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.