Category: Blog

For years, I had a ritual on Friday mornings.  It’s a subtle reference to Office Space.  On Fridays, I’d wear a Hawaiian shirt to work.  That’s the extent of it, but others wore them too.  We were modest in count, but strong in consistency.  We wore them year-round, independent of the weather.  We were our Hawaiian shirt brigade.  I continued even upon moving teams.  One subsequent team dressed up on Fridays once a month, and I participated on both by wearing a festive tie with my Hawaiian shirt.  I would not be denied.

Upon moving to a new company, I started work during the pandemic.  While I could not physically participate with my teammates in wearing Hawaiian shirts on Fridays, I still established that tradition.  We established a channel on our communications application dedicated to precisely this, “Hawaiian Shirt Fridays”.  Even now, after we have returned to the office, we still work remotely on Fridays for the most part.  A number of us dutifully post selfies of ourselves in our colorful shirts.

Continue reading “Those things you’ve ruined” →

A few weeks ago, we had a morale event at work.  Our morale committee does an exceptional job selecting different venues for events.  We held this particular event at Canvas.  These days, people often turn their passions into businesses.  Today, we would drink alcohol and paint on canvas.  They instructed us to park across the street at the public parking structure near the library and walk across.  As we filed in, they ordered us to put on an apron and pick a station.  Each station held two drink tickets.

I took two tickets off one of the stations farthest away from the front.  I had to leave early, and thus I didn’t participate in the painting.  However, I joined my friends with drinks while I watched the shop give basic instructions on how to paint a mountainous, evening landscape.  Each station has schmears of white, black, and a couple of blues.  Since I did not participate in the painting, I never put on an apron.

Continue reading “Losing our humanity” →

I still have my Florida driver’s license. Upon arriving in Washington decades ago, I replaced my Florida driver’s license with a Washington one. They punched a hole in my old one to render it unofficial, but they allowed me to keep it.  I tucked it away in some drawer in my office.  Occasionally, when I dig into that drawer, I see it and marvel at my picture from the 1980s.  I even look at some of the other details.

It explicitly lists a restriction for corrective lenses, which I’ve worn since my teens.  It also displays a one-letter code for ‘race’.  I still distinctly remember the conversation with the person from the department of licensing when I first got my license.  I asked if I may list my race on my license.  Their response, “You may, but it’s optional.”  That one-letter code for me was O, for ‘Oriental’.

Continue reading “Limits to religious freedom” →

There’s a funny clip from the movie, LA Story.  Friends gather for lunch, which includes familiar faces and some new guests.  One such new guest is Sara, a British writer visiting the Los Angeles area to write a story about the city.  During lunch, LA is struck by an earthquake.  First, everything rattles.  Second, the tables shake out of their positions and shuffle around.  Next, items start to fall, and even the ice sculpture cracks, decapitating a melting swan.  While this event naturally distresses Sara, the others’ reactions intrigue her.  The LA natives blissfully continue their meal as if nothing happened.  That subtle, though intentional, joke implies that, as dangerous as earthquakes can be, they’re so common in Los Angeles that they’re neither newsworthy nor even noteworthy.

I get it; there’s an aura of “When in Rome” to it all.  On a particular vacation trip to Miami, I drove north on Interstate 95 along the coast.  I drove past a fire engine on the shoulder of the freeway; it sat immediately behind a car lit aflame.  As I observed the black smoke and bright orange flames from that car, I also noted that the traffic had not slowed down significantly.  Sure, some motorists looked in quiet fascination, but the traffic had barely slowed from the evening pace.  Had this been my new home state of Washington, traffic would’ve been stuck for hours.

Continue reading “376 good guys with guns” →

Many advise against buying the first house you look at; we did.  Our friend alerted us to new construction in a great location.  I entered the address into the GPS (yes, it was that long ago) and off we went, except it didn’t take us to the place in question.  This neighborhood was so new that the years-old GPS had no record of its existence.  As the crafty engineer, I pulled over and reasoned through where this location should be and, after a few minutes, found the address.  We toured the model; it’d end up being our new home.

