Blog

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

May the 4th be with you

This is strange times to be celebrating Star Wars Day, isn’t it? Wishing each other “May the 4th be with you” has a decidedly different tone this year given everything that is going on with the coronavirus. The familiar phrase is no longer just a silly pun on an iconic movie line, but rather something more personal and true: I genuinely hope some higher power will be on your side, so you will get through this lockdown period relatively okay.

The melancholy doesn’t stop the festivities though, and it shouldn’t really because we could use something - anything - joyous to distract us from our current situation. Kudos to the teachers I heard about wearing Star Wars costumes during Zoom class sessions, and shoutout to my group of friends who did not forget to wish each other a happy Star Wars Day. The complete nine films of the main saga was also made available today streaming on Disney+, perfect for a marathon watch session, though with today being a proper weekday, I sadly have work.

Because I would totally binge-watch consecutively the entire Skywalker story, except for the very last one - Episode 9. I won’t rehash precisely how hugely disappointing The Rise of Skywalker is; May the 4th is a day of positivity. I’ll simply say that after watching the movie in theatres back in December of last year, I have no desire whatsoever to see it again, on any platform. Perhaps my mind will change many, many years from now - maybe when I have kids of my own and I’m preordained to introduce them to the Star Wars canon. - but for now, the frustrations I have with Episode 9 are still very strong.

This talk about movies, however, is making me miss going to the theatres. While I greatly love the home movie watching experience I’ve built for myself (read: I’ve got a large television), for the truly “event” movies - like Avengers Endgame from last year - the cinematic experience with a group of fans is unique and inspirational. (Of course, you would only be able to see such films in theatres, unless you are willing to wait the typical four months for it to come out on digital media.) The arrival of May means the traditional Summer movie season is upon us, though for obviously reasons, most of the slate have been pushed back.

We look forward to the day when normal returns. May the 4th be with you. Always.

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.

I am thankful for this little bugger too.

Independence finally?

With most people that have the privilege of work-from-home are currently working from home, the conventional wisdom that’s been going around is that this drastic change in the way we work going to cause a mini paradigm shift in how companies operate going forward, especially in the tech sector. If this somewhat coerced exercise proves that it’s possible for a company to operate just fine with a remote workforce, then it makes no logical sense to continue to rent real estate simply so that everyone can be in the same room. Especially so in the San Francisco Bay Area, where rent is utterly astronomical.

It’s being theorized the shift to working from home permanently will have further downstream affects, namely workers moving away from ultra expensive city centers and towards other parts of the country where a dollar goes way farther. Much like it doesn’t make sense for companies to keep paying rent, there’s no reason for employees to live in areas where four-figure rents would only net you a single room, if they are able to literally be anywhere in the world with an Internet connection and still work. Smart folk are predicting there will be an exodus of sorts of workers moving to the cheaper parts of the country.

And that is quite okay with me, speaking as a native San Franciscan. The downward pressure on housing demand, should the prediction of masses of people leaving the area comes true, means I’ll finally be able to comfortably afford the rent in the city I grew up in. It would be a lovely thing indeed to finally be able to move out of my parents place and attempt the independent life for the very first time. I did not skip town for university, so I lack the momentary emancipation that most of my peers experienced during our college days. I think the time is right for such a move.

If me and my family are lucky to make it out to the other side of this coronavirus mess healthy and employed, I’ll take a serious look at moving out of the house. The externalities of the virus have perversely created a situation where it actually make sense now. We shall see!

For a rainy day

These day it’s very tempting to go shopping for things online while we are stuck in our homes, especially for new items to keep ourselves entertained while we are still barred from going outside. I follow a set of people on twitter who are heavily into cars like I am, and the most common thing those guys and gals have purchased during the lockdown is racing simulation equipment. I get it: we all love driving, and since we’re prevented from doing so in the actual, driving virtual ones in a video game makes for a convincing facsimile.

Seeing so many people hopping onto their favorite racing sims even inspired me to pull out my own set of pedals and wheel from the closet and fire up Assetto Corsa for first time in almost a year. It didn’t take long for the muscle memory to return, and because I’m sat in front of a massive 58-inch television, the immersion factor is considerable, and super fun.

But that’s a setup I’ve already bought; had this not been the case, I don’t think I would have spent the few hundred dollars in buying a set just for this quarantine situation. The future is highly uncertain right now, and even though I’m extremely lucky to work for the State of California at a fairly secure position, I don’t feel comfortable taking that for granted. Right now, any discretionary income is going into the rainy-day fund; should the future economy make a turn for the worse than it has already become, I want to be as ready as possible.

Obviously, how another person spend their money is absolutely none of my business, and I’d be lying if I haven’t been tempted many times to plop down money on frivolous things. This is not a criticism towards others, but rather an explanation of my attitude towards the present situation in regards to money. The hope remains we will weather this cleanly and safely out towards the other side.

