Author: Thang Nguyen 555

Hope first. Or else. What’s the point!

Hope, my first thought. There at the moment I bathed in maternal-ward fluorescent light and friendly faces.

“Wow, she was 40 something yet while pregnant with child , she still juggled in between a class – 57 students – to push through nine-months of carrying”. Flanked by love, curious cousin and well-wishers I had my start. Southern summer night, two years post- Geneva Convention, at the heart of our newly adopted city, zooming past our refugee enclave – off from a colonial round-about, with passer-by in all modes of transportation.

There was my point A , cited on my Birth Certificate. “You can’t just birth-certify me then kick me out of the hospital?”. Or buy me a set of wheels and send me off (some Vietnamese old-maids stay put at home permanently). We feel abandoned – forced to leave the hospital after getting cleaned up and immunized, only to be rushed back – and be re-admitted – at the end, spending all the money (premium) we don’t have on healthcare service we no longer need.

When we first came around, we discovered our hands and feet, nail and skin (even in Mask, Cher loves her deformed son). Then we learned more from sibling and parent, teacher and neighbor: “That’s not right”. That clearly is “wrong”. ” Keep the blanket fully over you at night… ” or least desirable was time-out or spanking (I fish-hooked an old quarrelsome lady across the alley by accident).

After all, weren’t we at some point immature? The same way I first thought that nurses, oncologists, relatives and friends would forever be around, One big extended family, with happy days that last forever. But life has a different agenda.

Despite “All Aboard”, we see a lot of revision along the way (back in the early 90’s, we already saw the statistic that people would end up with 7 jobs on average working adulthood). Most times, we’re in the dark, some are deeper in the cave than others.

After decades of hope, of bumping and bouncing, I only have Gratitude toward the end.

Oliver Sacks reflected on ” being born sentient being…”

In the same vein, I certainly am thankful for not being born as in Mask, or a cactus i.e. living among reptiles in desert heat.

In college, we are nudged and urged to question things. Experiment after experiment we were to stay current e.g. with newer version of textbook, varied interpretations of test results. BTW, old textbooks might be discarded (USED), but old play book recycled e.g. LBJ younger self: ” Hell, give him someone he can look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you”.

Nixon still went on to write about Leadership, Post-Cold-War world order. He wrote again. Colson born again.

No truth is self-evident.

Between point A and point B, the shortest would be a straight flight path.

But not doable or preferable for us (we prefer scenic route).

Even when Earth consists of mostly water (75%) we still think it as mostly made of dirt and land. Or in our post-Copernicus world, we are still with a delusion that everything rotates around us (Here comes the Sun).

It took centuries for us to realize the Earth rotates and revolves around the Sun. When zooming out – a hockey-stick chart would reflect human progress that spikes after centuries of flattening ( Fareed’s Age of Revolutions pg. 108).

Each successive generation of late lives better (progress) than previous’. Yet, we tend to feel “deprived” when our numbers and neighbors’ are at disparity (peer pressure), even when it’s just a relative deprivation among peers (sub-set, exist only in our contemporary lifetime), not as compared to let’s say Roman’s times.

Yet public opinion carry the weight of the day: ” He took a bus”, “She shops at Goodwill”. With conspicuous consumption, the size of one’s purse equals the size of one’s heart.

“Shop til I drop”. The more (possession) the merrier (this used to apply to unannounced dinner guest in my past). Now, it seems, we’d rather make room for property, not people. Fact: we might over-leverage our financial position, but will never fully exploit our brain and heart capacity.

After post-war prosperity decade, the 60’s generation just wanted to explore their inner selves. It’s a natural rebellious swing against what they perceived as too high a price to pay for the outward at the expense of the inward.

Yet, how we are perceived, pinned down and re-classified with many roles and labels e.g. TK (teacher’s kid – translated into being poor and placed in higher standard of moral judgment, lead singer in the band ( a streak of healthy rebellion), refugee of war, volunteer expat, food-bank giver turned recipient etc…

Since not all could be a “Bill Gate”, and after spiraling on a slippery slope, you wake up, forgetful and filled with plaque in the brain. A blessing in disguise? It’s not as if one could begin life anew each day, baby-like, pampered in diapers, and entitled to bread and bananas, beef and burritos.

Since “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I certainly will be dead since “All men are mortal”. My parent were human, so am I. Hence…logical conclusion.

People poop, propagate and procreate. Despite longer life-span as compared to the 50s (when men died at the age of 65), we are to exit this bumpy ride, like it or not.

Yet, we all are hopeful (vs wishful thinking that we’re special, and that the law of the average doesn’t apply in our situation). Or else, what’s the point. Make it count.

But we confuse hope (daily renewed) with happiness (bell-shaped curve). Happiness and its plasticity is like a mannequin that needs a dress-change every so often to stay out front. Kara in the Sun.

We try hard to change the outward, in hopes of changing the inward (Don’t forget to recite St Francis’ “…the wisdom to distinguish the two” – changeable and unchangeable). Just look at the nip/tuck industry. Talking about cosmetic surgery.

In my head, there are three versions of the human body.

Sisyphus who pushes the rock uphill (struggling).

