Blog

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

Sleep experiment day three

Today is officially the third day of shifting my sleep schedule experiment to an earlier sleep and wake hour, and honestly I am rather sleepy right now as I am typing this after having just woken up. I guess my body clock still thinks 6:30AM is insanely early, therefore it must be out of the normal for me to be awake, and hence this groggy feeling in autoimmune response. This is precisely why the first order of business every morning have been straight to the coffee machine.

I have to say it’s really nice to wake up during a time when the sun is just beginning to make its transition from sunrise to fully bright. To witness the ultimate power in our nature do the thing it has done for over four billion years is a humbling sight. It sort of reminds me of our sheer insignificance in the universe, how we’re all mere travelers on a spinning marble mass within a universe that’s an unimaginable light-years in size. Seeing a sunrise makes the small things that are currently bothering me right now becomes trivial in an instant, refocusing me onto truly what’s important in life.

Not sure I meant for a philosophical lesson simply by choosing to wake up earlier, but there it is.

The morning hours are indeed some of the most tranquil and quiet of the day, and I’m massively enjoying the early stillness to go into a meditative state and get some tasks done. It creates something to look forward to every night before I go to bed, that the next morning I will get to have these hours of blissful calm. It makes falling asleep easier, and also creates an eagerness to actually get out of the bed when the alarm clock inevitably signals.

Even though I’m still quite sleepy.

Not even air cooled

I always knew it’s was a reliability risk in buying a German car rather than one made in Japan, even one as beautifully engineered as a 911, from a brand - Porsche - that’s got a great contrarian record of reliability. My one plus year with the GT3 was going quite well free of any hiccups. but the curse of the German car gremlins struck this past weekend while I was taking the car out for a drive to charge the battery, after having sat unmoved for over three weeks (COVID conditioning, I’d call it).

It was a typical cool day in San Francisco, so I didn’t notice it initially; after 15 minutes or so on the drive, I started to feel a bit stuffy and hot, which is abnormal because the car’s automatic climate control is set to 70 degrees fahrenheit at all times. I checked the air vents with my hands and felt a slight breeze coming out, so I dismissed the thought of anything being amiss; perhaps I just happened to catch the sun at a bad angle or something.

It wasn’t until I got further south - and the outside temperature climbed into the upper 80s - did I realize that something was wrong: the cabin was indeed getting hotter and hotter. As a test, I pressed the button for maximum air conditioning, but absolutely no air came out of the vents: the usual loud cyclone of whooshing noises were nowhere to be found. I then turned off the AC, and manually bumped up the fan speed; again, nothing, not a breath of air can be felt from the ventilation system.

I found a highway rest stop to momentarily park the car to see if turning it off and back on (it’s a cliche in the tech support world because it works an amazing amount of time) would do the trick to resolve the problem. Sadly it did not. Faced with rising temperatures with no way to cool down the interior, I resorted to head home and make an appointment at the dealership for the earliest possible date. Hilarious that I was just writing last week about the the negative aspects of owning a car - the time and money you have to spend when things go awry, like a tire puncture, or in my case, a malfunctioning HVAC system.

At least I get to tick this off my list: a German-made car with an unscheduled visit to the dealer service department.

Resetting the battery didn’t do it either.

Sleep changes

Good morning! I am typing this out at 7AM on this brilliant Monday, grateful for yet another day on this planet, and the thankful that I’m still relatively okay in relation to the current coronavirus situation. I am writing this daily blog at this seemingly ungodly hour because I’ve decided that starting this week I am switching to an earlier sleep schedule: from the previous 12PM to 8AM timeframe to the new 10:30PM to 6:30AM. The primary reason for this change is simple: I want more quiet time.

Early mornings - before much of the world around me have woken up - are some of the most tranquil and silent hours to be had. In a time when we are all stuck in our homes and the neighbors are particular rowdy into the night, it’s better to go to bed early (with earplugs on, mind you) than to contend with the noise whilst trying to type out one of these or read a book for an hour. Mentally speaking it’s also better to get a bulk of my daily tasks out of the way - such as this blog, rather than having to think about something to write after a rigorous day at work. The few hours after work will be slanted towards leisure, where my mind can relax completely because the jobs of the day are done.

