Blog

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

What's the deal with ballpark food?

Honestly, why is it so expensive?

I mean, it’s always been expensive. But with the inflation of the past few years, it has gotten utterly insane.

For the first time this baseball season, I attended a Giants game in person. While game tickets have largely remained the same price due to the team sucking for the past years, the food prices at Oracle Park have gone straight up the scale. I can’t believe I paid nearly 10 dollars for a small hot dog - way smaller than what you can get at Costco for $1.50.

And my ballpark favorite - the chicken tenders and fries - is nearly $19! People seem happy to pay the high prices, too. The lines for food were long and plentiful. Maybe I’m the only poor amongst a sea of high-income earners. Probably true! The median individual income for San Francisco (2023 data) is estimated to be around $90,000 (Thanks, ChatGPT). I make less than that, so that means more than 50% percent of the population makes more than me. (I paid attention in math class.)

Anyways, because I seldom go to the ballparks these days (back in the early 2010s, I’d go to dozens every season), splurging that amount on food is no big deal. It’s all psychological, you know? Because I’ve experienced the food price being almost half of its current levels, it’s very painful to pay for that. My anchor point is way different than someone who’s never been to the ballpark and seeing the price list for the first time.

As I’ve many times before, I don’t adjust for inflation.

Always take the shot

I hate to say I knew it.

Indiana Pacers star guard Tyrese Haliburton strained his calf muscle in game 5 of the NBA Finals. When he then decided to play in game 6, I remarked to my friend that he is playing with fire. A strained calf is an easy gateway to blowing out the supporting achilles tendon.

Sure enough, during this evening’s game 7, Haliburton tore his achilles in a non-contact play. Absolutely devastating. With their star player out, the Pacers predictably lost the game. The Oklahoma City Thunder is your 2025 NBA champions of the world.

We can obviously understand why Haliburton chose to play on a bum calf. Making it to the NBA Finals is incredibly difficult, needing a ton skill and a decent amount of luck. There are no guarantees for any player that they will make it back in the future. So this Finals might be Haliburton’s only shot at the gold. Of course he would throw all caution into the proverbial wind.

He’s made enough money in his career that any jeopardy to Haliburton’s future earnings is not as salient as giving it his all to win a championship. The older him would probably look back at it with regret if he sat out the last two games and the Pacers lost. That’s not an alternative timeline he wishes to live.

The key here is that Haliburton took the risk. Certain opportunities in life only shows up once at a given time. If you don’t take the shot (no pun), that’s it. It won’t ever come back around again. Crushed as he might be at the injury, I doubt Haliburton would do it any differently.

Just do it

R/bogelheads is a subreddit dedicated to discussing Jack Bogel’s investment strategy. (For those of you under a rock, Jack Bogel is the founder of Vanguard, a pioneer of the index fund.) Genuinely: why does this subreddit exist? Bogel’s investment philosophy is as simple as it gets: consistently buy low-cost index funds periodically for a very long time. What else is there to talk about? R/Bogelheads should consist of one single pinned post outlining that exact strategy, and nothing else.

Same with r/personalfinance. What can there possibly be to talk about when personal finance can be boiled down to a single sentence: spend less than you make, save and invest the difference.

Same with r/fitness. Go move some weights every few days, consistently for a very long time. That’s it. Gyms have not changed, nor has barbells and dumbbells.

I think we get mired in discussions on the margins, seeking ever more nuanced information, rather than doing the damn thing. Or, we’re already doing the damn thing, but we want to keep ingesting information about that particular subject as some sort of feel-good pacifier. You only need one podcast with David Goggins as guest to know that you should get off your ass. Finding 10 more just like it with essentially the same information is just procrastinating.

Once you know the secrets, you can leave! Rather than scrolling through the same information day after day, that time is better spent doing something else. It can even be for leisure! Go start a new streaming TV series. Go play some video games. Go hang out with your actual friends and family.

Worthless to anyone but me

An email got through the spam filters to offer me an opportunity to sell this very web domain. That is silly, because I’m pretty sure I am the only Healy Chen on this planet. Healychen.com is absolutely worthless to anyone but me. Not even a nice try. Just stop it.

For the record: I am wiling to let this domain for a few thousand bucks. No sane person should want to buy it for that money, however. But I’ll take it if offered!

You guys remember back in early April when the stock market retreated about 20% from all time highs thanks to President Trump’s tariff plans? Man have we recovered quickly. The markets are hovering near all time highs again.

What does that mean? I hope you bought during the dip, because I certainly did. And that chunk of cash is absolutely hard-carrying my portfolio performance for 2025. If anything, I now have regrets that I didn’t buy more.