Rodin’s Thinking man (sitting).

Michelangelo’s Statue of David (standing).

They struggle, are savant and striving. Sentient men. Thinkers and doers.

They know what to think and what must be done. In so doing, they skip all those middle Maslow’s hierarchy steps to self-actualization.

We are. It’s up to the “rock” to stay or to roll back down. We tried! (yet the jungle grows back and begs for the next generation of “Ask Not” to volunteer, this time, as Climate Corps).

Icarus (melting state) or David (solid state), both recite Blake’s ” Heaven, in the palm of our hand and Eternity in an hour ” poem.

The last reference (an hour) again was to the clock. For the prompt arrival of that mechanized train, or the hearse which finally comes for us. I know I was surrounded by well-wishers at one point . Nevertheless, I am not so sure about the end point (unlike and not as lucky as Mozart with his final composition in deathbed, in his case, his visualized horse carriage and not limo).

Will there be anyone left to show up (given my parent’s inherited longevity genes). Or ill wishers who just want to confirm the event (my death) for social “post”. Or out of professional duty as an AAA life insurance claim inspector.

In the beginning was hope. At the end, gratitude

When you are the youngest like myself, the least you can do – after receiving tons of hand-me-down – is to say “Thanks”. At big sister’s wake, I said ” I owe my American life to her” (see My Sliding Doors). So sweet! like Cher in Mask.

After all, I am not an unmoved being. I wasn’t born a Mask, or a cactus. Otherwise it would be quite irritating to those few who, standing around, not knowing where to sit during wake. Certainly not on my lap.

1975-1985

For context and contrast, he was just as tall as McNamara without the glasses yet with trench coat and slick-back hair. We did not go deep-sea fishing for father-son outing. He only spent Sunday mornings with me. Our routine. His afternoons were for the other, his second wife and child.

So I grew up, with abnormality as norms. Watching my Dad go about his work, his music and lust for life. Relatives and colleagues adored him in a warring society (he was a French-army discharge).

Floated South at the time Vietnam partitioned, he cared for his mom (my roommate) and grew to be de-facto patriarch given his older brother already deceased, and younger, martyred.

My brother took up after my Dad much more than I. They spent time in Northern Vietnam, before my time, then Northern Virginia, in Dad’s last two decades. But that is ahead of this story.

For background of unfortunate incidents in my refugee alley, you would have to read “Outlive the Bully” ( search other blog). Perhaps seeing me abandoned most of the time, neighborhood-watcher, an older pharmacy student took me out for a game of ping-pong or a game of pool. No deep-sea fishing there.

I would catch any ride with older male neighbors served as surrogates for my Dad ( most residents were laborers who toiled for foods. Of late, I passed by that old neighborhood and found no kids’ playing, only iron-bars and enclosed fences).

When the spaghetti hit the fan on Vietnam last days, we went through reverse-abandonment i.e. leaving our Dad behind. That pattern of chronic abandonment (betrayal) eats me up and still is in the bones.

So much so that on a lonely weekend night, at a fast-food joint, Campus Crusaders approached me, thinking I was an easy target. OK, tell me more about the Prodigal Son. God abandoned his Son just like I abandoned my father?. My brother, a Medic, was more conscientious and better-suited for the dedicated brother role. He sponsored my Dad over after that decade of absence and silence.

Since I did not know how to handle sudden separation, I ran around campus like that native American who “flew the cuckoo’s nest” with Juicy Fruits at the ready: from Mt Poconos as a camp counselor to Wilkes-Barre as an intern at the station (ABC-TV56).

In total denial I got busy with Penn State Choir, the Group Singer (nursing home free weekly concert), those Northern Baptist Sunday potluck meals (luckily, it wasn’t cult-like) as substitute for family meals. I revered father figures: Raymond Brown, choir conductor, Paterno, football coach.

I even cried my heart out at a friend’s father’s funeral to the surprise of my other friend. She has thus far become a therapist (but lack of training at the time of post Watergate, post Vietnam era on a lily-white campus).

People like the McNamara or the Lodges did not comprehend people like me (two times a refugee of French and American war). We were twice dis-lodged (no pun intended), hence, cosmetically picked up surface nuances (fourchette, brilliantine – pronouncing with a thick accent without neglecting our native tongue – itself with a Northern accent, sufficiently qualified for locals’ discrimination of sort. I was a bit ostracized when growing up in the Southern alley of Saigon.

Besides finding fatherly substitutes (unconsciously) I went about volunteering at multiple refugee camps in Asia – this was not sure out of guilt or compassion, but for sure to make amends, since I hate to see abandonment (for the past decade, I have lived up to this compulsive obsession by raising a child not of my own).

When my Dad finally arrived in Northern Virginia, I flew back from the West Coast to see him. His hollow cheeks told me there hadn’t been adequate dental care or nutrition even. I also noticed rare laughter – plenty at our extended family gathering in earlier decades.

He often showed me his other daughter’s letters from home. He commented often on how the luxury rental run so smoothly as we drove around the beltway. Fall foliage in N VA was quite a site: leaves lingering on on the ground until early Winter, the sight when he passed away in a Winchester home. My nephew and I cleared out his double-up dorm-like room and gave away meager stuff in his closet. No more apple sauce and shoe shine for the man of Chateaubriand and cafe au lait.

