Perspective, my friend

The people taking the bus at 6:00 AM in the morning on a weekday are legends. Shoutout to the early risers. The ones with a long public transit commute ahead of them. The ones with an ungodly start time to their work day. Or perhaps the ones returning from an arduous graveyard shift. And then there’s me: taking an early BART train to the airport because I had an 8:00 AM flight to Las Vegas for vacation. It is an humbling sight.

Beneath the glitz and money of the Vegas strip is an entire cottage industry that feeds off of it. The cleaning staff who keeps the hotels and Las Vegas boulevard spotless at all times. The solicitors on the strip hoping to make some money off the multitudes of tourists. The workers of all the restaurants and shops, catering to the whims of customers. There are no bathroom breaks when the line at the hotel Starbucks is stretched out into the casino floor the entire morning.

Throughout my time in Vegas last week I was filled with gratitude at how fortunate I am to not be one of the folks described above. I’m so lucky to have a job where I get paid for what’s in my brain than actual, physical labor. A steady 9-5, Monday through Friday job that I don’t have to think about outside of those work hours. A job that allows me to take paid vacation pretty much any time throughout the year, so long as I give proper notice.

What this recent vacation have reinforced in me is to be incredibly grateful at what I already have. There’s always plenty more to chase, sure, but so many have far less. Thank you for the much needed perspective, Las Vegas.

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Nike would agree.

Survivor's guilt

With the world having turned upside down for so many Americans in losing their jobs and the massive amount of uncertainty that brings, it’s a somewhat awkward feeling from where I am standing in comparison. I’m immensely lucky to have kept my employment through this COVID-19 pandemic, and the rest of my family is doing alright as well. News of millions of people filing for unemployment brings me slight pangs of unease, that I am somehow undeserving to not be amongst the unfortunate. I am not all that special, so why has the lady of luck chose me?

That sense of guilt regarding my relative prosperity during this coronavirus situation gets turn into anxiety over if and when the pendulum of hurt will swing towards me, that the wheel of fortune will surely begin a downward fall from its heights. So then I overdo and overthink it when it comes to work, on the silly belief that I have to work extra hard to be deserving of me being okay while so many others are not. That’s when I start to become careless about details, and worrying about things that I have no control over. If another team is particularly busy with tasks, I would feel bad about not contributing, even though it’s decidedly not my area of expertise and focus.

This sort of useless grasping is super tiring, and not productive at all from a work standpoint and that of mental health. But I cannot help to be sucked into that line of thought from time to time, especially when I’ve just read on the news about companies laying off employees, or State budgets getting obliterated due to the shutdown. There must be something I have to do to keep my positive situation static, so I extend myself in fretting over things I have absolutely no control over.

And that’s a fraught path to go down. The fact that I have a job that the pandemic have not adversely affected is by pure chance. I am entirely grateful for it, obviously, and the only thing I can do is to continue execute tasks at work to the best I can. It’s not helpful to feel bad about being fine during this quarantine, and that I’m greatly looking forward to the end of sheltering-in-place. I shall deal with events as they arrived, rather than being anxious about potentialities. As of right now, everything is okay.

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Pocari Sweat: the best non-alcoholic drink!

Thankfulness 2020

The emotion I want to convey right now is that of gratitude.

With everything that’s going on with the coronavirus, it’s easy to be caught up in the moment, become always reactive to things changing rapidly all around us. Days start blending in together, and you’re simply doing your best to find some semblance of normalcy, especially so in the earlier days of the current crisis, when you have no idea what new paradigm shift the next hour will bring. When you’re so busy trying to stay afloat, there’s no time to take a step back and look.

It was not until I start detaching from the situation and started to view things from on a macro level that I realize how lucky me and my family have been during this period of shelter-in-place. First and most important we are healthy and doing well physically, which is worth absolutely everything in these hazardous times. Secondly, our financial situation have remained very solid: my job allows me to work from home, and my dad who does general contracting hasn’t skipped a beat, because construction projects never really took a break.

Even the least fortunate of us - my brother - was lucky to get a month’s salary for March, and then filed for unemployment. Thanks to the generosity of the federal government in expanding the amount of unemployment insurance, it means he’ll be quite okay during this quarantine as well.

Indeed we are extremely lucky; there’s no other way to put it. Obviously I’m incredibly grateful that it turned out this way for us; I only need to go on twitter for a few moments to get a reminder that countless others haven’t got it so easy in this era of COVID-19. I hope to never take this for granted.

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I am thankful for this little bugger too.

Perspective

I woke up today in a first-world country, with a roof over my head, food on the table, and a healthy disposition. 

Nope, it isn't so bad at all. So many other has got it so much worse. 

I'm thankful. I'm lucky.