Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Lucrative panhandling

One thing I’ve noticed driving around the neighborhood is there’s a family that panhandles at a major intersection. Two adults, a younger child, and an actual baby. The family members stake out at the center median. When traffic comes to a halt for a red light, they descend upon the nearby vehicles to ask for spare cash. I almost never carry cash with me, but the panhandlers have a solution for that: a QR code you can scan for Venmo or Cash App. They can certainly afford a mobile phone and requisite data plan!

It must be good business to ask for money at that spot, because I see that family there every Friday after work - the first time every week that I have to actually drive. I mean, if it weren’t lucrative to panhandle there, they wouldn’t be there for long! They would have moved to a different location where the drivers aren’t as stingy and selfish. But no; that family is there week after week. I can only conclude that I live around charitable folks with high empathy.

Business is so good that I’ve started to see other families go to that same intersection to panhandle! I guess the word has spread throughout the beggar subreddits. The corner of Junipero Sera and 19th Avenue is the place to be to collect some serious change. Write a proper sob story on a large piece of poster board, and watch the cash roll in. And because we rarely see the sun on our side of the city, the risk of sunburn is far lower than say, downtown San Francisco.

None of this is to demean the panhandlers. I’m not hating the player, nor am I hating the game. Never come between a person and their livelihood, however they’re getting it (so long as it’s legally, I guess). I’m merely making the observation, is all.

Swimming again

This past weekend I went swimming for the first time in a very long time. Not since high school have I touched the chlorinated waters of a public swimming pool. It was all fun and games back then during free swim hours, but now, we are doing proper laps during lap swim time. Because as we all know, swimming is a great way to exercise with minimal negative impact on the body.

While I normally go running or swing around a kettlebell, my homeboy has been swimming regularly in recent weeks. He’s trying to lose some of the pandemic 15 pounds he’s gained (and hopefully more than that). Due to a recent hiking incident where he badly bruised his ankle, exercising in a pool was the only way to go. Since working out is way better when it’s more than just you, I decided to join my friend for some swimming. It’s always good to have a variety in my workouts.

The good thing about living in San Francisco is that you’re not far away from a local pool. Most if not all of them are either new or recently renovated. None of the dark and decrepit stuff I grew up with. I succinctly remember the broken lockers and the nasty-smelling showers. That is a thing of the past. Sadly, what still here from the past is requiring exact change in cash to enter. Credit cards are not accepted! What kind of back-water byzantine shit is this?! At least give me a QR code to Venmo or something.

What you can do is by a pass from the San Francisco Recreation and Parks website. That gets loaded on to a card, which is scanned at the entrance. Still seems needlessly complicated to me, but once setup it’s no big deal to continue loading money like a transit pass.

It feels great to swim again, especially for exercising purposes. I don’t care that I’m the slowest swimmer there: the whole point is to swim back and forth for about an hour and get a good workout in. I will definitely be joining my friend often in the future. Let’s get it.

What would you say you do here?

At work we are (finally) hiring another person to the team. I’ve been drafted to be on the hiring committee, which is a pleasant surprise. It’s my first time ever being on a team to determine who to hire as a colleague. Previous experience is only with interviewing potential student assistants. It’s quite a step up, and not without some pressure. To have the power to (partly) determine someone’s fate regarding their gainful employment is something I take seriously.

Since the pandemic is still a thing, we are conducting interviews via Zoom. We’ve only done one thus far, and I have to say I hate it. It’s a pain to read out long and complicated questions, hoping the interviewee catches all of it. Perhaps this first guy is idiosyncratic in not being able to hear well over the Internet. On half the questions he had to ask for a second reading. I got the feeling that this could have been avoided, and the interview gone much smoother, if it were live in person.

Because it’s difficult to deduce body language and cues when the other party is trapped inside a computer display. The eye-contact you want to make just doesn’t come through via Zoom. The interviewee can’t gather any immediately feedback, on how we are reacting to his answers. With this first guy there were definitely times where he should have caught onto our subtle hints that his answers were dragging on too long. Again, difficult to convey over Zoom.

Nevertheless I look forward to the rest of interview and deliberation process. To have some impact on who I will get to work with for many years to come is such a privilege. No one else to blame if who we hire ends up being shitty and wholly unreliable!

For the kids

It is wedding season! I attended one in may, and now another is coming up in three weeks for one of my best friends. I will be in the wedding party for that wedding, so it'll be an all-day production of endless ceremony. Good news is I took that week off from work so I can see to wedding business with leisure. What we don't want is to cram everything into the day before.

This past weekend, the groom and groomsmen went to a shop for renting our suits. I was all prepared to simply wear my bespoke black suit - with whatever colored tie to match the bridesmaids dresses - but the groom wanted a different color. We ended up with a dark navy, which in my opinion is only slightly off the side of black in terms of typicalness. If I were the type to have to wear suits on the daily, I'd probably own a navy-colored suit already.