I once saw him tearing up at the mention of his other woman. “How? it’s so far away!”. In my Mom’s case, it had been a matchmade marriage, perhaps out of duties more than love.

I don’t know the answers to a man’s heart, even when it’s my Dad’s. I certainly did not know what and whom he had seen for a decade. I just knew I tried very hard to make it on my own, without guidance and without the benefits of his experience. People perhaps saw in me that paternal void, just as back then when my mom by default played “single” mom and me half of the time with dad-size hole, like the Krispy Kreme glaze donut holes he and I shared at Bailey Crossroads back in 86.

That trench coat is for visual aid – for my dad who once wore it in the cold of Northern Virginia. I cried at my first wedding when both of my parents were finally together at long last. It was an overdue catharsis: no country for young man, no Dad for young man, and no date for young man. “Christian” girls would politely accept dates only to brush off : “Don’t be a stranger” on weekdays as we rushed around to classes.

I learned not to grow attached and got my validation from social approval to the point of chronic abandonment. After all, the seed had long been sown, repeatedly each afternoon, when I was hungry yet plenty of song sheets to go before dad came home (we got to wait for family dinner).

Even then, often out of jealousy, our parents would food fight thus gone our long anticipated meals.

To clamp up and bottle up resentment, disgust and distastefulness for the thing called love came natural to me.

Yet through it all, decade-long gap included, I learned from my Dad to stand up to a bully, to tear up when it touches your soft core and to love music, language and to live life as it comes.

He was laid down on a cold gusty windy day. I would be without a coat but for his, for the duration of the service. Unconventional as it be ( wearing beige instead of black) at funeral, I was proud, perhaps never been prouder in my life, to be his son, his replacement in the world, where Child Welfare exists only for partial protection of abandoned and anchorless children. The rest is up to us, neighborhood watchers who like myself, once beaten bloody nose by bully, and experienced protection from and rescue by a loving and accepting father.

I am that prodigal son, but for that decade of separation, it wasn’t just me who were apart from my dad. From 1975 to 1985, it was a lost decade for all of Vietnam and its people. People left their home and one another. It’s shameful and even intentionally relegated into the recess of our memory. Just ask people on the Wall, out in the Sea and inside the Pentagon. Take my cousin as an example. She was an unacknowledged widow of war for almost five decades. My Dad and she used to go on gambling expedition together way back. I guess it’s the equivalent of their “deep-sea fishing”.

It’s eerie that my dad wore the same trench coat as McNamara’s Fog of War. Yet they couldn’t be further apart, since he was a victim of war, not an architect of it. Nor that we had ever gone deep-sea fishing together except for a drive around the beltway, during which I still remember him saying:

” Em nhu ru” (this ride is smooooooth).

Among them, besides two set of clothes, was my birthday’s gift: a Collegiate Dictionary.

For the love of words and of a world that has yet to be discovered. It’s as it is today, slightly cool and conducive to sleeping-in. Yet I needed to show up for a rendezvous: my fateful trip to State College. A stranger, at the wheels, represented a group of profs called The Sycamore (house church) who chipped in to “do something”.

A quiet American, he perhaps was thinking along the same line that he had “wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry” like Graham Greene.. These professors meant business. They did not just chuckle while watching the collapse of S Vietnam on TV e.g. the dropping of bodies from the sky and the lingering refugees population at a camp near them.

When we finally met, they brought warm clothes, music sheets and job-vacancy list. But still, I valued that birthday gift given to me from officemates back at the camp. That dictionary, among the things I carried, opened a door to my future.

Months earlier, my brother-in-law sliced opened a Larousse English-Vietnamese dictionary’s back cover and hid a hundred-dollar bill inside. For the road. Just in case. Today, that dictionary lays like a relic of the past, nothing but its intrinsic value, for sentimental more than linguistic reason.

Words, words, words…change, change, change.

No longer do I need to acquire new words, like “psychology” (what’s that silent “p” doing there at the front?). More truthfully, I have since picked up nuances of our times, like “sycophant”, “spineless” and “roguish”.

Strange times call for strange tongues.

Centers of influence and thought leadership have moved around, with the flow of oil, software, AI and Nvidia, in this “flat” world of 24/7 world where a death toll here, a death toll there ( a Turkish-American US citizen killed in West Bank, a severe typhoon that took the lives of Northern Vietnamese) are no longer the things of secret.

It’s not like Los Alamos that was kept under wraps for nuclear fission quiet development. Today belongs to folks who self-advertise, self-promote and self-destruct e.g. from Kissinger to Kinzinger, Carson to Carville on broad daylight, on TikTok or what not.

BTW, who would have thought the NY TIMES (which used to scoop by publishing the Pentagon Papers) now opens a representative office in Vietnam, or the Philippines and Vietnam, victims of seasonal typhoon and China aggression, now joint-forces at sea to protect their mutual territorial interests.

Life moves on and language reflects that. Its free flow. Totally!

