Blog

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

Not on a school night

Amongst my friends, I jokingly refer to weekday evenings as “school nights”. Not only do I have a set schedule of studies and practice to attend to, I also have to go to bed early. Not entirely because of work the next day, but because I prefer to wake up early and type out a few words on this blog. I guess you can say it’s a bit neurotic to force myself to such a routine. All I can say, is that it feels weird when I have to deviate from the schedule.

Such as last evening. Instead of eating dinner at home then commencing piano practice, I went out with some friends to a burger place at the main drag of West Portal. It was a particularly warm day so the ambiance was quite nice to be sitting outside and taking in the small town atmosphere. They’ve chained Christmas lights between the light poles so it was rather festive for a random February evening. The burger place was right next to a record store that constantly played music, adding to atmospheric flavor.

See, I’m not so strict with my routine that I can’t break it for these random excursions. The lost time for piano practice and reading can be easily made up later. Quality time with friends, that’s something to grasp at the first opportunity. I even thanked them afterwards for coming out of a school night. One of them is doing his doctorate program, so it actually was a school night for him. There was homework waiting soon as he return home. NERD!

I guess that’s why people adore Fridays so much. They can go out and deviate from their regular work-life schedule without a care. Friday nights are their proverbial oyster. As for me? I also have a set routine on Fridays: I visit my friend’s kids and have dinner at their home. Not all that exciting from certain perspectives, but it’s quality time with people I cherish nonetheless.

I don't know about you

Hello there! It sure is wonderful to see the dawn of another day and a new year. The COVID pandemic rages on, but I’m rather optimistic about 2022. I really wish to be able to travel to my beloved Asia again - sans the need to quarantine. We shall see. For now, the cold and rain of winter is the reality, and the routine of every day life.

It was nice to not have a routine from Christmas Eve onwards until New Year’s Day. Working in higher education grants me the privilege of having that week off every single year. My last day of work in 2021 was the 22nd of December, which is something to be smug about, honestly. I don’t have to work in tech-bro land to have this perk! Granted, I don’t get paid like I would be if I worked in tech.

So it was a splendid week of rest and relaxation. I slept about 10 hours every day, and then went about my business as slowly as possible. I spent an hour just to eat dinner! It’s incredibly nice to not have to rush through things or treat the mundane stuff as mere obstacles to get onto the fun stuff. Taking my sweet time to perform my morning grooming because I don’t have to rush to get to work on time is a small joy.

The Hawaiians and their “island time” are kind of geniuses.

Anyways, I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions because any changes I want to do, I don’t wait until the calendar flips to a new one. However, I did make one tiny but significant change to start 2022: I deleted twitter off my iPhone. I now have zero social media apps. No longer will I waste half an hour (at least) each morning and each night browsing through the feed in bed. It’s not a good use of time, and it’s not healthy towards my quality of sleep.

I wish us all a great 2022. Let’s get after it.

Back from the awakening

Well hello there. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? At least for the usual cadence of this page.

The last time I wrote on here, it was a typical Monday back in mid September. An ordinary morning onwards to an ordinary day. But then during work I got a text from my brother saying our father’s new lease have arrived. In this crazy hot market where there’s a huge shortage of cars to sell, the dealership is only willing to hold the car for us for so long. We had to make the move quick.

So I spent that Monday evening at the local Toyota dealership finalizing the deal. This knocked my whole schedule off as I wasn’t able to do any of the things I typical do after work (the piano went unpracticed). No big deal, I thought: I’ll just make it up the next day.

Tuesday had different ideas, though. A new lease meant it was time to get rid of the old lease. What I had thought would be a quick transaction at the local CarMax have turned into a whole roundabout affair that’s still ongoing. I basically had to buy the Hyundai Tucson from Hyundai outright. Then I got to wait for the California DMV to send me the unencumbered title. Only after that can I sell the car to CarMax, or whoever is willing to give me a solid price that’s above my buyout.

I spent much of Tuesday evening sorting this out. The routine once again ruined.

Wednesday was not any better. I went to a Giants game for the first time this 2021 season. By the time I returned home it was nearly midnight. Forget reading for an hour; now my sleep schedule is off as well. No way I was going to wake up “on time” the next day and do my usual morning routine. Sleep is too precious to be usurped.