However, we didn’t know it at the time.  We liked the location, but the builder priced it out of our comfortable price range.  Initially, we found Linda, a real estate agent with whom we had great rapport.  She ended up driving us into neighborhoods, showing us many homes.  That first neighborhood had only built homes for about half the lots so far, so we even toyed with the idea of building our new home. 

Continue reading “Our neighborhood as a microcosm” →

I confess that I have a guilty pleasure.  It’s a television show named House, MD, or House for short.  The show centers around an exceptional diagnostician in New Jersey who suffered a traumatic leg condition.  The show cycles between the extent of what he’d do to manage his addiction to pain medication, his relationships with his peers, and fascinating medical cases.

I started watching the series early; she started watching a couple of years later, after watching a few episodes with me.  Naturally, the characters fascinated us.  The fact that Jennifer Morrison (Cameron) and Jesse Spencer (Chase) became engaged while they dated in the show tickled us.  Listening to Hugh Laurie talk natively genuinely shocked us; we found him incomprehensible.

Continue reading “Accepting the miracle of medicine” →

We live in a great, diverse country where we may each have opinions.  The First Amendment guarantees the right to practice different religions and express our opinions.  We don’t have to agree, but we do have to coexist.  Our founding fathers understood that we built our country from many distinct parts.  The very name “United States” implies a collection of many.  The similar Latin phrase ‘E Pluribus Unum’, placed on all our currency, means ‘From many, one’.

For our citizens to all collectively believe the same things is profoundly dangerous.  Homogeneity is our enemy; diversity is our friend.  Our founding fathers listed the freedoms to practice our faiths and express our different opinions as the First Amendment.  This is the very definition of diversity.  You’re entitled to your faith and expressions, as long as they do not impinge upon others’ rights.

Continue reading “Who are the actual groomers?” →

I’ll write a Star Wars-themed post after observing May 4th (affectionately recognized as Star Wars Day).  In 1977, as a 9-year-old boy, I watched Star Wars at the movie theater in Puerto Rico with Spanish subtitles, even though I barely knew how to speak English.  The movie stunned and even fascinated me; even back then, I knew it would make a lasting impression.  However, I did not anticipate Star Wars becoming a franchise and, dare I say, a pantheon.  Though strangely, this is precisely what I needed.

As a child, I would’ve described Star Wars as science fiction.  As I grew older, I realized it was closer to fantasy.  It had its type of swords and sorcery with light sabers and the Force.  The classic conflict of good versus evil anchors the story, and it starts with the onset of the first scene of the first film, Star Wars (A New Hope).  Darth Vader boards the smaller captured vessel and immediately dominates the scene.  His imposing stature in all black symbolically earmarks him as the villain.

Continue reading “The tragic story of Anakin Skywalker” →

Strangely, I don’t remember much from my high school prom.  I went stag when most of my class had dates, and honestly, the entire social expectations dance wasn’t my thing.  However, after years of bullying and ridicule, I had clawed my way back into relevance.  I attended to demonstrate that they would not browbeat me into ‘outsider’ submission, much like my private version of Pretty In Pink.  At least that’s the story I tell myself in my head today.  Truthfully, I did not have this level of self-awareness when I graduated; it gradually developed over the years.

One conversation I remember from that night came from my friend’s date, a college student.  He lamented that although he had turned 19 years old, he was disallowed from drinking alcohol.  Specifically, the legal drinking age in the US wasn’t always 21; for many years, and in many states, it was 18.  To retain its federal funding, Florida also made this transition to 21.

Continue reading “Breach of contract” →

As spring starts and flowers bloom, I settle into an annual tradition.  Baseball season starts in spring.  Those who know me know that I’ve cheered for the Atlanta Braves from the start.  People often follow that discovery with a question (or confusion, if you know my geographical history).  No, I never lived in Atlanta, though I have visited a handful of times.  For the record, I do not follow the American predisposition to cheer for a professional team based on geography.  If anything, it irritates me that others assume that I would follow suit.

In 1982, the Atlanta Braves rocketed from next-to-last in the preceding year into first place through a 13-0 start.  They kept that first-place position in the National League West on the last game of the season versus the Padres by the skin of their teeth.  The start of the baseball season is magical.  The 1982 Braves weaved that magic.  They were the embodiment of the little engine that could.  Geography does not undo that kind of loyalty.

Continue reading “42” →