Dell posted something about water spray (midst) on LinkedIn. The re-post shows tons of comments, mostly sincere, but many I suspect, just trailing the leader for self-promotional visibility.

Social and superficial media.

Life as a result makes sceptics out of us all. If you have not been injured, physically or psychologically, you have not been living.

I carried two set of clothes to Penn State on one arm and a Webster’s dictionary on the other. Little did I know, I no longer need it ( replaced with spell-check and Google search).

I missed it when students walked away from their seats just to look up in library card catalogue, or our shared and opened dictionary. The inquisitive and scholar urge to discover.

We have more means now to look up things, to name things and to call out things. Yet we are immobile, tranquilized and static. As if inaction and inertia will magically improve in locked steps with inflation. As if the past will somehow edit itself. As if the dead will be resurrected and reunited with us on Earth – without us ever see “the End” as seen after watching a flick.

In the beginning was the word. Past tense. It’s up to us to conjugate, to look it up, to edit and revise it. Life is nothing but a story whose words are constantly replenished, evolved and spellchecked, to be lived and relived, revised and recounted,

The things I carried.

One time, I let my long lost nephew into my bachelor room. I then told him to take anything he would like. Out ran the guy, at the speed that overtook my objection, with my Samsonite briefcase. It was when yuppies still wore suspenders and carried heavy things to work (when snapped shut those briefcase make an official sound, like a blue-collar punch-in at factory timestamps clock).

The things we carry – get lighter as technology flows more freely (drone, phone and AI). Still, the burden in our heads are still there, with less bandwidth, occasionally unerasable unless we’ve got Alzheimer’s. Like the Count of Monte Cristo’s. We reinvent ourselves with new-found wealth which come with newly bought titles and name prefixes affixed to mail boxes with new-found zip codes.

Yet inside, we are torn, between conflicting aspirations and ambition. Tears of agony are so readily flown, from our Count’s eyes, hid behind the curtain while he watched people who hurt him now got what they deserve, or people who helped him also got what come their way.

The things I carried, in the beginning was the word; yet words by themselves are cheap…unless accompanied by action, action that bear personal consequences e.g. loss of blood, lives and limps.

I no longer learned stuff like “psychology” or “esoteric”. Now, I come across e.g. “sycophant”, “roguish” and “alternate facts” all generated by our spirit of the times. Still I carry old words in my head, leaving my dictionary at home, like my bro-in-law who after retrieving his 100-dollar bill for his new life in the States, unbuckled himself with that heavy bi-lingual Larousse once served as a concealed petty-cash box across the ocean.

The things we carried.

It’s the fact of life: people need to feed and eat, by laboring together to achieve that which is not possible otherwise.

Let me hold that for you. It’s a wrap (we hear that on the film production set).

I love the showing of film credits, from costume to casting, from screenplay to directing.

Sydney Lumet, Sydney Pollack followed by directorial debut by actors e.g. Jodi Foster, Paul Newman and Robert Redford ( ” I can’t swim”).

I saw Forsaken. The Sutherland, Father and Son, play themselves in it. Both want to be pacifist in a world that wouldn’t allow them to.

The Wild West (more so when the town sheriff had already left, hence, gangsters emboldened).

It’s a blend of man-woman, father-son love (eros and filial).

But above all, justice, when push come to shove.

Justified violence. Bullets piercing through window glass. Forget tinted glass that we all want to see the coming of the Lord. Here on Earth, it looks as if we are abandoned, if not forsaken. We all wish for an abundance of affordable health care and child care, yet it’s the upper class lawn care that are prevalent.

We go about “influencing”, “thought leadership” and world ordering…until we could no longer do so (poor LBJ and Biden).

Limits to growth, and limits to lead. We are given a window, a lifecycle…like Fortune 10 some decades ago (with only 3 or 4 American companies appearing, joined by Japanese and European, per Fareed on Charlie Rose talk).

Machine-aided, chemically induced, and socially assisted, we limp along.

Tranquilized and mortified. The affairs of the world is beyond us. Then we stop and think, ponder and reflect. Wait a minute. We can do this but we need to labor together. Like a film production, with casting and costume, screenplay and directing (not to mention editing and sound).

So here we go. Just a pause, reflect and play. Let not the problem of the world (news) trouble us too much.

And there is no need for a High-Noon lone wolf. Competition with collaboration, freedom in safety. A mix of mature consideration and childlike ambition. When we no longer operate on win-lose, then we go places.

Share the spaghetti as in Bambi. Sacrifice just a bit to jumpstart Karma. Once it’s cranking, and its wheel churning, justice will be done. How long? Not long. We are not forsaken. It’s us who forsook old principles once found true but long forgotten: scratch each other’s back.

Sometimes A Great Notion.

Folks need to eat, children/elderly need care and work flow require collaboration. Live and work together, die alone. Go and get another Covid shot.

Divinity and DNA, eternality and here/now, the spiritual and the material.

Push and pull, past and future.

Are we nearer to Singularity? AI or we who are asleep at the wheel!

I always appreciate a good story, like the one about a chapel of New College in Oxford whose beams finally gave, but with foresight and anticipation, early builders had already planted replacement oak (5) centuries ahead.

