Weekly update 4

• cooking lots of Indian food. I mistakenly bought the wrong 10lb bag of indian wheat flour, i bought the one mixed with multigrains, oops.

  • I need to narrow down my rationality for indian food. Its too many spices to keep in stock if I don’t.

• I went to Yucaipa to hang out with clin and parents as they cleaned out the warehouse. I played with lots of guns

  • Hanging out in warehouses is always fun. I’ve spent a lot of my childhood in warehouses, and a lot of trips in vietnam/china in warehouses/factories. Its more fun when you get to poke around the merchandise, and when the merchandise is fun

  • its a great privilege to be present during things like cleaning out a warehouse

  • Hanging around clin’s parents is always shockingly low effort. Reinforcing the idea that I was basically raised taiwanese. My family is Taiwanese adjacent tbh, south chinese overseas diaspora have a lot in common with taiwan, in that they share pre communist, pre-cultural revolution chinese culture (and chauzhou is geographically adjacent to taiwan/hakka/fujian). Also, chinglish fluency lol

  • Clin’s dad is the OG Asian dude fixated on too much gear lol

• I watched a Taiwanese film at vidiots, eagle rock

  • I love taiwan, taiwan feels so natural and comfy and intimate to me (raised taiwanese adjacent in san marino, study abroad in taiwan in college)

  • It was such a good movie

  • Yiyi tackled so many big ideas simultaneously, successfully, so many ideas that are relevant to my own life, but it was also frustrating to watch. it framed life as something that just happens, when problems arise, it gives far too much credit to luck and fate, while I saw these problems as “skill issue.” Your wife feels like her life is empty, you don’t feel close enough to your son, your brother in law keeps making bad financial decisions based on superstition, these are not issues of fate and luck. You didn’t have to marry your wife, you can spend more time with her or your son, you can spend the energy to educate your brother in law to rely less on superstitions, or lock up his assets to be less liquid (you can choose not to loan him money).

    • This was from a different generation, year 2000 Taiwan, it was an era where self improvement, working on interpersonal relationships, building a real relationship with your children was not really something that was understood well.

  • some random details a lot of people missed in the theater, dad spoke taiwanese to his childhood sweetheart, but mandarin to his wife. The wedding took place at “the grand hotel,” but was never explicity stated in the movie. The exterior was never shown, nor the name mentioned, but that wouldn’t be necessary to anyone familiar with taipei. The hotel carried a lot of cultural significance. The relationship with taiwan and japan, why it isn’t weird that a random bar is full of people who could sing along to a popular japanese song.

    • These are the little details that are obvious to someone who are fluent to a culture, and its hard to separate what needs to be translated to someone from a different culture and what doesn’t. This is part of the reason why its not hard for me to hangout with clins parents.

    • I spent so long in college trying to explain my identity and culture to people who never understood, and likely could never understand. If it is true that to be understood is to be loved, then there were parts of me that people in college could not love.

  • there were a lot of asian people at vidiots. Even the line for the next movie had a lot of asian people. Way more than other indie theaters. I guess eagle rock is closer to SGV?

  • I was very drained after the movie. I think my ability to empathize has grown so much that it drains me to watch a movie like that. I feel a lot more feelings now.

  • I saw them use “zuo ren” (do human, be human) in the movie. it was translated to “Dignity” in the movie, but that is only the translation in that context. I’m glad its used in standard mandarin, I have only heard it in cantonese and chouzhou.

• I’ve been walking benzi a lot (he likes to walk a lot in cold weather), and hiking a lot (with leilani, this is how im getting her to exercise, and its good for me too) but now my feet are tired all the time from putting in so many miles lol

• Zach Byan’s new album on repeat. I was excited to drive to yucaipa on friday because that was the day the album dropped and i could have an hour of alone time on the road to listen to it lol

• chelsea and danny are a full blown thing now. Weird. Idk how to feel about it. I keep “guys” at arms length, and idk how much to talk to danny 1 on 1. Its all weird, hes over every weekend. Danny says hes been talking to chelsea to get her to like, idk, change some problematic views/beliefs she has, he agrees with me and sidney on a few big things chelsea needs to work on. Idk what this means in the context of my relationship with danny and his relationship to chelsea. I am not thinking about it much, idk if I should or should not

• uncle sean called me telling me that I need to talk to uncle tony about his cognitive decline. Idk if its just like, extra raging adhd or alcohol related (alcohol related dementia?). I haven’t talked to uncle tony. its scary. idk. But huge sign of trust and respect that uncle sean called me about it. I need to tackle this. I don’t know how, or how quickly, but I will. ( i dont like hanging out with uncle tony, and hes older than me, so I can’t give him the ethan/tj treatment where I hang out with them and lecture them all the time and force them to workout with me) A litle annoyed I haven’t been hanging out with uncle tony the last few months, hes been wanting to, probably to say thanks for TJ but I find him kinda annoying so I’ve been brushing him off.

• a lot of my 1 on 1 time has been shifted to fitness of active stuff, Its pretty exhausting, i feel like a personal trainer, where its hard to fit in your own workouts on top of all the personal training. But its good, i wouldn’t have it any other way. Its good for me, it keeps me active, and its good for people I hang out with, and it facilitates much better interaction than sitting and eating food.

• TJ robotics

  • He’s super busy now, for the next few weeks he will be on 2 active robotics teams in 2 different leagues, it will be like, 5-6 days a week for the forseeable future, and playing a very active role on both teams.

  • FTC, his team is totally rebuilding the entire robot, after 2 meets they realized they have hit the limit of what their platform can do, there are critical design limitations that they can’t overcome without a full redesign, this is awesome learning, this is why I think FTC is so much cooler than FRC. This is a much closer representation of an engineering problem.