That’s the hope, anyways.

Not sure why I didn’t do this earlier; with the lockdown in effect since March and I’m largely working from home, I don’t necessary need to keep the old sleep schedule that was largely predicated on the fact I had an evening shift and didn’t get home until 11PM on most work days. Unencumbered with that limitation, I am free to adjust what time I go to sleep. I guess I wasn’t yet resigned to the fact that this quarantine will go on for the rest of the year, so in some ways I was still clinging on to the old way of doing things because surely we’d go back to that soon enough, right?

With COVID-19 not showing any signs of abatement in the States, coupled with the campus remaining remote for the entire Fall semester, my current situation is not going to change. Resigned to this, it was appropriate to make additional moves that would go towards improving my well-being, and I think this sleep schedule shift towards regaining a few more calm and productive hours in the morning will be really beneficial.

Happy Monday, everybody! Let’s get after it.

Resignation

I think all of us living in America right now need to reconcile with the fact that there is no normal to return to for the rest of this year. The pandemic has yet to abate in this great country of ours, and in many regions the case numbers show it’s getting worse. Right here in San Francisco the Mayor have put a pause on the reopening plans, and this week Harvard announced their Fall semester will be completely online. That big Christopher Nolan movie - Tenet - that’s schedule to come on in theatres mid August? I don’t see a chance it’ll make that date; no way we’d be ready to be packed into a theatre by that time - it’s too risky.

As the calendar flips over its pages and you hope the situation we’ve found ourselves in since mid March will soon be over, the end horizon simply keeps stretching further and further. It’s as frustrating to me as I am sure it is for everyone else, compounded by the fact we can clearly see other countries that dealt with the coronavirus more properly than we did getting to enjoy the fruits of their persistence. Formula One is back, and my relatives in China tell me that life for them have largely resumed as before, aside from the constant temperature checks when entering buildings.

Why can’t we have nice things? Some days it’s difficult to resign to the reality that the United States have played the same hand so utterly poorly. I’m afraid we’re going to be in continued lockdown for the rest of 2020 while looking out forlornly at the rest of world returning to a significant semblance of normalcy. The hopes of being home free by the time autumn rolls around is likely gone, and honestly that’s a tough pill to swallow when there’s glaring comparisons pointing out that it definitely did not have to be this way.

No doubt, this too shall past; just probably not anytime soon. It’s really no use being disappointed that each passing day seems to bring no relief or end; we have to stay focused on improving ourselves during this time and prepare for the day when we are able to go back to our pre-COVID lives. That day will come, so don’t despair that it hasn’t yet.

Ownership blues

Such is the negative side of car ownership that it’s a real downer when things such as a tire puncture happens. You’re going about your day nicely on the commute and then suddenly there’s a huge popping noise; not a minute later the dashboard is furiously blinking at you to say the front left tire is gone. After some curse words you are forced to stop the car to assess the situation, after which you thank the heavens that your particular car has still got a functional spare tire - rather than the can of goo that’s en vogue these days - to replace the failure.

After that episode, you now have to make a call to the tire shop to get the puncture repaired and/or the tire replaced. Good news for the tire shop, bad news for you because you’ve now got to take time out of the workday to make the trip over, and because of COVID-19 protocols, getting an appointment is neither easy nor quick. There’s also the looming potentiality for even more hurt: the car you have is all-wheel drive, so laws of physics dictates that if you have to replace one tire, the one on the opposite end of the axle must also be replaced as well, lest the differential gets destroyed due to the circumference mismatch.

You had plans for a good day, and then out of the blue you’re now down the price of one brand new tire, and a half a day of precious time.