We water the plants, raise a kid, save a little, because we believe tomorrow will come ( no where truer than for the LOC – loss of crew – 2 astronauts currently awaiting for a Space X taxi to fetch them – perhaps after the holiday).

We’re all hostages, in a different sense: stuck on Earth, not knowing how to get home (Paradise).

Some are more aggressive than others i.e. Icarus, just fly toward the Sun, on wings of wax.

Others, more conservative, brush, comb, spray, vitamins, weight on the scale, gym, annual checkups. The Crusaders were trying to usher in the Kingdom of God (supposedly spiritual) on Earth. The Buddhists just stoically let go, as far as the material realm.

We live with an illusion, that technology will save the day. Others, on Sundays or Holidays, believe otherwise (Theology). Waiting for Superman, for a rescue party.

For the UN, the UNHCR, the UN vaccines and supplies.

In a way, we’re all like LOC’s longing for a better tomorrow on the one hand, while cherishing our selective collective memory on the other. Our life, like a Super 8mm film, projected on the wall, showing our younger selves. Wedding ceremonies, birthdays and reunions zooming at breakneck speed.

It’s technology that reminds me nowadays of past uploaded photos. The Cloud reaches down to me, for fear I might forget my own “sum of selves”.

I was the youngest son of the clan (at the time). My younger uncle had died a martyr’s death, hence, leaving behind no younger heirs my supposedly younger cousins. From that vantage point, I kept looking up to the older adult: how they interacted (wearing Ao Dai whose collar covering up their neck; on a hot summer afternoon, everyone fanned themselves and in so doing, generated more heat – chicken and the egg).

Jacques Ellul eluded to “technique”. And how what we worked “technique” into our everyday life, the way we do things and solve a problem,; then generated its own problem. Hence, “the medium is the message”. Progress, electricity, rare Earth, competitive race and trading, social effects (kids don’t read), and obvious obesity.

Theology, however, pontificates. Faith first. a priori. Deductive vs inductive learning. Top down vs bottom up (scientific observation, problem ID, hypothesis, experimentation and conclusion).

Faith and reason, religion and society. Many scientists are still holding on to their faith. Many of the faithful have abandoned theirs (“Losing our Religion”, Russell Moore). From the future and from outer space, an alien (anthropologist) would conclude that: Earth is over-heated and saturated; uneven distribution of supply-demand, too many “gods” and creatures are tribal, trivial and trite.

Ask the crew once they are taxied back to Earth, their re-entry first impressions. In Gravity, the movie, Sandra Bullock woke up as if from a dream (George Clooney already drifted away in space and into Infinity). Now, that’s a fresh perspective and a good reset. Mine when coming back from overseas trips, was that we ‘ve got more broadband, but less desire to interact with our neighbors.

Talk is cheap. Has been and always will be. Action (unhooking oneself for others – as in Gravity) speaks, much louder, more impactful and is lifesaving.

I was overreaching and misleading with the title. It’s just that I did spend some time in my younger years learning Theology instead of Technology. I hope that the former will paint a clearer picture of what’s out there, as oppose to what’s over here. But it’s the latter that occupied me (in the name of time and money saving) with this password and that reminder, a ping here and a ping there. To the point, that its immediacy seems to be an end in itself. T=T in our world. That which occupies becomes and dominates. The perpetual present, here and now, ping and no pong. Just ping.

Tomorrow, I hope, will come. So plant a (oak) tree, teach a kid and say a prayer for the lost crew in space.

Let’s cut to the chase. It’s machine, invented by man, that shows us human, how to behave consistently, efficiently and even humanly. “I am sorry, I don’t understand” (human wouldn’t be that honest!). From flight runway to fashion runway, AI is now here to stay.

It has done away with middle men e.g. printing, book shops, magazine stands, brochure designer, soon, fashion models.

I was surprised while watching the DNC Convention (live) that Tim (machine) texted me while giving the acceptance speech of his life.

Omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent.

The promises of yesteryears, which belong to God Almighty, now made available at the push of a button.

Man can become god-like, machine can become man-like, and the gods are relegated into the corner (Chinese restaurants feature Fortune God near their cashiers).

There increasingly are less need for learning how to spell, how to look up a word (dictionary???, what’s that), even reading a book (in Japan, books are read from Right to Left, last page first. How would that work in digital version???).

We read so we won’t be alone. Hardcover books, when opened, embrace us, pull us into the intrigue of the mystery (if that’s the genre you are into).

I grew up unhugged and un-tugged (to bed), due to my Mom’s extremely busy schedule (grading her students’ homework late into the night, teacher-student ratio: 1-57). This was on top of the touch-avert Asian culture (bowing so we can stay 6 ft apart, even before Covid) and she herself had been an orphan sleeping in Lycee’s boarding school.No wonder Asian love Kungfu, with lots of kicking, a contact sports to “bridge the hug gap” (that’s been there for centuries).

Now, to make up for lost time, I am surrounded with books, books, and books.

I am not a monogamous reader. I flirt, flip and browse. Sometimes, I even read the conclusion first, just in case (akin to eating dessert first).

The irony of our Age e.g. Kennedy Jr not for Harris, and Bush not for Trump.

