Book Corner 2023.11

The Chinese Groove

by Kathryn Ma

This was a fun little story. Shelley is a young man who comes to San Francisco from China with dreams of success. Everything goes rather poorly from the start. He had been told his uncle, who will be hosting him, owns a big fabulous department store; but the truth is the family used to own a little corner grocery, but no longer. Furthermore, his uncle and aunt stick him in a tiny spare room and kick him out after two weeks. Hunger and homelessness threaten. But Shelley is positively buoyant through it all. He makes himself useful to his uncle’s elderly father and endears himself to the little boy of a family friend. He endures heartbreak and trickery. And then it’s all tied up in a nice bundle.

From the Dept. of F*ck It

Ya know it doesn’t seem to matter how much or how little I sleep. I can have a lousy night and still feel just average the next day; I can sleep seemingly plenty and still feel like crap. And in a similar vein, Saturday night I eschewed burgers and fries and ice cream when we went out to eat, yet I still had a lousy night. I feel so exhausted today, and I didn’t even buy into that DST bullshit (I’m protesting and shifting my life an hour later, which is to say, NOT shifting my life). I really can’t remember the last time I felt physically “fine”, in fact. So just f*ck it. Do what you want, body. You’re gonna do what you want anyway.

Book Corner 2023.10

Slouching Towards Utopia

by J. Bradford DeLong

I really enjoyed this. It’s a 500+-page economic history of the years 1870 – 2010. It got really exciting in the WWI chapter, nearly every sentence packing a punch. Here’s just one I bookmarked, about how just 80 years separated Croats & Serbs fighting together as blood brothers in WWI and the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 90s: “To fight one set of wars at the start of the twentieth century to unify Serbs and Croats, and another set of wars at the end of that century to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Serbs of Croats, and Croats of Serbs, seems among the sickest jokes history ever played on humanity, or, more causally accurate, humans ever played on history.”

The overall theme of this history is Hayek vs. Polyani. Friedrich Hayek, I was familiar with, but with Michael Polyani I was not. DeLong sums up Hayek (repeatedly – the book is not afraid to repeat its themes): “The market giveth, and the market taketh away; blessed be the name of the market.” Polyani, if I can summarize: nothing beats the free market for producing general prosperity, feeding technological progress, and allocating capital efficiently. However, people generally want more. They want some stability, some expectation they can keep their job, some fairness, etc. The market produces none of these things, which isn’t a bad thing or a good thing; it’s just not what the market does. Since people will persist in wanting these things, they will take action to make them happen, which is entirely reasonable. This struck me as one of those perspectives with a deep sense to it. Like when I turned away from libertarianism all those years ago. Freedom is great and important, but why should it trump other things that are also great and important? Like Haidt’s RIGHTEOUS MIND – empathy is great and important, but people have other pillars of morality. So, the market is great and important, but there are other things that maybe it doesn’t always trump.

Great food for thought, great history, great read.

Anti-Gratitude for Real

I’ve referred to this before. I keep a line-a-day-journal. In recent times it’s taken the form of “one great thing from the past 24 hours and 3 blessings” a.k.a what is sometimes called (ick) a “gratitude journal.” But I’m going to morph it into a combined anti-gratitude and gratitude journal. You should definitely think of a great thing that recently happened every morning when you get up, and count your blessings. But first you should think of what was the worst thing that happened in the last 24 hours, and what are three other things you have to be ungrateful about. Because that way when inevitable bad things happen, you won’t feel, on top of bad, the feeling that you are stymied, that this bad thing wasn’t SUPPOSED to happen, you wuz robbed, you were gypped. With practice, you’ll instead think, aha, this is the Bad Thing, or one of the Bad Things, due to happen today; right on time!

Except When It’s More Than One Thing

…it’s always something.

Started to get a headache. Hope it’s not Paxlovid relapse.

Finger hurts as much as ever, I just try not to use it. Boy, if this is arthritis and permanent, it truly sucks.

Wasn’t sure about the pink in this. Still not sure. Not sure I like the way the pattern looks a lot better on one side than the other, also. I bet once it’s an actual scarf that I’m throwing around, fine details like this will be overlooked.