Waking on time

It’s been, what, two months since the clock moved forward an hour for daylight saving time? It has taken that long for me to finally readjust my sleeping schedule. For the past two months, I’ve been content with not setting an alarm, and letting myself wake up whenever. Usually that occurs at around 6:30AM, about half and hour later than my usual 6AM alarm. On certain mornings it would be past 7 o’clock. Must have been tiring days prior.

Well, the natural wake experiment is over. Due to my tendency of scrolling through twitter in bed for at least half an hour, waking up just whenever is costing me time. The obviously solution would be to stop reading twitter in bed, instead of waking up earlier, but that’s far too logical and prudent for me. I enjoy my morning twitter read, the equivalent of reading the delivered newspaper every day.

But I also miss being up during the tranquil hours of early morning. On both days this past weekend, I forced myself up right at 6AM for various activities. Being up and active during those ungodly hours, while everyone else is still sound asleep, is the magic of having an early sleep-wake schedule. Nothing better than reading a book in absolute silence with a cup of coffee in hand, while the view outside the window does it morning color dance. Or a stroll through San Francisco chinatown before any shop have even opened.

This is why I’ve once again set an alarm clock for 6AM - everyday. No more “sleeping in”; morning hours shall be utilized to the maximum. The past few days I got my hour of daily reading in before I moved on to breakfast. It’s really nice.

No Internet for early man

Yesterday morning I woke up to the home WIFI not working. Because I rent, and all utilities are included, I don’t control nor have access to the Internet modem. I’m an incredibly early riser, so I wasn’t about to wake up my friend and landlord upstairs at 6:30 AM in the morning, just so I can have Internet. It will have to wait until he has woken up, and realizes the WIFI connection has stopped.

At least I still had cellular network on my iPhone. I can never quit you, twitter!

It turns out I didn’t really need the Internet for the first two hours of my morning. Indeed, I did use my phone to check the socials for a bit. After that, I didn’t bother to tether the phone to the MacBook Pro, even though I could (my cellular plan is unlimited). Lacking an Internet connection, I wrote my morning blog in Microsoft Word instead of directly onto the Squarespace CMS, as I am doing now. And then I read a book until breakfast.

The Internet has given us many wonderful things; it’s good to be reminded that I don’t have to be completely reliant on it to function normally. My morning didn’t get ruined just because the WIFI was down. It reminds me back when I lived with my parents, when I was in charge of the home Internet. Whenever the system was down, I’d immediately get a knock on my door from my parents informing me of such. As if they couldn’t bare to be without connectivity for one minute.

Sometimes I would wryly retort that they should go read a book, or do something non-digital (have a conversation with each other, perhaps). Not having Internet for the 10 minutes it takes for the modem to reboot is going to be just fine. Take a breath! At home we either stare at our phone or the computer screen constantly, so it’s good to have breaks from it from time to time. Even if said break is induced by nonfunctioning equipment.

I'm heading out

Some days it’s nice to simply get out of the house.

Today was one of those days where I had to physically go into work, and I have to say I quite enjoyed it. Routines are nice, but sometimes it’s cool to break it up and do something different. Who knew that actually going to campus for work would be the thing that is out of the ordinary, but such is the time that we are living right now. Of course, it’s a blessing that I get to drive my brother’s car for the commute, rather than take public transport; it probably wouldn’t be enjoyable at all if I had to slog it with the masses on the bus.

Nothing against buses, but you really cannot do social distancing inside one.

It is eerie indeed to be one of the few people on campus, a sort of silence that even during the breaks between semesters you wouldn’t find. Picture an entire floor of the library building, and it’s just me, my supervisor, and the attending security guard. Everything seems to be in suspended animation, other than the few items I interact with. It sounds a bit perverse, but it’s as if Thanos did the snap, and I’m amongst the few survivors combing through everything that’s been left behind. The coworkers that I’m used to interacting with have seemingly vanished.

On the other hand, I also like the silence very much. Where I live it’s not the quietest street in the world, and sometimes it’s difficult to concentrate on my third-floor room that faces the road. On campus - with almost everyone gone - it’s far easier to keep focus, and not be momentarily annoyed at the car driving by that’s playing music at the volume level of a rock concert. I know I shouldn’t let such a trivial and uncontrollable things distract me, and I really try not to, but to be in an environment where I know for sure that no such mental intrusion will ever occur, the mind is that extra bit calmer.

I reckon physically going to work once a week is a good thing for the mind.