We still need to see consistency, norms and some semblance of order and predictability.

Traffic safety law, SALT treaty, and peace treaty.

Another irony I came across the other day. It relates to LBJ, the young congressman who tried to bring electrification to the Hill Country, TX (population 1 per square mile at that time; so sparse that it wasn’t qualified and not worthy of tax-dollar spending).

Then he ended up ordered the poles and wires for An Giang Province of the Vietnam’s Mekong due to his sinking into the thicket of things.

Now I live in denser population, 100 degrees for 100 days at a time, as a striver and settler from a distant country to the Hill Country.

You tell me, what’s next on the agenda? Rural broadband for all! Gaza, Ukraine, Kabul?

Meanwhile, machine acts more like man, man learns less than machine. Both want someday to be like God i.e. omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. Keep striving, tweaking, and nudging. That’s how we did back in the VoIP days, transforming and transitioning human voice (analog) into machine signals (digital) via a process called quantization.

Just as my thoughts via the keyboard and your decoding them. In the hope that we come to an understanding, that we can’t stop progress. But someone must be at the helm, with steady hand, or else, we have a runaway train. I was scared out of my wits in two instances: a free flying chopper blade that floored us (see My Sliding Door blog) and at Three-Mile-Island, when as a news intern, I ran in the opposite direction of frantic residents fleeing an impending disaster.

Irony of our Age. Those who want to live, don’t or can’t (machine). Those who don’t want to live (World’s oldest 116 as of late ) do. Rest my case. Now, you deliberate.

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague of mine. During the course of the conversation, we mentioned NOC (Teleglobe days) Network Operating Center based in Toronto, CANADA.

My kid and her friends taught me about CROCS, their favorite footwear.

Then this morning, I learned a new, scarry acronym: LOC (Loss Of Crew).

It brought to mind a scene in Gravity, where George Clooney character cut himself of from Mother Ship so the other can live.

He drifted away (by default, becoming Icarus with back toward the Sun) into Infinity as we call it.

LOC. Loss of crew. Lost in space, at sea (recent submersible deaths) and on the streets (Amber Alert).

Each day, we face a new set of challenges. It’s hard enough to deal with inflation, interest rates and fluctuation in moods as we interact with new challenges.

It’s how we compose ourselves, grace under pressure and courage under fire.

Lt Murphy of Penn State drew fires away from his crew (getting satellite signals), Todd Beamer of Wheaton said “Let’s roll” before tackling the UA-93 terrorists.

Those alumni of mine did me proud. Not unlike Stallone in Rocky (shown during my time on campus) “Cut me” (so he can see the raging punches coming at him).

Life. Lots of challenges: buying CROCS for kids, visiting NOC’s for a tour of Teleglobe HQ, and even NASA LOC. I recently visited my cousin’s grave. Her husband was an MIA of 50 years. Now her kids were discussing having two pictures on the marker, in so doing, joining them in death, since it hadn’t been possible in life.

Greater than no man who gave his life for his fellow (generic) man (in Gravity, it’s Sandra B, and her grateful thousand yards longing eyes, started out with the Net, or abandoned to drive the bus in Speed).

We all have to let go at some point. Progress rides on these losses. Earhart and Markham, Apollo and Armstrong.

I will never forget getting in line to have my first glimpse of that exhibited piece of a Moon rock.

You believe what you see. Then this process emboldens you to venture into the unknown, seeing the unseen. What lies beneath the surface, the tip of the iceberg.

We have a boat load of thankfulness to pioneers and pathfinders before us (transatlantic flights), and now, transpacific crossing. From the emigrant to the immigrant, Mayflower to Boat People.

Those who survived and arrived built this Nation of Nations on the sweat of their eyebrows. One brick at a time. One English word, one chip soldering shift at a time, day-old bread and left-over packed lunches.

America the Beautiful (and the dammed). We don’t talk about the later, since they didn’t make it here in the first place. History books often edited out the bad and the ugly, foolishness and feverish rush to Gold digging. We buried Ponzi and celebrated Pelosi.

America, its past all buried (dead or alive), but always with a promise of a brighter future for all who gamed and came. Sometimes, it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Can someone put on the Net’s soundtrack “the whiter shade of pale ” as we reluctantly part with the blinking cursor on the screen. Goodbyes are never desirable, since it is synonymous at times, with farewells. Those who love experience loss. Those who don’t don’t. Life is constituted with both the seen and the unseen. Mind you, it’s the later that affects us more with hollowness to see and scar to show. NOC, LOC, CROCS.

I am a product of rote learning, of nudging, bending, pressuring, conforming, imitating, group thinking, “the apple cannot fall far from the tree”, social engineering, IBM clones etc…

No wonder. After a while, I came to believe, as Patty Hearst once did, that the Stockholm Syndrome is the Law of the Land, like physics and biology (empathizing with your abductors and their causes, the end justifies the means etc…)

I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to be somebody else, to live somewhere else. ” You can have any model T’s you’d like, as long as it’s black”. I’d rather go along, unquestioning and …oh well, conforming: ” oh, you want me to rob a bank for Our cause?” No problem.

