the last 20 years now. It's like the complete opposite of the world I normally reside in, with everyone watching the skies for pilots flying crazy patterns in the sky, with planes, helicopters, and all kinds of aerial vehicles and also parachuting out of some artistically. A lot of military people on site, from Air Force, Navy (like Top Gun) and Army, etc., all supporing the Air Show. I think if I had went a different route in life and joined a military organization out of college or even out of high school, I'd have a totally different experience and maybe even be flying an airplane at some point. That seems really liberating, to be flying above the clouds and seeing the lonely earth below. Some people say you forget about all the troubles of life when you reach outer space and look back at Earth, and realize it's just one big land mass, and there's so many different worlds out there. I imagine that's what aviators feel too when flying their own planes up there, basically free to go anywhere they want to go and not restricted by roads or gravity. No wonder Wrong Way Corrigan purposely took the wrong way and went to Ireland. 

Wealth Distribution (财富分配, 富の分配, 부의 분배)

 As Squid Game Season 2 is arriving later this year (2024!), I rewatched some of the first incredibly successful season of Squid Game, and couldn't help feel myself getting sucked in emotionally by the depths of despairs that the main characters suffer, mainly due to their lack of wealth, whether it be due to bad business investments, bad gambling habits, bad bosses, etc., their problems were caused by money and lack of it. It's telling that the 2 most successful cinematic successes in Korea, Parasite the movie, and Squid Game the TV series, both center on the theme of class inequality and wealth inequality. It's apparently a problem in South Korea, but it's also a problem in the U.S., China, literally every single country in the world. Wherever there are people, the wealthiest people want to stay rich, so the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. One of the most heartbreaking sequences in Squid Game is Episode 2, AFTER participating in the Red Light Green Light game and knowing of the full consequences of losing, Giheung goes back to real society and finds himself begging for money to help fund surgery for his diabetic mother, who can't afford the surgery because Giheung had sold the money for health insurance. How many people in the world have been placed in a similar situation and can resonate with that feeling? Unfortunately it is not a rare feeling in today's world, where many many people have to suffer so that a few people can live their dreams and make all the money they've ever wanted in the world. And it's not just because the wealthy people worked hard and deserved it more, that's a tiny drop of water in the pool of factors that make one rich, or poor enough to be desperate to ask one's ex-wife to help finance the surgery. It's devastating but very very real, as far as I can tell from visiting different communities in the U.S. and everywhere. The real world is so much different from what's depicted on TV of celebrities, parties, people having fun, luxury yachts; the real world is a world of thankless jobs, corporate bureacracy, paying for your mortgage and insurnace, dealing with mean bosses, paying money to coporations that don't care anything about you except your money. 

I can just so many of those interactions in Squid Game actually happening in real life, arguing vehemently about money, promising things you can't promise, being so far into debt there's no coming back from it, life is just miserable for those people. And it's more common than people think. 

In an election season that's turned really weird, I'm as disillusioned as ever about all these power-hungry people running for public office who want more power, to make themselves more famous and powerful and asking normal citizens for money to fund their campaign to get elected so they can be more powerful. All they want is your vote! It's just the same as companies running advertisements: all they want is your money. Some companies specifically benefit off of your inability to pay back your loans by charging usury-level rates. Basically rich people benefiting off of poor people, the rich robbing the poor to give to the rich. 

Today my parents and I went to a few open houses around the Los Angeles areas to see what kind of real estate money can buy....and the basic premise is, if you want anything that is livable in a decent neighborhood with amenities and working functions, it starts at a million dollars. Seriously, a million dollars. Not even counting property taxes, paying the realtors, condo association costs, repairs, redoing the carpet for some of these places, the starting price is just right there..... a million dollars. It's just an absurd amount for a normal house, and obviously it's that high because it's L.A. and inflation and a conglomeration of reasons, but the cold hard truth staring you in the face at the end is that price tag of a million dollars, something I thought basically made you rich when I was a kid. Now it just makes you an in-debt homeowner in Southern California. I make a pretty good salary way above the median salary in the U.S., and even I balked at the price; how does a normal person afford a house nowadays? It's just a product of the wealthy buying up all the best things in life (SoCal weather, good neighborhoods, near Trader Joe's, etc., etc.) and buying at high prices, and leaving the scraps for the rest of the world at inflated prices. That's the world we live in now, and if left unchecked it only gets worse. That's MY number 1 issue in this election, and I don't think based on either candidate just firing emotion-based and personality attacks against the other, that we're gonna get it. Because hey, the politicians are part of that wealthier class, what incentive do they have to change the system to take themselves down? 

