The Year of Living Dangerously

Tomorrow would be my kid’s last Zoom schooling day.

Been a year to be exact, without to-and-fro drop-off and pick-up, with school-zone speed limits and speeding tickets.

We sneak out once in a while for a donut (to-go), plugging-and-unplugging various headsets and speakers, re-arranging the home-office (home-classroom background), doing the laundry before class to avoid washer/dryer ambient noise.

After tomorrow, all is gone. Early to bed, early to rise. Back-to-school shopping (of new clothes and shoes, and perhaps school supplies for the remaining 9 weeks…all of it costs, but the President will certainly sign that Relief bill, won’t he this Friday).

A year of “white-on-rice”: I have played school janitor, after-school attendant (kids in the neighborhood just showed up), tutor, stay-at-home Dad, cook, dishwasher and driver.

In between, we had a house eviction, an unprecedented Winter Storm in Texas (today was the last day we had our burst pipes fixed).

Life goes on, albeit is still lived out dangerously (at gym, 70% of “incredible hunks” still don a mask, despite “Texas Strong” on shirts. )

The year of living dangerously, of driving like a bumper car between toll booths during the ice storm, of cooking on propane gas with windows closed (could have died from CO2).

A lot of close calls, but we’re together, white-on-rice, 365 days, 24/7, always-on like the Internet (except for this year’s storm).

During this hallucinating hibernation, I came up with “what does Al Gore have to do with Algorithm” (the answer: he championed the Information Superhighway, which paved the way for the physical layer, on top of which, resides the application layer run by multiple algorithms – hence, al-gor-ithm….Got it?)

Or “Malthus is wrong, Moore is right…..food production could not keep up with population explosion? Wrong. The speed of micro-processing keeps doubling every 18 months or so…? Right. Now, each of us can have more than 15 minutes of fame being Youtubers (sorry Warhol, your observation was made under limited electro-magnetic waves of radio/TV spectrum).

Between Spring break of 2020 and 2021, we lived dangerously, starting with UT students traveling to Cancun to Ted Cruz repeating it this year. We came close to another “uncivil war” (imagine if BLM folks actually confronted Jan 6th crowd – or, Floyd’s death that unleashed another LA’s riot – this time, not the Korean shop-keepers who protected their well-stocked stores, but the St Louis gun-toting couple, their well-manicured lawn).

I will close with a hopeful note: those “anti-Asian” sentiments will be just that: sentiments. America will get back on the road, freewheeling on four-wheelers, Spring breakers and beachgoers, stopping to order Chinese foods, Kung Pao chicken with just a faint memory of Kung flu, or who coined the term…on Fox News or Newsmax (should have been called junk news”). Vaccination=vacation. Our collective amnesia will undo past nightmares (should I mention a few here???) like Vietnam, 9/11 even Covid and 1/6/21.

1918, 1975, 2001 and 2020 were the years of living dangerously. R.I.P. to the many who did not make it.