Found on our front yard this morning.

Wordle 322 4/6

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Wordle 321 4/6

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Wordle 320 5/6

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Can’t decide whether my sense of taste is off because of COVID or because of plain old sinus congestion. Either way, I’m not used to nacho cheese Doritos tasting like corn flakes.

What a great piece Justin Chang has written in the L.A. Times ($): “From ‘Turning Red’ to ‘Everything Everywhere,’ the Asian (North) American mom goes mainstream.”

As Mother’s Day nears – my first since my mom’s passing – it kind of hits me in the gut in a sad and complicated way. These paragraphs (with my own emphasis added) especially linger for me right now.

Maybe you too were raised by an Asian American (or Asian Canadian) mom with some resemblance to Ming, a mom who only ever wanted the best for you and never let you forget it. And if you will allow me to generalize further, in hopes of getting more specific: Maybe she wanted you to enjoy the material benefits of a Western upbringing while still upholding the strict cultural traditions of an Eastern one — and to that end, she rigorously policed your academics, your extracurricular activities and your sorry excuse for a social life. Maybe she skimped on verbal and physical affection, favoring a love language that expressed itself in steamers full of dumplings or plates of sliced fruit.

Maybe she didn’t mind embarrassing you in public since your family, being of Asian descent and therefore of perpetual outsider status, didn’t really belong to that public in any meaningful sense. And maybe she’d blanch if anyone dared call her a “tiger mom,” a term popularized by Amy Chua’s 2011 memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” and disavowed by many as offensive. Then again, if she’s anything like my mom, maybe she embraces the “tiger mother” label and wears it proudly. …

Asian American moms, in other words, are not a mom-olith. And it’s been gratifying to see so many recent mainstream movies arrive at that conclusion, several of them by way of richly imaginative premises that happily dispense with realism in favor of fantasy, science fiction and even horror. And why not? (Whose Asian American childhood wasn’t, at some point, a horror movie?) In “Umma,” Iris K. Shim’s muddled but intriguing ghost story, [Sandra] Oh plays Amanda, a quietly anxious Korean American mother whose lengthy estrangement from her emotionally abusive mother has sinister implications for her relationship with her own teenage daughter. Shim’s attempt to meld parental trauma and boogey-mom shivers isn’t entirely successful, but Oh’s performance sounds a resonant echo of her very different work in “Turning Red”: In both movies, a cycle of generational pain can be broken only when a controlled and controlling mother learns to relinquish her tight hold on her own kid — and, ultimately, herself.

Wordle 319 4/6

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Whether you like baseball or not, here's the kind of viral stuff we all need

I really needed a good kind of viral moment lately, and two baseball fans in Toronto gave me that.

And it led to this moment earlier today.

The Toronto Star spoke with the guy who caught the ball, who seems to be as cool as you hope he’d be. Also a great back story about the kid, who emigrated to Canada from Venezuela with his family and was named after Derek Jeter.

I just really hate that a Yankee made me cry in a good way.

(Also, the Blue Jays' George Springer gave the ball guy two signed jerseys for his kindness. Lots to love about this whole thing.)

Not at 100 percent. But I’m okay enough to be useful, and the office workload is exploding, so I’m back working from home.

If I had my druthers, I’d be offline sucking down hot tea and watching “Aggretsuko.” Never has a workaholic, metal-loving red panda meant so much to me.

Are vents bad for this disease?

Now that the kid is recovering nicely and I’m much less worried about her, my thoughts are drifting to the fact that HOLY CRAP I ENDED UP WITH THIS STUPID COVID THING.

Sick of this illness already, especially when I probably was too optimistic yesterday about being on the upswing. It’s more like being at a standstill—a phlegmmy standstill that exhausts me ands burns deep into my sinuses.

I hoped to be back tomorrow to work (from home, as I have the past 2 years now), but now I don’t really see that happening.

Been so tired and hangry all afternoon, and running on barely 3 hours of restless sleep from last night. Probably not a good idea when you’re dealing with a disease with a zillion different outcomes.

Oh well. Vent over. Kinda needed to unleash, I guess. And I just blew the carb count on chili dogs and a chocolate cake shake. Time for Advil and bed.

Recent Internet rabbit holes I have come to regret following (especially on Twitter):

  • MetGala
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene
  • Ashley Judd’s face
  • Bill Murray
  • Elon Musk
  • Donald Trump (or any of his minions; see “Marjorie Taylor Greene” above)
  • Prince William’s nanny

Wordle 318 4/6

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I’m as pro-life as it gets, but there’s something utterly naive and simplistic about the triumphal social media posts concerning the reports of Roe v. Wade’s demise.

