September — Blog — Healy Chen

Where's the protein?

I came home today to find that I forgot to defrost the char siu (Chinese BBQ pork). So now as I am writing this I’ve no idea what I am doing for dinner. Typically I would just make rice and that’s about it. The char siu heats up in the microwave, and the all important vegetables is in the form of kimchi. I am a simple man with simple tastes, and I can eat the same thing day after day.

Not that I wouldn’t mind variety. But variety costs time and money. My meager public servant salary definitely does not allow for nightly food orders from DoorDash.

Good news is I live a few blocks from a full-size mall with a proper food court. I’ll probably head over there soon as I finish typing the amount of words here I feel appropriate. Besides, today is the last mild day before a heat wave is suppose to hit all of California throughout the Labor Day weekend. Going to enjoy the mildness while it lasts before my friends with air-conditioning in their homes get to be smug about things.

It is indeed already September. This far into 2022 and I’ve yet to do anything special, really. The only vacations I’ve taken were all of the stay at home type. I am heading to Austin, Texas in two months, so there will be some excitement for that. Other than that it’s just going to continue to be the same old same old. And that’s perfectly fine: life’s treating me quite well these past months. Nothing to complain about, everything is going smoothly and flowingly.

Of course I probably just jinxed myself. Perhaps the forgotten-to-defrost char siu is the harbinger of a downturn!

Last week of September

It is the last week of September, and yet it still feels as if the autumnal season has yet to sink in. If you’d ask me back in March - when this whole coronavirus saga began - that we’d still be in amongst the chaos come the Fall, I probably would’ve laughed in your face. Remember a time when we all thought life would go back to normal come the Summer months? Well, that has come and gone, and the horrible situation of nearly a thousand deaths a day in this country remains ever present. If it hasn’t sunk in already for you: this is going to take a very long time.

Indeed, my place of employment - San Francisco State University - have already declared Spring classes to remain remote. Some would say this is a bit overcautious, but I think in time the decision would prove to be correct and appropriate. It goes to show that the arbitrary end of this calendar year is not some magical boundary line between the mess of 2020 and the world returning to normal with the ushering of a new year. It’s rather easy to imagine and believe there’s only three more months of COVID to go, the same sort of thinking that motivates people to make New Year's resolution. If the past six month is any indication, the beginning of 2021 will be much of the same.

I reckon this quagmire we are in won’t be completely solved until there is a vaccine. In the meantime we’ll continue to be stuck in this sort of half-open, half-shut limbo.

That’s not to say we should lose hope or be pessimistic. Going through life with an optimistic mindset that things will improve is an immensely better way to live than the opposite. However, blind optimism is not the solution: you will only find disappointment if you hold onto the idea that this coronavirus situation will be over soon. That optimism will turn into cynicism and despair, because eventually you’ll get tired of waking up disappointed the world hasn’t yet return to normal.

This a reminder very much for me, by the way.