Thang Nguyen 555

People

  • Dilemma called Life

    30+ Chinese women start protesting the label of “unwanted” goods. Tunisian Topless Jihad set a World Religion on fire. Men teetering on retirement seeking work and love in the wrong place. A friend in search of affordable physical therapy and health care coverage. Dilemma called Life. If it’s easy and smooth, it wouldn’t be called…

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  • Life as Unfinished Book

    I brave heavy traffic to get to the book store on Nguyen Hue again. Just to find out if Murukami’s 1Q84 part II in Vietnamese was available. It hadn’t. Back and forth for nothing. But the two interwoven stories must have that crisscrossing point, a happy ending. Can’t wait to find out. And that was…

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  • All to the payload

    Nothing goes to waste. Neither a minute nor an experience, good or bad. This is not pre-destination. It is how our brain stores and evolves. Millions of calculation, prediction, reflection and reinvention. Like technology which evolves, so do we. We made a mistake. We did it again. Then we learned. Both David Brooks and Jeremy…

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  • Trust again

    People with bad experiences go through various phases in recovery. Some need a lifetime. Others could trust again in no time. All depends how the mind plays tricks. If pain recedes deep into long-term memory, then it takes longer to process pain. Short or long-term memory, bad experiences stay. They surface on unsuspected occasion (Murphy’s Law).…

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  • Holes and gaps

    By now, we realize we were born incomplete. We need one another, like a team that needs complemeting members. Some lack social skills more than others. Most know by now how set the trajectory of their lives are. No more dreaming, tweaking and improving. Yes, occasionally we indulge in fantasy. But those moments are short-lived. Then back…

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  • Start thinking

    This is the last of the Trilogy: Start seeing, start hearing and start thinking. It’s the hardest, because the end product of thinking is acting. Acting means change. Change brings dissonance and discomfort. Our faculty is quite limited: we are conditioned to respond in Pavlovian way. Group think. Similar to   Adam Smith’s unseen hand…

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  • Motherhood, Madness and Meditation

    Seeing a photo of a grey-hair guy, on bike and  backpack, riding home with bouquet of flowers in the front basket, reminded me of International Day of Women. There is no doubt, according to an Australian’s observer, that women are bosses here in Vietnam. Tiger Mom. To punctuate this point, I was sitting at an outdoor…

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  • Customarily Bad Luck

    It’s known urban legend here in Vietnam that you do not take a photo with three people. Someone will need to stand in to defy the odds (of bad luck). It is also bad luck that a person in the photo but was cut out. I once saw a family picture which had a missing member.…

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  • Human ingenuity

    When you see population growth which doesn’t equate with starvation, it’s a testimony to our human ingenuity. The US has less than 2 percent of its labor force in agriculture, yet no one is without a hamburger (even when it’s thrown out by McDonald). From Malthus to Moore, we have moved up the value chain.…

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