Of course, we should not time the market, because most of us will fail. The reason I bought during this recent dip is my investment time horizon is long. It’s not a get rich quick scheme, it’s a get rich long scheme. I plan to hold stocks until well into retirement, so when the market offers a 20% discount to buy more, heck yeah I am taking that advantage.

In the (very) long run, markets will always go up. Let’s say for the sake of argument the American stock market doesn’t grow any (or even declines) over the next few decades. If that were to be true, there would be way greater things to worry about than simply our investments. See: Argentina.

Live your life

I am on YouTube often. I pay for premium so I can watch videos on my large TV without annoying ads. (Word on the street is the Youtube ads have only gotten ever more annoying and frequent?) Hagerty channel car videos look majestic in large format. Shoutout to Henry Catchpole and team for making banger after banger.

I get confused when the algorithm recommends me videos of people’s daily lives (vlogs, in the modern parlance). Confused not at the over-sharing (though I would never), but at the supposed audience size for such content. Think about it: folks are actively watching someone else live life, rather than living their own life.

The platform Twitch has created many millionaires out of people watching them play video games. Watch another person play video games? I much rather play the games myself. Of course, it’s not lost on me that half the time the audience is there to watch a reasonably hot girl, with her boobs barely contained, merely existing. Pretty privilege is exploited to the maximum in our age of streaming.

No hate for the content creators. How a person legitimately makes money is none of my business. Good for them.

I reckon religion is no longer the opiate of the masses. It’s live streaming. The many hours spent watching someone do stuff are hours lost to either productivity, or destructibility. In that way, I guess it’s fine? I’ll take net neutral over net negative every single time. I dare not imagine what would the legion of lonely males do otherwise without the pacifying addiction of OnlyFans.

Me? I’m going to live life, rather than watch someone live theirs.

I am priced out

I was walking through my local Target store when I noticed a 20 ounce bottle of Coke now costs $3.19? And that is before tax! I am old enough to remember when 20 ounce bottles were 99 cent. A dollar bill at the vending machine was enough to obey your thirst.

Talk about things I am priced out of. Buying soda drinks at a store is one of them. Filtered water is just fine, thank you very much.

But then people would argue that saving that three dollar on a daily soda (or four dollars on a daily coffee) is not going to get me to buying a house. The math on that in the San Francisco Bay Area is indeed tragic. Those people are right: keeping that $3 in my pocket is merely pissing in the wind of houses that start at a million dollars.

A better use for that $3 is to buy the lottery. At least there’s a infinitesimal chance!

In the grand scheme of things, buying a soda bottle here and there is not going to monetarily affect me one bit. But it’s the mindset that counts here. We can all agree that spending money is easy. The American credit system is fantastic in that regard. Therefore I think we have to train our resistance muscles (not to be confused with resisting a certain presidency). The calculus has to be more than: can I afford it, if yes, then buy!

Saying no to the $4 coffee helps me say no to a new iPad Air I’ve been eyeing, or a newer laptop to replace this “aging” M1 MacBook Pro. Those are the money decisions that really slice chunks: the hundreds and thousands of dollars at a time. Money that can otherwise grow significantly if put to proper investing.

If I really want to drink soda, I’d go buy in bulk from Costco.

Two months post Accutane

It’s been a little over two months since I ended my (first and hopefully only) round of Accutane medication. I am happy to report that my face is remains pimple free. That’s the main fear, you know? That soon as I hop off the drug, the persistent acne that so plagued me since puberty will return with a vengeance. Irrational, probably, though it’s not exactly uncommon for chronic acne sufferers to need multiple rounds of treatment.

The other fear is for the oiliness to return. One of the only good things about being on Accutane is that my face and scalp were bone dry all the time. It was so nice to touch my face and not be repulsed at the oil slick on my fingers. My hair was no longer matted down with oil the next day after shampooing. While on Accutane, I could have gone a whole week without washing my hair.

In this regard, some of the moisture has indeed come back to the face. It makes sense, because otherwise my lips would still be chapped all the time. You can’t expect to have selective dryness! That’s just not how the body works.

But I glad to say the intense oiliness seems to be a thing of the past. I hope two whole months post treatment isn’t still too early to determine. What’s the half-life of Accutane in the body anyways? (ChatGPT says about five days.) You’re apparently okay to make a baby - something you’re explicitly warned to not do while on the medication - one month after stopping.

Overall I am very happy with the results. The seven months of insular and antisocial behavior - due to needing to avoid being outside during the daytime - was worth it. Having lived with chronic acne for so long before, it’s difficult to believe that this acne-free condition will stick. I don’t think the anxiety of thinking every new odd sensation on the face is an oncoming breakout ever goes away.

So far so good, though.