It's good to see inflation hasn't yet reached to the suit rental industry. The entire kit - jacket, shirt, pants, vest, and shoe - is only $217. That's not bad at all, though perhaps we're getting a multi-order discount. It's far cheaper than custom tailoring a suit that I will only wear maybe once a year. The shop is even on my side of town, so I won't need to use too much pricey gasoline to pickup and return. Petrol is still $6.99 per gallon in my area!

I am very excited for the wedding, and happy for my friend who's finally tying the knot, moving on to the next stage of life. Replete with an albatross of an hefty mortgage around the neck, of course! Housing cost around here may be insane, but if you are dead-set to stay in this one place for at least the next 30 years, it's a worthy and necessary life expense.

A house is for the kids.

Straight cash, homie

It’s always a bit nerve-racking when bringing a relatively large stack of cash to deposit at the bank. What if I get robbed before I get to the location? Lots of AAPI hate going around these days. What if I get pulled over by the police while I am still in the car? Civil asset forfeiture is a thing: I would have to prove to the authorities the cash is clean and kosher. Guilty until proven innocent - imagine that in America!

While waiting in line for the next available teller, a helper person asked me if I want to use the ATM instead. Heck no! Last thing I’d want to risk is the machine eating up the bills and causing a huge headache. I’ve also seen ATMs outright reject otherwise good bills. Any count above 10, it’s better to deposit with a real person. They’ve got those fancy bill counting machines that goes through a pile quickly and accurately.

A couple next to me was doing a wire transfer. They’ve just closed on a home, and were super excited. Their teller wished them congratulations, to which they replied, “Thanks! But now we’re house poor!” Indeed that’s the reality: there’s really no homes around here that isn’t above seven-figures. Anyone not making tech-bro money will be stretching to make the mortgage. Not to mention the exorbitant property tax every year - no prop 13 protection for you!

I have zero illusions that I can purchase a home in San Francisco any time soon, if ever. Not on this government employee salary! Besides, I don’t want the inflexibility of being tied down to a property for an extended period. It’s not that I plan to go anywhere; it’s because having a mortgage payment changes the calculus of how you approach employment. The stakes are higher: you can no longer afford to tell your boss to fuck off.

Those are the shackles!

Le Mans 2023 or bust

The annual 24 hours of Le Mans endurance race is this weekend. I wish I was in France right now to attend in person. Barring anything too dramatic, the winner of the race will likely be a Toyota. The top P1 class just isn't that competitive. Next year, entry from Peugeot, Ferrari, and Porsche will flip the excitement level to the other end of the spectrum. That’s the one to look forward to.

So let me put in on paper now: I aim to attend the 2023 running of Le Mans. Getting time off from work shouldn't be a problem, since the summer months are significantly less busy on a university campus. The main barrier will likely be cost. Travel cost right now is insanely high, and if the trend doesn't come back down. an international trip to France might be prohibitively expensive.

For shits and giggles, I looked at flights to Seoul, South Korea for early August (this year). Prices are at least twice as much compared to the last time I flew there back in 2017. Two thousand dollars for an economy roundtrip is rather high. Even flying on off-peak days won't really save significantly over the weekend days. Probably a confluence of high demand, high fuel cost, and overall inflation.

I am definitely not going to fly anywhere this summer, and likely the rest of 2022. I have to hope that things will return to a true normal next year. In the meantime, there's much saving to do in preparation.

Inflation is too damn high!

The struggle is real. Just today I bought an order of popcorn chicken at a Quickly, and it was nearly eight dollars after taxes. Not that many years ago, that same bag of chicken would have been under five dollars. That much money for not really amounting to a full meal is kind of shocking. I should have known, after paying nearly seven dollars for a gallon of gas last week, that such inflation was to be expected every where. But damn if it isn’t still surprising every time.

Good thing I seldom eat out. If I did so regularly, I probably would have to cut back by now. Honestly, inflation hasn’t affected me that severely. I am lucky to say there’s enough room in the budget for these increases. An extra few dollars here and there for a quart of milk or a dozen eggs isn’t going to upend my lifestyle. If it did, I’ve got bigger things to worry about than inflation.

It’s good to see the Fed doing something to tackle the problem - by raising rates. Interest on my savings account with Ally have crept back up to 0.75%, after being stuck at 0.50% since the end of 2020. I guess I can count that as a sort of stimulus. I mean, the IRS is certainly going to tax that as income! All things being equal, I think the Fed should further tighten fiscal policy and raise the rates some more. I’m paying nearly eight dollars for popcorn chicken!

And it’s not like my income is going up commensurately. Fingers crossed the union can get some inflation-adjusted increases on the next contract.