A month's extension

Well, it’s officially official now: the shelter-at-home order has been extended until the end of May for the Bay Area’s six counties. In a somewhat surprising move (to me anyways), we will have a third continuous month of quarantine action. If you’d ask me early in March when this all started that we’d be in for lockdown until the beginning of June, I probably would have said “no chance”.

It is surprising that we are in for another month of stay-at-home because San Francisco never really saw the major outbreak that occurred in New York City and in Italy. Undoubtedly due to our early efforts to stop mass gatherings of people and start working from home, coronavirus cases here never increased exponentially, and our area hospitals remain calm and at the ready. Due to these factor I thought the city government may see fit to loosen some of the proverbial strings and gradually dial back in some normalcy. Well, the answer is no; we have 30+ more days of the current status quo.

And I have to say I am quite used to the quarantine situation that we have now. The major change in working from home have turned into something normal, and my weekends are fairly the same given that I’m an introverted shut-in anyways. I am itching for the rest of you to return to your regular lives, and personally I can’t wait to be able to do one of the things I love most in this world: driving. It’s the reason I’m low-key dismayed that San Francisco have move the endpoint one month further. As much as I enjoy being at home, the current situation remains very weird.

I think my mind subconsciously knows this as well; I’ve been having difficulty falling asleep lately, even though I literally have changed nothing with regards to my evening and night routine. I can’t even say it’s stress from work because being relegated to sitting in front of a computer in my room is actually an easier task than during normal times. I think the troubled sleep stems from very subtle anxiety with everything that’s going on outside; no matter what new routine I settle into, it will never feel completely right until the lockdown is over.

April went by unexpectedly quick; what’s another month, really?

At least the roads will be nice

One of the silver linings I’m seeing with the whole State of California on lockdown is that the roads are getting some much-overdue maintenance work done to them. With an exponential decrease in the amount of cars on the road, what better time than now to fill in those potholes and repave a major thoroughfare. No need to worry about the coronavirus, because workers would be outdoors where the air naturally circulates and it’s very easy to socially distance.

A few weeks ago I was a part of a skeleton crew for my job that physically went to campus for work, and to my surprise, 19th Avenue was down to one lane from the normal four. Crews were taking the opportunity to repave the busy boulevard while traffic levels are historically low. Ironically closing it down to a single lane caused a traffic jam of its own with the few remaining cars: it took me a good 15 minutes just to get out of the area and on my way back home, which was slightly annoying because with shelter-in-place happening, I had expected to commute in record time (traveling at normal speeds, mind).

This Summer there was to be a planned shutdown of the super busy section Highway 101 at the Highway 280 interchange for three whole weeks. The need for seismic retrofit to the aging elevated structure is paramount, no matter the absolute traffic hell that is for sure to happen as a consequence of shutting down the freeway. I mean, it’s not like our region is famous for earthquakes or anything. Nonetheless, the fear of massive congestion during construction can now be allayed because the city have moved the project up by months; work actually starts this weekend.

I am greatly looking forward to some beautifully smooth roads once things return to normal.

No travel for the wicked

Needless to say, there won’t be any traveling happening for me personally for the rest this year, if not into the next. It’s a sad thing to say really because a part of what I enjoy most is traveling abroad and visiting places I’ve never been; last Summer’s trip to Japan was in many ways a high watermark in my life. Unfortunately due to the current circumstances, being stuck in a metal tube many thousands of feet in the air is probably not the smartest thing to do.

For the past five Januaries, I’ve flew back home to China to visit family, and I’ve already resigned to that fact that the streak is over: I won’t be making the same trip this year. Even though it would be right at the end of December as usual, it’s hard to predict what sort of normalcy the world will return to by that time. Never mind the dangers of being clustered together with hundreds of people inside an airplane: I don’t want to return to a hometown that’s still dealing with the affects from the coronavirus. As much as I wish to see family members, if Guangzhou is lacking its typical vibrancy, it would be a wasted trip.

I think this would have been the year I finally make it over to Europe, perhaps a trip surrounding the legendary Le Mans 24 hours race, or the 24 hours of Nurburgring (both races have been rescheduled from their usual July slot to September). That’s obviously out the window now, but being that I never been to Europe, there’s an absence of longing for and fondness that I carry for my beloved continent of Asia. The “old continent” can will have to wait a bit longer.

Had it not been Europe, I would have probably gone back to South Korea this year for the second time since the trip in 2017. With another two years of Korean language learning under my belt, I was ready to experience the Korean culture fully and unreservedly. More importantly, there’s the numerous variety of Korean food I’ve been missing since the last trip, dishes that I simply cannot find here back in the States. There would’ve been lots of eating going on, but alas there will be no beginning-of-Summer trip in 2020.

To quote the Terminator: “I’ll be back”.