Locks (锁, ロック, 자물쇠)

 Today a 40-year-old veteran locksmith came to my condo and fixed a bunch of my locks, an issue that I never thought much about when living in our condo but now when it's coming time to either sell it or lease it as a rental unit, it's so important to have everything working in the right order. It reminded me how many doors we have in our unit: We are the proud owners of at least 10 doors just in my 1400- sq ft unit, not even counting the front door of the unit, almost all of which come with a lock on it (come to find out, not very high quality locks by nature because the designers of the condo purposely skimped on inner doors). Turns out the problem with the lock not locking was that it just needed a little bit of readjusting to put it back in place, getting the lock to slide in and applying some WD-40 to get it to lubricate. There's a lot inside a lock we don't see, probably almost as complicated as what goes on inside a human brain. There were also locks in my home that I never use that I didn't even think about before the locksmith arrived, so he helped me better understand the home that we had purchased. And locksmiths, it turns out, are much sought after! It took a 3-week waiting list just to get this guy to come out. People need locks, not just for safety and security but also to put in their keyless AirBnB-friendly locks, change the locks after buying the unit from a previous owner because you never know who still has the keys from the previous owners, stuff like that. Another aspect of home ownership I didn't think about before buying, along with property taxes, "special surcharges," painting the walls, leaky roofs, old water heaters, and a host of other things. Good thing my condo has nice bay windows to look out of to make myself feel better. 

I think locks is one of those things I get triggered by, and it has manifested itself in the worst times because MJ has locked the door on me during an argument and I've become irrationally upset even though it's probably a good physical barrier to let both sides cool down before more damage is done (Good thing that particular lock was working!) I have some psychological trauma from locks, not the physical locks, I've never been locked inside a car or locked by myself in a meat locker or anything (ending of Season 1 of the Bear) but I've always felt locked out of the "cool people group" or out of the law firms I wanted a job at, or the top "elite" universities I applied to out of high school. Even though I live in probably one of the most free societies in the world where I can go almost anywhere anytime with money, a phone, and a car, I've felt locked out of certain levels of society, unwanted. It's easy to say people shouldn't be affected by popularity or having people like you, but I always felt I never got invited to the "VIP" table or the "cool college parties" or been allowed to move on in reality TV casting process, even the Game Show audition processs. I've always felt locked out, like something wasn't right about me, I just wasn't enough for other people, I have to bring something to the table for other people to like me and I just don't have it. That's why they say "college opens up so many doors" or "knowing so and so opened so many doors for me," I know what it's like to open those doors and I got really excited about opening them like being able to work at the jobs that I get selected for, or picked for dodgeball teams, or invited to friends' weddings. But the flip side is I also know the unspoken rejection of NOT being selected for a team, and how much it reminds me of not being able to sit at certain tables in high school, or people not wanting me to play with them, etc. Bruno Mars has a catchy song that goes, "I've been Locked Out of Heaven...." I definitely haven't been trapped in Hell or anything like that, I've been very lucky in life and get to do a lot of things many people in the world don't get to do, but I still can't help feeling I get deprived of some experiences because of these locks in society preventing me from getting in. 

I guess that's part of the frustration of not being being able to have a child yet, I've been made by society to feel like this big giant club of people who all have kids (including so many friends who have been invited to that party and are there now), and I'm just on the outside looking through the window at something I can't have, even though if I join the party I might find that the party isn't for everyone and might be more than some have bargained for, I still feel locked out of the cool kids' club..... more on that later as the marathon journey continues (hint: I visited a urologist recently and I may be locking myself out of heaven). 

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned

 Contrary to popular belief, the popular phrase "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" is not from the Bible, it's from a 1697 play by William Congreve called the Mourning Bride. Soemtimes phrases are timeless and created to fit nicely into the English lexicon; they just capture the idea so smoothly. 

