Blog

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

Great news!

(DJ Khaled voice) Big life change alert: my housemates/landlords are having babies. That’s right, plural. They’re expecting twin boys coming due around September. We are all very excited for this next stage of life for them, though those of us living under this roof are going to rue the departure of peace and quiet. It’s going to be a rowdy few years (at least) until the babies grow into kids who can behave themselves. Earplugs for everyone! Well, not everyone: just me. My housemates actually have to wake up when the babies are crying.

As a noted lover for all things peace and quiet, I think there was some concern that I would move out of the house on this baby news. While indeed I do prefer absolute quiet, there is no way I’m abandoning this place. The only constant in life is change, and if I run away every single time it does, that costs a lot of money. Speaking of money, if I do move out, it would be difficult for my housemates to rent it out to another person. Incoming twin babies living right above you is not so attractive on an advert.

It would be unkind to remove an income stream just as they need it the most. The joke is: they’ve only budgeted for one kid! Besides, there’s no way I’m giving up living close enough to work that I can walk there.

Another big life change later this year is my dad retiring from work. At which point I would be old enough to have two retired parents. A sort of weird milestone that you really don’t think about at all until it creeps up on you. After slaving away for nearly thirty years - after immigrating to America from China - just so me and my brother can have a better life, the pending retirement is hugely deserved for my father.

Meanwhile, my housemates are just about to begin that journey. It’s going to be chaotic around here.

Is that what I am?

It was a bit jarring to hear a friend describe me to another person as a “photographer.” I could only reply sheepishly to the fact I’m a mere hobbyist, nothing serious. My slightly embarrassed response is because I haven’t really been doing much “photography” at all, not ever since the pandemic started some three years ago. It’s a dormant hobby at best, abandoned at worst.

The only sort of photography I do these days is to make sure I take at least one picture a day for the 365 challenge. It’s something I’m proud to have kept going since 2011.

But otherwise there’s really not much else going on. My bread-and-butter in terms of interest is travel photography. Easy to figure out then why I haven’t done much these past years. I long to do another project like the one I did for my Japan trip. To do some writing to go along with the photographs. To tell interesting stories of a foreign place. A soft goal of mine is to return to South Korea for this purpose. It was not something I had in me when I first visited back in 2017.

And what camera will I do it with? As great as iPhone photographic capabilities have advanced, smartphones are still not substitutes for dedicated “DSLR” cameras. Difficult to believe my Sony A7R2 is now eight years since it was introduced back in 2015. The image quality out of that camera is still top-notch, but as is my wont I am hankering for something newer and a completely different brand.

Whether or not I actually spend that money remains to be seen. Honestly, whether or not I actually return to doing lots of photography is also an open question. It’s that whole different stages in life thing, you know? What is for sure is that I do want to travel back to Asia again.

For the sake of others

A coworker on mine recently got diagnosed as pre-diabetic. The condition is serious enough that he is now taking three separate medications for it. What he needs to avoid is the full type 2 diabetes: a lifetime of blood-glucose monitoring and kidney dialysis, if it gets bad enough.

Other than the meds, the prescription is simple, really. The coworker just have to eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep. Of course, what is easy on paper is really not when it comes time to move. It’s a drastic change for those who are used to a life of eating with impunity and not much exercising. The struggle is real when you’re trying to eat a salad while the people around you are eating cheeseburgers. Whichever pharmaceutical company figures out how to compress diet/sleep/exercise into a one singular pill is going to make all the money in the world.

Until then, my coworker is going to have to do the hard slog. So far, not so good. Just last week he went to the campus dinning hall to eat lunch, which is buffet style. Naturally then he stuffed himself to the gills, ruining his afternoon of productivity. It’s kind of disappointing to see a diagnosis of pre-diabetic isn’t enough of a wake up call for him. Especially considering he has a young daughter (and a wife, in Borat voice). Surely he wants to be healthy and functional for her sake.

The answer is of course yes - on paper. Wanting to be healthy and actually doing the steps to get there can be mutually exclusive. You’d think having a daughter to live for would be enough of an impetus, but we’ve yet to see the consistent change with our coworker. Hopefully it won’t take crossing over to full diabetes for him to actually get on with it.

There goes the neighborhood

Word on the street is our local mall is being inundated with rowdy teenagers. Lots of fights and general mayhem. The mall has pledged additional security presence, and SFPD promised more officer patrols. Things have definitely changed for the worse since my high school days. We used to go to the same mall after school all the time. I can’t remember even one incidence of fighting. Honestly, what Lowell kid would risk suspension and missing class time? No way.

While it’s understandable that teenagers will be rowdier than the average adult, causing fights and disruption is definitely unacceptable. We expect them to pull some tables together at the food court and be loud and rambunctious. What we don’t expect is dozens of them gathering together and duking it out. This isn’t West Side Story. Where the heck are your manners?

It’s good to see the mall and SFPD doing something now. What I would hate to see is nothing being done until some kid gets stabbed and killed. The lawsuit against the mall from the hypothetical aggrieved parents would be massive. As private property, the duty is on the mall to keep a pleasant, non-stabbing, environment. I certainly would visit the mall less if the unruly teenagers problem continues.