That’s just part of the game, isn’t it? It comes with the territory of owning a car: you have to spend time and money to maintain and upkeep it. Such complicated machines aren’t destined to run perfectly all the time, and of course there’s many external factors as well, such as hazardous nails on the roadways. It doesn’t help that us car enthusiasts are so obsessive about our vehicles, constantly worry about its condition and making sure its as perfect as possible. The stress goes through the roof should you have to street-park your car, scared of the one day you’ll return to some act of vandalism, or worse, a mangled mess of metal.

Well it’s a good thing that everything I’ve described above happened to my brother and his Audi A3, though I can surely sympathize with the anxiety and hassle of having to deal with the less glamours parts of owning a car. Tire problems especially: it’s really down to pure luck.

To the music

Every year I compile a top 10 list of songs that was significant to me for that particular year. I’ve done so since 2011, and it’s quite interesting to look back at these lists and see what songs are on there. The music provides a symbolic window into what sort of year I’ve had, and what kind of feelings I was contemplating throughout. Similar to the 365 challenge that I’ve also been doing since 2011, it’s great fun to look back at the times gone by, which is precisely why I do this record keeping, if you will.

A few days ago I took a look at the song list from 2019, and I was surprised to find that even though the songs were important enough to make the top 10 list, the amount of times I actually listened to each track were vanishingly little - one of the songs a mere 15 times! This made me realize how drastically I’ve decreased in music listening; the top 10 lists of earlier years featured songs I’ve played hundreds of times, so it was shocking to find one that made a list with a play count in the teens.

For a guy that used to relish listening to music on the bus to and from school, oh how the times have changed indeed. Surely the available explosion of podcasts in recent years have absolutely obliterated opportunities for music listening. I’m big on always striving to learn new things, so podcasts have dominated my casual hours; why waste the precious minutes on repeating tracks when there’s so much to learn from many interesting people and subjects.

I don’t exactly regret listening to podcasts: some of my mental health breakthroughs in regards to dealing with anxiety is owed to information gleamed from them. That said, in this time of continued sheltering at home and running out of proper things to do, I shall endeavor to indulge in music far more often than I’ve had in the past years. In the moments where I’m searching for stuff to do to pass the time, why not put on the set of Bose noise cancelling headphones and press play on iTunes.

It sure beats looking at the horror show on twitter for the umpteenth time.

Sleepless in the 4th

How was your Fourth of July? Didn’t get any sleep, I bet.

As is with everything these days, Independence Day was not untouched by the scourge of the coronavirus. No big municipal firework show this year, obviously, and with parks closed and gatherings strictly not recommended, the traditional July 4th barbecue with friends or family was not be as well. Even though the weather was lovely and the sun was out in San Francisco, it was largely just another Saturday this past weekend. That is, until nightfall.

It’s ever expected that once Fourth of July turns into evening, the illegal fireworks come out to play. It’s something you get used to, but of course this year COVID-19 sprinkled some additional magic. For whatever reason, the amount of fireworks and the potency of them were extra high, probably the most extreme that I can remember. And people started early, too - before the sun has even gone down, which doesn’t really make sense because what exactly can you see when it’s still light out? Sadly, logic didn’t stop anything that day.

The noise and bangs from the fireworks were so intense that I put on earplugs as soon as I finished dinner, but even those things can only do so much; there’s no keeping out the sound entirely when it’s that loud. Not sure where people are getting them but the scale have gone completely off the rails. Your illegal fireworks are probably too big if the explosion can be felt through shakes of the windows and building. As someone simply trying to endure through the night, you sort of hope that nothing falls on your roof and catch on fire. To used a tired and inappropriate cliche: it sounded like a war zone out there the whole night of the 4th.

There was some good news: by the time the next day rolled around, it seems my neighborhood have exhausted their supplies because there were far less fireworks on the 5th of July than usual. Thank god for that because there are those us who had to get some proper sleep in order to for work on Monday.

Happy birthday. America; the only civilized country on earth that can’t seem to contain the coronavirus properly. You are indeed exceptional!