Blog

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

What you really want

A day off during the middle of a work week is a great opportunity to reveal to yourself just exactly how you spend your time. No work responsibilities, no weekend errands: you’ve got eight solid hours dedicated completely to you. How you choose to spend those hours is a good indication of what you really want to do.

This Veterans Day holiday, I spent the majority of the day reading. (The Red Rising trilogy is a fantastically good read.) In between two meals and a workout session, the rest was proper couch time with a book and a few cups of coffee. Eat, workout, and books; what more does a person need?

This list of things I chose not to do shatters the illusion that those things were something I actually wanted to do. Videos games? I’ve yet to play a single hour of games on the PlayStation in 2025. I pretend to be an avid gamer, but really it’s the idea of it that’s interesting to me. In hindsight, I should have never bought the PS5 at all.

Go outside and take photos? It turns out I’m not that type of hobbyist photographer. I want to be, but again it’s the ideal of it that I fancy, not the actual process. I enjoy taking pictures during my travels, that remains. Going around locally, hunting down moments and scenes? I am and was never that kind of photographer. It’s time I stopped pretending to be.

Take the car out of a spin on the mountains - for the fun of it? I’ve not done that since the beginning of the pandemic, and I never resumed. The magic of an open windy road is not as alluring as it used to be. I’m okay with admitting that I’m the sort of car enthusiast that enjoy cars as a static museum object. This might be sacrilege for some that consider mileage as a badge of enthusiasm.

Sometimes I watch YouTube car repair videos, and think to myself that’s something I would like to do. If only I have a garage. I should get a garage! Then I can be the DIY car person with chests full of tools and hours to spend tinkering. I could spend a ton of money pursuing that ideal, but I have to remind myself that I’m not even inclined to wash the car these days. What makes me think I’m want to spend a free afternoon wrenching, instead, of say, reading?

To quote the great DJ Khaled: “Never play yourself.”

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.