Weeknotes 66
- Happy New Year! 🍾🎆
- Once again, went to the New Year Cone Parade, and saw some lovely and very creative cones.
- Mamdani’s swearing-in ceremony was filled with so much positivity and hope.
Especially powerful was Jumaane Williams’
speech
that includes this incredible passage:
Yet, the truth of it is there are people who are rooting for New York to fail. Some couching it in concern, others openly scorn our city. But at the heart of this hate is the truth that our success, that our very existence, belies their core belief that New York is not possible. They demonize us because our mosaic challenges their ideology. They want to be right in their cynicism more than they want us to succeed in our idealism. They are driven by the idea that bringing together so many diverse people, cultures, faiths, identities into a united community is impossible. But New York, we are a shining beacon of possibility. We cross new cultural borders through each subway stop and are introduced to new experiences through each passenger. Our possibilities come in every language and from every heritage. So do our prayers. So do our people. So does our power.
- Those positive vibes came to an abrupt end by the end of day two of 2026, when we all learned the U.S. had once again flagrantly broken international law, bombed a major city, and kidnapped its oil-rich country’s president.
- We finished watching Pluribus. Vince Gilligan’s favorite Breaking Bad episode must have been “Fly”. Because that’s what 8 of this show’s 9 episodes basically were.
- Got around to drilling a couple holes in the shed, to run power. And now I have my motorcycle and Prius batteries properly tended.
- The final exercise in each chapter of my Mandarin course’s workbooks is to write a short (~150 word) essay using the newly-learned vocab words, and grammatical tidbits. I’d been skipping these because it’s still just so arduous to write when my repertoire of characters I know well enough to write without double checking is so small. But this week, I decided to just do it, and see how long it takes me, and was pleasantly surprised that it’s actually not bad.
- Whenever we go to Taiwan next, we’ll be filing the paperwork so Taiwan is aware of our marriage yada yada. To do that, I’ll need a proper Mandarin name. So I’ve been pondering ideas a bit. “Lee” (李) is an extremely common family name, and whenever I tell a Chinese-speaking person my name is Lee, they get visibly confused, and it always requires a brief bit of explanation. So I think that default option is a bad one. When I was a kid, my nickname was some variation of “Magoo” or “goo”. So, 故 is my current front-runner.