Who I most feel sorry for are the mall workers. They definitely do not get paid enough to deal with this shit.

There’s a general sense the San Francisco government, from the very top on down, simply do not care about fixing quality-of-life crimes. We are the car break-in capital of America, we can’t buy laundry detergent at Walgreens without asking a clerk to unlock the shelf, and open drug markets run unabated in one district. To live in a society where reporting a theft will only illicit a shrug of the shoulders from the police: it’s utter madness. Why can’t we have nice things?

The itch to spend

Hello! I’ve returned from a brief one week hiatus. Thanks to daylight savings time changing the clock one hour forwards, I spent last week recovering from the regulation-imposed jet lag. Even a person like me with relatively clean sleeping patterns struggled to acquiesce to the time change. Going to sleep at the new “normal time” was difficult, and so is waking up at the new normal time. For the first time this whole year, I actually hit the snooze button. Groggy. Where did the sun go in the morning?

It went to the evening hours, obviously. I concede that it is indeed quite nice to still have some semblance of sun after getting off work. Last Friday I had a lovely time with my friend and her pet dog at the local park. I guess on that alone, I would vote to keep daylight savings time constant, rather than having standard time year round. What the powers must do is simply pick one! All this time change nonsense absolutely wrecks our circadian rhythm for at least one whole week. It’s not healthy in the slightest.

You know that feeling when you’ve got some free money in the bank account, and you get that itch to spend it? How can we not: we get bombarded with advertisements every single day. The Internet services we know and love are basically advertising machines. I have started paying for YouTube Premium, however. No ads when I watch YouTube. Ever.

So I was looking at (finally) getting a standing desk to replace this IKEA Galant that I’ve had since my college days. In the name of health (I’d be able to adjust the height of the desk specific to me) and novelty (who doesn’t like a fresh new bamboo work surface?) I began a search on the Internet. Turns out the major players in the standing desk market all seem to be having Spring sales. What would have been a thousand dollars - for the specification of table I want - is now only $700.

After sleeping on it, I decided against buying a standing desk. Primarily because it feels wrong to throw away a perfectly good table, albeit one that cannot adjust height. I don’t want to spend the time playing the Craigslist games in trying to sell the old one. Trashing such a bulky item also isn’t as simple as putting it in the bin. My IKEA Galant remains a sturdy and useable desk, so it remains.

At least you have one!

I have a coworker who maintains miserly tendencies, even though he makes around the same money as everyone else in the office. His problem? He is what we would call “house poor.” Too much of him and his wife’s income go towards servicing the mortgage. But hey, at least he got in when the interest rates were low, and houses weren’t all above one million dollars around here. Imagine paying 7% on a 30-year loan! You can buy a whole other house in the midwest with the combined interest payments.

And at least the coworker has a house! I on the other hand have zero allusions about home ownership. There’s no way I can afford one on my salary, unless I meet a partner who makes vastly more than I do (and I make above the U.S. median household income already). If the potential partner makes around the same as me, we would be house poor just like my coworker and his wife. Definitely not a situation I want to dig myself into for 30 years.

For my lonesome, renting continuously is absolutely fine with me. I like the flexibility and optionality of not being tied down to the place (not that I plan to move from my current situation anytime soon). Renting prevents me from accumulating too much material things, because moving it all to the next location would be a huge chore. I’ve already made the decision to donate most of my books before I move next time. Everybody knows how much I read, no need to a have shelves full of books to show for vanity points.

While I may not be house poor, but I’m definitely car poor, and have been ever since I started making enough money to buy my own. A huge chunk of my income have always gone towards paying for and servicing the ownership of a car. But unlike my coworker who seem rather miserable in being house poor, I’m absolutely fine with spending money on cars. Because it’s the great passion of mine since I was young.

Be careful why you strive for

The movie The Menu. Ralph Fiennes plays a renowned chef that serves an exclusive clientele on a private island. As the evening goes on, the guests’ past misdeeds come back to haunt them in devastating fashion. Of the many messages to garner from this film, the one that stuck with me is: Fiennes’ character was happiest when he was just a lowly cook making fast food cheeseburgers.

Imagine that: this famous chef, with patrons paying thousands for a table, a stable of cooks under him, is not happy. All the striving for money and recognition cannot compete with the complete satisfaction of cooking a good cheeseburger. Be cautious of the achievement treadmill! Much like the hedonic treadmill, the pitfall is the state of being unsatisfied until blank happens. What happens then is you’ll always be miserable, because there’s always something else to chase after achieving the current thing.

Look at car enthusiasts with vast collections, or the not-so-rich enthusiasts who can’t seem to keep the same car around (that’s me!). The endless desire for something new and different causes us to forget how much we wanted the thing we currently have, and how happy we were - momentarily, it would seem - when we first got it. If I could do it all over again, I probably would have kept the 2016 Mazda Miata I had until now.

There’s happiness to be found in stasis. There’s got to be a reasonable endpoint to all the striving. After which we chase after new goals for the sake of them alone, and not because they will bring additional units of happiness - because they won’t. Reflect on whether that new thing or achievement is really what you want. I think if Fiennes’ character can do it all over again, he would have kept making cheeseburgers as just another cook in a kitchen.