I realized recently I know all these trivia facts and general knowledge about the world, but I really don't know how a woman thinks, I've never seen the world like a woman would. Not to generalize all women into one type or anything, so many women behave so differently, but I would have liked a basic introduction and general overview of the female psychology and mind. As a child I grew up with a younger sister and a very involved mother, but I wouldn't say I was necessarily surrounded by women in my life; in fact I pretty much steered clear of any meaningful contact with girls my age, not really even being friends with any of them much less having any relationships. It was all just all dudes, all the time. (Which is hard enough if you ask me for teenage kids like me who tend to be unpopular to survive in social hierachies). Maybe I should have watched more movies about the female mindset than just the overly reductionist "What Women Want" or read more books like "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars" (ironically written by a male authro), or more books with a female heroine or protagonist like "My Antonia" or "Little Women," "Anne of Green Gables" or even "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (written by a man, haha) instead of all male authors like Tom Clancy or Shakespeare or Dickens; real interaction with someone who could explain it better would have been extremely helpful too. Any older sister would have been very, very helpful to understand all the benefits that men have and don't have to deal with that women do. Hormones, emotions, so many body parts that need constant adjusting, need to look nice, need to discuss feelings and emotional attachment. I missed all of those when I was at chess club with all-male friends or at poker night with male buddies. As one of MJ's friends put it so elegantly, "woman are always thinking about the relationship, but the man is just thinking about lunch." 

Recently, I've suffered for my lack of understanding of the female mindset. You would think I would have learned by now after being married for 7 years, in a relationship for 8, but maybe being a man just means never truly understanding how a woman feels. I can easily brush off something that happened 10 minutes ago and move on to something else pretty quickly, our DNA is built differently. 

Sadly, I realize the TV shows and movies I watch also influence my man-centric thinking: just recently watched Jake Gyllenhall movie called "Guy Ritche's The Covenant" about US army in Afghanistan; total guy movie full of guns, shooting, heroism. No female presence in the entire movie, barely any woman in the movie. The Amazon.com TV show I'm into now, The Boys, is male-dominated: it's right there in the title. The show is kind of about men ruining the world, like Homelander the evil superhero manipulating the world with his superpowers. I just gravitate to these shows that have men in them, I guess that's what our society drives us towards. Obviously more female heroines in today's media, but I was ingrained as a kid to gravitate towards males. House of Dragon: essentially the story about 2 strong female characters turning into a family drama, I don't really like it as much as Game of Thrones, which was much more male-dominated. Do I have a male bias? Probably, so sometimes I do need to put on different glasses and look through a more feminine lens and think like they do. 

Breaking ( 霹雳舞, ブレイクダンス, 브레이크 댄스)

 Speaking of interesting things about the Olympics, one of the newest sports to be added to the Olympics this summer is called "breaking," also called "b-boying" or "b-girling." I respect breakdancers and all they do and ability to keep a rhythm and dance in ways I can never do on the dance floor (I always just embarrass myself at weddings), but what really qualifies as an Olympic sport anymore? More importantly, why has dodgeball not become an Olympic sport yet? Dodgeball at least has balls, keeping score, teams facing off head to head against each other..... what is b-boying? The others I've seen that are pretty banansas are "artistic swimming" (I get competitive swimming and racing to see who's faster, but I didn't even know swimming could be artistic). The amazing thing to me is that there are really good people who are masters at this, whom we never hear of except for this one event every 4 years. That could be dodgeball! I remember break dancing was a thing that was big among my junior in 8th grade, it was just "cool" that everyone would do, and one girl kept asking me every time I message her on AIM (AOL was big back then and instant messaging seemed like the cutting edge technology, which it kinda is still, the precursor to texting which is the only way people communicate nowadays) if I "learned how to break yet." I'm pretty sure she was joking, or saying it in a "no way this guy does that" kind of way because I was nerdy, unathletic, overweight, wore glasses, and definitely wouldn't be the kind of guy who did "breaking," but maybe I should have insisted on signing up. Maybe I'd be an Olympic champion by now. 

Also at the Olympics: cool Korean shooter Yeji Kim is lighting up the Internet, exuding "main character energy." Pretty easy way to look good in front of a camera: shoot something. Really stylish. 

Today I saw it.....very depressing signs around the local university around my house while on my jog: Welcome Class of 2028! I get why colleges put those signs up, to welcome the freshmen and foster a sense of community and belonging at the university, but boy oh boy does it make people out of college and have been for a long time feel old. I remember in 2010 I was running around USC and saw signs saying "Welcome class of 2014!" and thought, boy that's a long time away. or was it in 2014 seeing signs for Class of 2018? Whatever it was, that time has long passed by. Cruel, Cruel summer. (Banarama song, and Taylor Swift song). I guess it is already August now, and college kids are moving back in for college, but I wasn't ready. 