Instead of upward mobility in the hope that the trickle-down economy somehow will spare some chunk of change, past the next to the top level, I sunk, slowly. Enjoying the view from the Titanic. First by acknowledging and confessing that I am a sinner. Then slowly I have become one, by appropriating the sin of my fathers (and theirs), acting out a pre-set, propensity and impetus to fail.

So does it mean , I am doomed from the get go?

Always I am in between, the Alpha and the Omega, striving and stumbling with no upward trend (have you paired the dollar of 50 years ago vs today’s! I was shocked at New Yorker’s sticker price of 8.99). When does this (quality of life) downward trend end!

Without affirmation, validation and award, the world needs assurance that it’s OK with its soul.

Machine learning, but men are not. Men sleeping, but machine are not. Who is going to liberate whom? Want a fruit juice? (Ken Kesey).

We exist, live a little, love a little and lose a little. We’re all different yet all the same (destiny, misunderstood and misunderstanding – born the wrong way, bought in the wrong cause and subscribed to wrong method). Always on the outside, not in the know. Forgot password?

Religions have been counter-productive if they seek the end to justify the means.

By itself, it is a path, a means, yet out of sheer insecurity, it compromises and shows its true color (Priest abuse, indigenous school children ab/inducted up North in Canada, private-jet preachers ).

We no longer examine cause and consequences, raison d’etre as to why we exist and how much we’re needed ( if at all, beyond election year, when solicitation from both parties die down).

Until someone with “authority” tells us who we are and could become. Nudged, pressured, pushed and pulled. To become They, the abductors, the Jim Jones and Jim Bakker. In short, we’re finally de-individualized; no longer the person whose name was on the birth certificate. We no longer are with our names. We’ve become numbers. Assigned and slotted into a verticalized and structured algorithm like soldiers with dog tags for convenient identification, just in case.

Born this way, died that way. A completely different, inauthentic and unrecognizable version. If life is a Xerox machine, it certainly has ran out of ink, thus, makes poor copies. Just click “Accept” on all the terms of use.

The saddest thing in life is to live someone else’s life but one’s own.

Dutiful, obedient and without authenticity. Parents are guilty in this respect as much as Priests, Teachers, Politicians and Philosophers (those who tackle the “why’s” ). How many gay men and women died without ever given a chance to “come out”. How many soldiers died in “friendly fires”, whose death certificates did not reflect the reality of war (perhaps to protect pension). Those who suffer silently, without an internet connection, to vent, post and share their grievances (today’s Patty Hearst would be deprived of her access to a phone).

Last week, we had a moment of joy: prisoner swap. Patty Hearst comes home, so to speak.

Now, the hard part: de-briefing and de-programming. Our “Spartan” have done his job – hostage rescue. Now as a society, we must ride this momentum (of “one is free, all are free”), and reexamine who we are and who we want to become.

As Sec of State says it all ” given the choice between a society that does everything to bring its innocent citizens home, and the one who went the distance for its terrorist, I would choose ours any day”.

Becoming You, I’d say, is the hardest of all, in a society and social media that say otherwise. Your mission and mine, is to become ourselves, from cradle to the grave, owning our idiocy and idiosyncrasy; that way, while we are around, the world could exhibit its flavorful whole.

Our world is wonderful not without you and I in our fullest (of nuances).

So drop the facade, the pretense, unlearn those rote learning, stop saying the expected and for once, release that weight (stress) someone has outsourced onto us. Fly free, face the Sun, and feel the warmth of free air and freedom. I’d take that over any Stockholm S** any day, since we all eventually die alone as part of the package we didn’t sign on.

The Olympics reinforce healthy competition: win/lose by the rules. It’s been said our happiness depends largely on our relationships to one another e.g. Tennis Champions McEnroe later picked his rival for Best Man at his wedding.

In life, it’s who we associate with at clubs (analog) on LinkedIn (digital) that matters. I was fortunate having a string of personal and professional endorsement: from graduate-school study-mate to corporate colleagues, from bosses to partners.

My 360-degrees reputational currency are intentionally diverse e.g. female, bi-continental, homosexual, multi-cultural and direct report etc. to self-stamp and “self-verified” in our age of AI, with un-doctored profile and non-photoshopped photo.

Over time, we extract wisdom from digital “social nutrient”, a connection of our connection often influences us more per some study (six-degrees of separation). Thank you, Glenn Arnold of Wheaton Journalism school, for mentioning Zinserr. Influencers come in all shapes and sizes: teachers, families and friends.

The Internet offers nuggets of wisdom from crowd: people we probably will never meet (Wikipedia contributors). We’re kids in the candy store: overwhelmed by colorful choices, with untrained capacity to absorb (sugar high) or filter for use. We become digital chipmunks, storing food for fear of famine (pre-internet times).

How to inoculate ourselves against bad information? Just like how to know which foods are best for brain. We have become hoarder and sorter of data as they pour out of the firehose. Tangents stuff wears us out: information-fatigue.

The future belongs to data scientists. Neil Postman made similar comment about Television in ” Amuse ourselves to death”; little did he know the Internet and streaming usher in a biblical deluge.

