Blog

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

Kingdom of Heaven

I am reading this book on the Crusades, the many quests to reclaim the Holy Land during medieval Europe. The overwhelming takeaway from the book is my astonishment at the massive carnage done in the name of god. (A supposedly all-powerful, benevolent god.) Though I guess it isn’t secret that in the history of the Catholic Church, there’s much blood on its hands.

Muslims on the other side of the belligerents list are no better in terms of cruelty inflicted.

Of course, we can’t take our modern lens to view history. To the populace of the Middle Ages, large casualty events by sword blades might be a normal thing. Potential terror that would paralyze modern humans is simply the price of doing business way back in those days. We can’t imagine living in city where every few years another siege army comes to wreck havoc. Men are expendable. Women tradable. Children disregarded.

And yet people of the medieval period carried on living. Far simpler times, I suppose. The only salient things in life is enough food to eat, and a roof over the head. There’s nothing more than that. Even if the next day some Venetian ships might show up on the town coastline, ready to plunder your city. Danger is something you accept.

I suppose the citizens of Ukraine in this current war with Russia can relate. Amidst many bombs and tragedy, Ukrainians must keep it moving. Stomach needs to be fed, homes need rebuilding, should it be unfortunately destroyed.

Those of us sitting pretty in the first world have lots to be thankful for. It seems petty to complain about big city crime when medieval people’s very existence hangs on so delicately.

The peak-end rule

The book Thinking, Fast and Slow by the great Daniel Kahneman details the concept of the peak-end rule. Basically, how an experience comes to end - negatively or positively - biases our feelings towards the entire experience. A television show can have an excellent run of seasons, but the entire series can be tainted if the final season is utterly crap.

Looking at you, How I Met Your Mother.

The tragedy here is in ignoring the majority that came before the end. You still suffered through six hours of hiking, even though reaching the summit gave you tremendous euphoria. The first two years of child-rearing was still full of suck, even though the five-year-old now gives you more joy than you can ever ask for. How I Met Your Mother provided nine solid seasons of laughs; a spoiled 10th season shouldn’t obviate all of that.

The peak-end rule explains why I am unable to look back fondly at my (all too brief) ownership of a Porsche 911 GT3. Because the ending is so crap. Making the decision to sell the car due to life circumstances has tainted the entire year and a half run. It didn’t feel like a good experience because of the action that ended it: I essentially sold my already attained dream car.

It would serve me well to remember that I did have 18 months of absolute fun with the GT3. And cumulatively, that amount of joy is exponentially greater than the pain of that week at the end when I made the decision to sell and sold it. This life of ours is full of chapters, with distinct beginnings and ends. We should try not let the disappointment of something coming to a close wrongly color the entire chapter.

And vice versa.

If I die, I die

The book The Last Place on Earth narrates the duel between two teams of explorers aiming to be the first to reach the very southern pole. The too long didn’t read is the winning team took a measured, calculated approach, while the losing team went full Rambo at the beginning, running out of steam at the end. It’s the same tortoise and the hare story that they’ve been reading to little kids since forever.

My personality is definitely on the hare end of the spectrum. Years ago while running a 10K, I drained myself going too fast on the first half. I then essentially walked the second half, leading to a slow result. If it were on a North Pole expedition, I would have surely perished.

It’s a deadly thing for motivation to strike me, because the sudden inspiration will cause me to focus so intently that I forgo everything else. I can be researching hotel accommodations in South Korea for hours, and won’t pause to even drink a lick of water until the job is done. Fiction books are especially dangerous towards the end, because I won’t stop reading until the very last page. Bed time? No it isn’t!

Besides, it’s not likely I would be able to sleep anyways. Slumber is not possible when that thing with the car still isn’t fixed (so glad my brand of car enthusiasm doesn’t involve massively fixing or upgrading car parts). Or the stuck kitchen pipe needs something stronger than Drano to clear. Is this the opposite side of the coin to procrastination? Once I begin something, it’s difficult to stop until the job is done. Regular life be damned.

Good thing then that none of my projects or tasks have downsides that involve death.

Where it all went

As a person who doesn’t typically do New Year’s Resolutions, I have but one in 2025: no buying new books until I’ve read all the ones I already bought. Tolstoy’s War and Peace will finally be devoured before I can clear off additional books on my Amazon cart. It’s the right thing to do. The least a book can do before becoming a gatherer of dusts on the shelf is to entertain me with its infilled information.

As 2025 gets underway, a good exercise to do is to take a look at your money in 2024. Credit cards make it super easy to gather and export all your purchases in an Excel file. The Chase cards that I predominantly use even categorizes the spending for me, and lets the user compare year to year. That’s how I was easily able to know that I successfully spent thousands less money (2024 compared to 2023) on Amazon.