Speaking of songs, I've been watching old re-runs of trivia shows now that Jeopardy's most recent season is over (just a 6-week hiatus, but still, feeling lost without it) and watching "Win Ben Stein's Money." Cool show, Jimmy Kimmel was the host for most of it before he went onto bigger and better things. The set of questions for the late 1990's and 2000 was very differnet than what it is now, but sometimes it still makes me happy to get the history questions right, or remember. The other show right in the same time period is Jeff Probst (still hosting Survivor seasons now!) hosting Rock and Roll Jeopardy, about just popular music of the 60's - 90's. There's a LOT I don't know. Reminds me of a whole world of music and facts that I've missed out on in life, kind of like breakdancing. The cool thing about band trivia is the name of the bands are pretty entertaining as well as their origins. Mister Mister was from the band members referring to each other sarcastically like in a rival band's album, Twisted Sister, Iron Maiden came from the name of a torture device, etc. It's all pretty cool stuff. 

The Phryges

 The Phryges are the official mascots of the 2024 Paris Olympics, an Olympics that so far has been known for how weird they've been. There was a masked torchbearer during the opening ceremony that looked like the character from Assasins' Creed; a metal band named Gojira performed (yes they were named after Godzilla the sea monster from Japan), and minions stole the Mona Lisa. I usually like the Olympics opening ceremonies just for all the celebration it brings and the festive mood, but the last 2 summer Olympics have been real downers: 2020 didn't even happen and by 2021 everyone was in such a sad mood it was unwatchable, and 2022 Beijing Olympics were subdued and kind of redundant due to the relatively recent 2008 Beijing Olympics. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I found out that Beijing had won their bid for the Olympics, by the way, and it doesn't make me feel young- it was summer of 2001, a lifetime ago. 

As part of the pageantry of the Olympic games I like the mascots, which are supposed to represent the host country, the local culture, the people hosting the games. Most memorably, the 2018 Pyongchang Olympics in Korea had a black bear and a white tiger as mascots, with tigers representing Korea, and also continuing the tiger that was the mascot of the 1988 Seoul Games. This year's mascot..... are a pair of phrygian hats, adding to the weirdness. It represented freedom and liberty during the French Revolution, which I guess is significant, but wasn't the French Revolution where they executed tons of people including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? They couldn't hae selected a more unifying and less controversial time than the French Revolution? 2022 were pandas reflecting Chinese culture, 2020 were Pokemon-looking creatures representing Japan, 2016 was part animal part plant creatures representing Brazil.... France just had to be different. 

Speaking of needing to be different, I found myself in an AMC Theater this past Friday night in Manhattan, New York City at 1:00AM (so Saturday morning) to meet my friend in the morning. The movie was "Twisters" starring Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, and Daisy Edgar Jones, and I purposely fell asleep (the movie from parts I remember wasn't bad).... I always wanted to see what it was like on a summer night in Manhattan, and I got my answer: it is really the City that Never Sleeps. Luckily, I picked a summer night that was the exact right temperature; after a hot day it cooled down to the 70's at night with a slight breeze, allowing me to walk around unfettered except for motorcycles going up and down the city streets. Time Square apparently is open all night in Manhattan, and the bright lights and ads for every TV show you can think of come on all night, and there are plenty of people roaming around like it's normal to be up at 4AM in the morning. Yes there were homeless people and people asking for money, but enough cops around to feel like it was the safest part of the city, the most unsafe I felt was actually a group of hooligan teenage girls who threw empty water bottles at me for no reason other than I was sitting by myself minding my business; ahh to be young and stupid and have nothing to do but annoy strangers for no reason at 4AM in the morning. I've seen plenty of sunsets everywhere around the world, but not an early riser to catch the sunrises.... I got one overlooking the East River and the Pepsi sign on the east side of the island, and it was awesome: glimpses of the Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bridges, Roosevelt Island, and the sun rising over the 59th Street Bridge (I believe it's aka the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge? A once in a lifetime experience for no cost, and no one to bother me for falling asleep on a park bench; just some early morning joggers and taichi enthusiasts enjoying another day in the summer in one of the greatest cities in the world. Upon going to the Empire State Building later that day, I reflected that NYC is one of the most beautiful cities in the world topographically: surrounded by water, bridges all around, natural beauty meeting man-made beauty of buildings, bridges, roads....it's like the Olympics happens here every day with all the different cultural events and languages being spoken and international flair of the city; maybe the aliens who come down and take over Earth one day will enjoy what us humans had.