Roe is only part of the problem. Protecting mothers and the children who are actually born is important, too.

Ask not for whom COVID-19 tolls

So, the Evil Virus finally showed up for us over the past week. And it’s all the fun it’s been cracked up to be.

In our case, it’s actually been less, compared with what others have experienced. At least F and I are still alive, for one thing. (I had two cousins die from COVID over the past year or so.) Our experience has been more like The Worst Flu Ever, with persistent fever, body aches and headaches, and a sore throat that feels like needles in the voicebox. I’ve never seen F quite this sick, and I haven’t been this ill in a long time.

But as I’ve mentioned to friends and colleagues – and on this here website – I highly suspect that things would be a lot worse if we weren’t vaxxed.

(C was smart enough to get a fresh booster shot a week or two ago, and I’m convinced that that is what kept the virus from taking him down with us.)

And even though I’m still overweight, I’m nearly 70 pounds lighter than I was a year ago; as obesity is a comorbidity of COVID-19, I’m even more grateful now for the weight loss.

Our illness has been relatively mild enough to be treated with Advil, hot tea with honey (plus lemon for me) and other fluids, and binge-watching anime on Netflix. (I will gush at another time over our discovery of “Aggretsuko.") So, at least we’re fully hydrated and entertained.

Fortunately, F is very much on the upswing after the onset of her symptoms last Wednesday; given her school’s COVID protocols, she may be okay to go back in the next day or so. For now, I can report – with perhaps more optimism than merited, since I tested positive yesterday – that I may not be far behind: My fever has subsided so far, though the body aches linger, and my biggest issue is a scratchy, phlegmmy throat.

F and I let our guard down with the masking over the past month or two (although she still continued to mask at school, even when most kids did not). I regret that now, even though the past few weeks of freedom reminded me of how much I hate wearing masks.

(C said when he called the school nurse’s attendance line this morning to notify the school that F would be absent, the voicemail box was full. F’s friends have confirmed that an awful lot of kids at school have been out sick. So, we can confirm that no, the pandemic isn’t over.)

Grateful that this whole experience has been survivable. Hope this is a cautionary tale for people who hate masking as much as I do. And I pray for those who are dealing with this, especially in far worse manifestations than ours.

I guess the virus hasn’t hurt my Wordle capabilities.

Wordle 317 3/6

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Yesterday’s Wordle.

Wordle 316 4/6

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Catching up on my Wordle posts over the past few days.

Wordle 315 5/6

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Appreciate the well wishes from all the kind micro.blog folks. Now both F and I are COVID-positive. Been loading up on Advil, tea with honey, and anime on Netflix. It’s like the World’s Worst Flu, and I can’t help but think this would be a lot worse if we hadn’t been vaxxed.

F stayed home from school yesterday with a low-grade fever and sore throat. She tested negative on a home COVID test.

She woke up today with a 102.6-degree temperature, so I made a doctor’s appointment for her this afternoon. And then she took another home test.

Sigh.

Wordle 314 3/6

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Third straight overnight of working past 2 a.m. (I take a break for dinner and family time, then return to my desk by 10:30 p.m.) Hoping this is the last of such overnights for a while. I’d like to have more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep one night.

Wordle 313 3/6

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New Wilco album out next month. New single out now. I’ve missed countryfied Wilco.

"It's time to talk about our billionaire problem"

Kevin Clarke writes in America magazine:

It is perhaps not a shock to discover U.S. oligarchs are generally interested in promoting policies that protect their wealth or allow them to accumulate more of it while countering legislation or social campaigns that promote income-building or wealth-equity efforts, or that protect the environment but add to industrial production costs. Is it time this collective power were restrained by sensible tax policies aimed at reducing the billionaire class’s accumulating economic and political might?

In a word, yeah.

Pope Francis has in recent years regularly dressed down the world’s wealthiest for not only declining to do their part to mitigate ecological and human suffering but for elevating the care and feeding of their personal fortunes as the primary good. In these pandemic times, Francis has talked a lot about building back a better world, one that includes a thorough examination of conscience of the role of finance and wealth in human economic and spiritual development and the protection of creation.

In doing so, he turns not to Marxist or Peronist economic doctrine for inspiration, as his many critics like to allege. His source material is simultaneously deeper and more simple. Despite what America’s prosperity gospelites prefer to believe, Jesus was not shy about his distaste for wealth accumulation and the personal and social imbalances, long before Marx, it seemed to produce.