The art of unsubscribing and deleting are our new lessons. Reply by Texting STOP. Non=permissible marketing (not that AI ever cares or feels rejected) just for self-preservation and sanity.

The internet and the individual, crowd wisdom and personal (paced) enlightenment, zeta bites vs mouthful bites.

People trade goods and services. This time, it’s data trading. As if we are lab rats, brokers and posers of untested wisdom. as trial-error Yelpers. Since we cannot “try them all”, we become superficial rankers, a human last touch over machine SEO.

From local village to global village, frequent face-to-face to virtual communication (with complete strangers), we experience unprecedented geographical shift and generational shift. No Fisher Temperament Index can help.

In short, “the gods must be crazy”. At times, we wish that “coke bottle” had never fallen off the sky.

Let’s go off-grid (you wish!). Per NYU study, we need a digital New Year resolution. A Sabbath break.

Wise council might come from people of different color, younger generation or past generation. Where are the Medicine men, the Chiefs and the Astrologers? In the 80’s we had Shirley MacLaine’s New Age, and Nancy Reagan’s Fortune Tellers – to schedule our State-Affairs meetings.

It baffles me in our jet age and Internet age, people still are doubling down on and self-medicated in the confinement of their own rabbit hole, finding comfort in well, comfortable (prejudicial) data set. Never setting foot outside of the bubble or talk to anyone besides their Dunbar circle (our digital security blanket). The more advanced we are, the deeper our longing for a selective past, and since we cannot recall the past, we become angry and self-destructive. 19th-century America without tax? Gilded Age without the Great Depression?

At the end of all travel, as they say, we arrive back at the same place, only to know it better (e.g. at Kennedy times, post-Bay of Pigs, 11,000 “advisors” sent to China Beach, then peaked at half a million before finally dwindling down to 11 Marines on the last chopper out. America knowing itself – every time we read aloud the 52,880 names on the marble wall). To travel means to experience not only places, but also ideas (Montaigne).

Changes from within comes after changes (often defeat) from without. The world works slowly inward as we are more receptive one layer and one generation at a time. It takes courage and loss of face, mostly shame and guilt, to course correct.

To admit we were wrong e.g. Social Media – a systemic failure – is to give ourselves much needed realignment. Self-projection are products of self-delusion. Advertisers always print two versions of mass-producing bumper stickers and T-shirts, mini-flags and presidential portraits. We might as well print ours, on Self photo-day. Not to mention, our friends are saved from feeling cheated for having formed false perception based on data we sent out.

“I look at life from both sides now” (from the long 60’s). My parents and half of my siblings have recently gone. Life transitions jolted me, as an unaccompanied adult (abandoned, as kids often say “my dad went for milk”). Vividly, I can still recall getting lost, while the adults were frantically searching for me (Tet festival at the park.) I circled back, stood on the roof of the car, holding a red balloon high up, like that French movie of the same name.

Getting lost in the crowd now repeats itself on the web. The unknown future is full of virtual strangers from strange shores, at the urge and nudge of AI (executive search anyone). Algorithm recommended. Unregulated and “self-censored” ” wisdom of crowd become our new PG -13 guardrails (Congress won’t budge beyond Section 230).

It’s frightening and uplifting.

Melinda Gates in her Stanford Commencement talks about “small waves” that lent perspectives to “big waves’” doomsday’s scenario (remember, we’re water, not waves). In the end, that’s what happened, that we become ourselves (I borrow a title).

Our core humanity looks up to the sky and soars. Every generation wants to be better and outperform previous. Graduates want immediate entry into the workforce. French citizens want earlier retirement. The piece of the pie vs the percentage of GDP is what one wants.

Our career ladder might or might not lean against the right building, either way prepaid with hefty price e.g. neglecting families and/or health, not to mention your real self and its limitations – BTW, watch “Instinct” toward the end, where Cuba Gooding confesses how deep he had sunken for playing hard and bought deep into the “game”.

It’s relationship that fulfills our lives. Things money can’t buy e.g. 360=degree reputation, self-respect (the right version of self), integrity, taste, class, memories, decency, dignity, empathy, humanity and loyalty.

Keep your authentic self. In the end, what we are most fearful to lose is what counts the most. To test this, just go out of your way and be selfless for a day.

At funerals, no one misses dead wood. What counts is the deceased’s kind personhood, cherished warm memories and “de-classified” hidden selves, wide linkage and love. How we make others feel (be-little or uplift them). To paraphrase Hemmingway” we are strong in broken places and it’s through those cracks that light can shine through”.

On your mark, get set, go! Get some personal and reputational rehab- this side of Paradise.

While in Paris, the Olympic reminds us competition is good. But it doesn’t have to be demeaning.

Competition – rules based – doesn’t just happen only in that summer. It’s in our heart, Notre Coeur not Notre-Dame. We compete against the clock…”how many potatoes can you eat in your lifetime” albeit time itself is contained within eternity.

Keep paying forward, share some fries. Go get milk and return dad! Let’s do so in hopes future generations connect and comprehend better without self-destruct. Grace and humility in defeat, but in competition, courage.

P.S. check out “Full Time” the movies – re: a single mom during the strike