I think it’s valuable to know the big picture of where my money went, so that I can intuitively plan for the new year. Performing the audit (if you will) was how I found out I only filled up my BMW M2 a total of twelve times. For a car that goes 200 miles before the gas light comes on (which is to say: pathetic), that means I did very little driving in 2024. I endeavor to accumulate a lot more miles in 2025. To pay for that extra gas, the amount of money not spent on books should cover a good chunk of it!

A surprise spend of last year was food delivery. How it can add up to so many hundreds of dollars, even though I’ve only ordered seven times. Those fees and tips really add up to already inflated food prices. This year there will be zero food delivery orders, unless I am so unfortunate to become incapacitated.

Spend wisely, my friends.

Shogun

My one goal for this three-day Memorial Day weekend is to binge watch the entire 10-episode run of Shogun (streaming on Disney Plus). Long ago have I read James Clavell’s acclaimed novel of the same name. It was therefore super exciting to see it visualized in a new medium.

Verdict: Shogun is magnificently done. The cinematography is amazing, and the acting is superb (Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai should win lots of awards for their performance. Moeka Hoshi is a bonafide scene-stealer). Fans of the book - I would include myself - can be wholly satisfied with the show-runners’ interpretation of the base material. It’s largely faithful to the book. The subtle changes made contribute to better storytelling for television.

The depiction of Lady Mariko leading Toranaga’s retinue out of Osaka Castle, Mariko fighting through the samurai blockade, is wonderfully breathtaking.

The feudal period of Japan is my absolute favorite historical period - of any country. Before I read Shogun the book, what got me into this slice of history is the book Taiko, by Eiji Yoshikawa. Taiko narrates the story of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s rise from lowly peasant to the Taiko - ruler of Japan - during the Sengoku period. That book is where I first learned of these giants of Japanese history: Oda Nobunaga - the unifier of feudal Japan, and Tokugawa Ieyasu - founder of the great Tokugawa Shogunate.

Shogun is actually a fictionalized version of Tokugawa’s maneuvers to claim the supreme title, during the period after the Taiko’s death.

I immediately wanted to play Ghost of Tsushima again after finishing the show.

Please sir, no more

I really need to stop buying books. There’s still so many on my shelves currently that I’ve yet to read. Just this week, four more books arrived from the overlords at Amazon. The COVID pandemic may be over, but my personal pandemic of compulsive book buying is here to stay. What I should do is stop listening to podcasts, because that’s where I usually get book recommendations from. The hosts would interview some interesting person releasing a book, and I would immediately go one click purchase (trademark) on Amazon.

No wonder book tours include going on podcasts.

There’s also the problem of running out of shelf space. The two Billy bookcases in my room is full (man have they gotten expensive since I bought them three years ago), and I prefer not to get more shelving. That money would be better used towards buying more books! My solution to this is to slowly donate the books I’ve already read. The rule: any new book I buy, one on the shelf has to go. Fortunately, it’s super easy to donate my used books. Our university library has a book donation drop-off. So I simply have to bring the books with me to work.

I would donate to the San Francisco Public Library - there’s a branch literally down the block from me. Sadly they do not except donations at branch locations. There’s a central spot on the other side of the city that accepts them. My housemate recently hauled a bunch of his old books over there. I on the hand will not be wasting gas for this endeavor. Sorry, SFPL: decrease friction if you want my donations!

There’s nothing better than an early Saturday morning, reading a book in front of my room window (with a requisite cup of coffee, of course). No need for any grand travel adventures; that simplicity is what satisfies me these days.

Books on books on books

I kind of promised myself this year that I will not buy more books until I’ve read all the ones that are already on the shelves. Well, that has gone completely out the window already. I’m about a dozen new books purchased this year, and it’s only been a month! There is literally no more room on my two IKEA BILLY bookshelves. I’ve resorted to stacking the news one horizontally on top of the books already there.

In my defense, I do tend to read all of the new books that I buy. But with shelf space becoming an acute issue, I soon will have to make a decision: either buy and create more shelf space, or donate a portion of the books. Because let’s face it, I’m not going to stop buying new books. That’s just not happening.

Donating the books will be easy: I work in a campus library that takes donations. The hard part will be figuring out which books to donate. That’s when the emotions and sentimental value kick in. Marie Kondo doesn’t have a solution for this: what if everything sparked joy? A more useful standard would be to toss anything that have not been touched/used in the past 12 months. The likelihood of such a book ever being touched again is near zero.

I previously had dreams of stuffing as much books and shelf space as possible into my room. A wonderland of books, if you will. The coziness scale will certainly be off the charts. However, that would clash against a strong sensibility of mine: cleanliness. It’s a simple equation: the more stuff you have, the more difficult it is to maintain it.

This is why I’m kind of rethinking about getting a second car. Sure it’ll be fun to have a different kind of car to drive around, but it will be two times the effort (and costs!) to maintain. That’s a tremendous time investment, even for something I am deeply passionate about.