Author: Frank

In the mid 1980s, I navigated my life by autopilot.  I bided my time through the labyrinth we called high school.  Socially, I excelled only in awkwardness.  Academically, I excelled at every subject I studied.  How did I pick my eventual field of study?  Computer programming came easily; I could learn in minutes what took others hours to understand.  Other subjects might’ve come easily, but not that easily.  I spent a couple of summers in engineering programs before graduating.

After high school, I attended the University of Miami to pursue a degree in engineering.  I only have two criticisms about my time at “The U”.  First, as a private school, it had considerably higher tuition than state schools.  Second, which is really a side effect of the first, I consistently took 16-17 credits per semester to maximize my tuition money.  That course load, along with needing a part-time job waiting on tables to pay my expenses, made for an exhausting grind.

Continue reading “A new hope” →

I spend many evenings tinkering on my computer.  My activities may range from composing blog posts (like this one) to 3D print projects, among others.  As I continue to pound away at the keys on my computer, I turn on the television for background noise.  I could easily turn on music or a YouTube channel.  Reflecting on it, I turned to television, at least partially, to account for the elapsed time.  The start and end of shows will mark the incremental hour or half-hour chunks.

I turned to Investigation Discovery, a channel that specializes in true crime stories.  The names of hosts like Tamron Hall, Joe Kenda, Paula Zahn, and Candice DeLong become familiar, and so do their styles.  Having studied both engineering and psychology, I am fascinated by both the how and why people commit crimes.  My wife often refers to it as ‘The Evil People Channel’.

Continue reading “To truly understand that they matter” →

I moved from Florida to Washington state in 1991, and now I live in the Seattle area.  Seattle is substantially different from Miami.  For instance, Washington legalized recreational marijuana in 2012.  Recreational marijuana is still illegal in Florida and federally.  Naturally, values and opinions vary around the consumption of marijuana; some opinions will be driven by whether its consumption is allowed by the law.

Interestingly enough, that’s not the only metric that drives opinions.  Washington legalized recreational marijuana in 2012; some stigma around it remains.  We should treat pot the same way that we treat alcohol, because they’re legally equivalent.  How many work-sponsored events have you attended with an open bar?  How many work-sponsored events have you attended with THC products?  Will you comfortably mention at work that you had a glass of wine after work?  How about a pot brownie?

Continue reading “How laws can change” →

Initially, I only saw vague references on Facebook on January 7th.  The phrase read, “This was not self-defense. This was murder.”  At the time, I had little time before I needed to leave, and I’ll hear the details later.  In that moment, I didn’t anticipate that this incident would balloon to what it became.  I left for the day and generally do not browse Facebook at work.  I did not receive the details on this discussion until the evening, and then it blew up.

Of course, the references were to the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent.  Both the news and Facebook blew up with news and opinions about the incident.  I watched in quiet horror as video feeds from other people and different angles trickled in.  In a quiet instant, I think to myself, how much horror do we need to endure before we all become desensitized to it?

Continue reading “The memory of Renee Good” →

Years ago, a good friend read my long posts on Facebook and suggested I move my writing to a legitimate blog.  At the time, angst consumed me, and I shouted into the darkness.  His suggestion intrigued me.  This idea wouldn’t be that far-fetched; I kept an online journal many years before.  However, the type and style of the writing would be different.  This idea bounced around in my head for a while.  I always intended to return to writing, but not like this.

As it happens, starting a blog would be relatively simple.  You can register a domain for $20 a year; the price of hosting it will be a little more.  That’s if you want your own distinctive home on the web; there are plenty of websites that will host your blog free of charge.  However, I felt that if I wanted to do this legitimately, I should get my own domain.  Then the gears started churning.

Continue reading “Finding my imperfect self” →

Modern technology has almost eliminated the need to visit banks.  These days, I rarely find myself visiting a bank, or more specifically, an ATM (automated teller machine), unless I travel.  Still, if you’ve regularly used an ATM, at some point you would’ve probably used a drive-up ATM.  I’ll let you in on a little secret about drive-up ATMs; they outfitted them with Braille on the keypads for each of the numbers.  Some likely think that I made this up; I didn’t.

You may ask, “How would a person who is blind ever drive up to an ATM?”  However, they constructed drive-up ATM’s this way intentionally.  First, the most obvious explanation is that the user may operate from the back seat as a passenger.  This scenario is perfectly reasonable, especially since the drive-up ATM’s often keep longer hours than the bank itself.  Second, it costs less money to design, manufacture, distribute, and manage the inventory for one panel instead of two.  Since having the raised dots for Braille does not prevent anyone else from using the keypad, they all have them.

Continue reading “Wishing you happy holidays” →

On a day in late August 1977, my father passed away.  He was the model of health; it happened suddenly.  One moment, he was cooking in the kitchen of our family restaurant; the next moment, my mom took him to the hospital.  He died that night.  He didn’t just leave emptiness, as if he walked to the next room.  He had presence; he left a vacuum in his wake.  I was nine years old.

The family that remained was my mom and my two sisters, ages thirteen and seven.  We had no actual family here in Puerto Rico, but friends flooded our home that day.  They were effectively family; we even called them by the Chinese words for “aunt” and “uncle”.  I had never seen so many of our friends together at once.

Continue reading “To dismantle the hierarchy” →

I spent my early years in Puerto Rico; this tropical island holds my earliest memories.  My family spoke Cantonese at home; this is the first language I learned.  My father ran a Chinese restaurant, which was also our home.  I learned some Spanish while chatting with family friends and patrons.  However, I officially learned Spanish when I enrolled in Catholic school.  All the other children learned the subjects taught in school; I had all those in addition to learning a foreign language.

Once they started teaching English as well, it proved to be too much for my brain; I failed that class.  While I understood early on that my sisters and I were different from the remaining students, classmates didn’t really treat me any differently.  I mean, we spoke Cantonese and were obviously different races, but it wasn’t a thing.

Continue reading “Donde cabe diez, cabe once” →

Drosophila melanogaster.  The biological name of a common fruit fly used for biological research due to its rapid life cycle.  I learned that in high school biology over forty years ago.  I don’t have it tattooed on my arm; I simply remember it.  I’ve occasionally described the random facts in my head to a landfill.  Save for perhaps a trivia game, knowing the scientific name of the common fruit fly will never be useful.  I should just jettison it like jetsam.

I retained a disproportionate amount of civics, which is the study of government.  I remembered details about the branches of government and how they all functioned.  Strangely, I don’t remember if that class was in middle school or high school, nor do I even remember the teacher who taught the lessons; I just remembered the facts.  Though much of this also came through osmosis on Saturday morning cartoons and Schoolhouse Rock.  Where I learned about how bills are passed, and even the preamble to the US Constitution.  I can still hear the tune in my head.

Continue reading “Race ≠ Nationality” →

Puerto Rico holds my earliest memories.  As the children of Chinese immigrants, we grew up speaking Cantonese at home.  The front of our home in Rio Piedras hosted my father’s restaurant.  Unfortunately, we didn’t learn Spanish at home, save for a few moments of talking to the patrons at the restaurant.  By the time we enrolled in school, we needed to learn a new language.  Initially, we didn’t realize that the words we knew for trivial things like ‘shoe’ were different.

I believe that my parents enrolled me in school a year early.  I’m not sure if they wanted to give me a head start or simply wanted me out of their hair during the day.  I’m pretty sure that I failed that class and needed to repeat.  No harm, though; I landed in the class where my classmates were mostly my age.  While I could speak the language, I was still the only Chinese student in my modestly sized class.

Continue reading “See who I am” →