Last minute weekend errands

Actually, these fireworks were from yesterday, July 5th. I went to my friend’s house. They live behind Magic Mountain, and she invited us to join her family to watch fireworks.

End of an era

About two weeks ago, my Amazfit Fitness tracker died. I went to a pool party and of course wore my fitness tracker and it never went back on. I’ve swam many times with this fitness tracker but I guess that day was the day. I’ve had my Amazfit Fitness tracker for five years which is a very long time in new tech. It’s also the longest time I’ve had a fitness tracker. I’ve had a couple of FitBits that lasted no more than a year. In total I’ve worn a fitness tracker for about 10 years.

On the other side of hard times

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend about helping him with his next steps in life. I didn’t talk to him in a life coach kind of way, more like a friend or a sibling. I think I mentioned him a few times. We were roommates many years ago, and he was good friends with my husband. Back in 2022, he lost his wife to a terminal illness. In fact, they met while travelling. She travelled because she wanted to do all the things she wanted to do with whatever time she had left.

April and May Spending Log

Here are some highlights of things I spent in April and May.

I put these months together because I spent so little in April. The largest purchase I made was mailing a gift to my cousin in San Diego because she just had a baby. May was a high spend month because my sabbatical got approved which allowed me to begin booking my flights and lodging.

Four million stories waiting to be told

I want to thank all the people who reached out to me about the protests in Los Angeles. It isn’t a war-zone like you see in the news. Here’s a map of the City of Los Angeles:

The green area is the area where the curfew applies. Though I live fairly far from that green area, I’ve been hearing helicopters all week. In the past, the few times when I’ve heard helicopters flying over, it’s usually just a couple hours. I would check on Nextdoor to learn they’re trying to catch someone who is fleeing.

Now these helicopters are more present. I hear them every day, all throughout the day. For the last few days when I step out to walk my dog and I hear that helicopter, my first thought is “should I still take my dog out for a walk?” Or when I step out to walk my kid to school, which is only a quarter mile, I tell myself “It’s just a short walk.” Their presence is, dare I say it, performative and meant to create psychological fear in the community and it doesn’t make it okay at all.

I work in a university, so you can imagine how things have been like there for the last few months. We’ve been hit on all sides.

What annoys me is there are some people — namely those who don’t live in Los Angeles — who act like they know more about life in Los Angeles than I do because of what they watched on TV or read online. For a large city, Los Angeles has a soul. There’s a reason why I’ve been living here since 2012. Community exists but we acknowledge we all have our lives; that keeps us busy. These past few days have unified Los Angeles.

And of course, there are naysayers who go, “I doubt there’s going to be much solidarity when storefronts are looted and people are put out of business.” As I mentioned, 99% of the time, these naysayers don’t live here. Los Angeles has a population of almost 4 million people (10 million if you count the entire county) and you’re saying not a single soul out of the millions are available to help? One of the things we’re promoting in our Los Angeles and neighborhood groups is to support small business and getting involved in mutual aid efforts.

Besides, these naysayers are not improving the places are they are living in, wherever they are. They complain and contribute nothing.

I’m not saying that Los Angeles is perfect. There is no perfect city. Nobody who lives here is naive to the criticisms and issues of Los Angeles that do exist. But what also exists is people helping each other. We need to shed more light on that. Multiple “conflicting” views are allowed to exist. Not just this one-note narrative. Remember this is a city of four million people, which means there are four million stories waiting to be told.

Lastly, I have decided to normalize leaving people in whatever reality they have chosen. I’d rather not waste my time and energy changing people’s minds. My friend had an opinion on why we should change people’s minds, but I’ll save that for another time. I say people are allowed to have different opinions. That’s what democracy is right? For me, most importantly, I would rather do whatever it takes to get ICE, the National Guard, and Marines out of here.

One day I will spill all the tea.

Weekend Coffee Share

A friend of a friend did this thing…

Want to hear some tsimis (gossip) about all things AI-related? Maybe the appropriate question is “want some tea about all things AI-related?” Here are three stories of people being used in terrible ways. They are all one to two degrees away from me. All I can say is talk about brain rot by AI…

I believe gossip is the Aesop Fables of our times, learning the lessons of what NOT to do. We gossip because the world is, dare I say it, unwritten. Gossip enforces social norms.

Here’s the tea. I’m going to call this vignette “Book Club Fail.“

There’s someone who leads a book club. As a lead, they create the discussion questions for the book club. Apparently, they didn’t read the book and used ChatGPT to generate the discussion questions. They used those questions and printed them out for the book club, only to learn that ChatGPT created the discussion questions for a completely different book.

The folks at the book club go, “who are these characters? This never happened. Did you read the wrong book?”

Did they not review the questions before copying and pasting and printing? Then again, this is what happens when you don’t read the book.

What they could have done, though this does use ChatGPT, is skim through the book. (Or maybe read as far as you can if you really care.) After skimming, they could have written a bunch of bullet points and observations and entered those on ChatGPT, asking it to create some discussion questions.

Or another option is to look up discussion questions on the internet — maybe another bookclub has read the book somewhere out there. It’s quite likely.

Here’s another cup of tea. I’m going to call it…”Caught by Keystrokes.“

There’s this Master’s student. I can say this Master’s student does not attend the university where I work. Since they began their Master’s program, they have been using ChatGPT for all their assignments. I’m not sure which concentration they are in, but there is an assignment that involves coding. They submitted the prompt into ChatGPT and copied and pasted whatever it generated, and turned it in. They received a failing grade because it turns out whatever software the class uses tracks keystrokes. I assume the keystroke picked up was “CTRL” + “V”? Or was it right-click and click “Paste”?

Then there was another assignment. Learning their lesson of NOT pressing CTRL+V, they typed whatever ChatGPT gave. Come on. That’s suspicious too. No human can flawlessly type; there is pausing hesitating to type out the rest of their thought, there is backspacing, there is clicking in the middle of a paragraph, and there are typos, of course.

Lastly, another tea. Maybe I’ll title it “I’m a Superparent, I Swear.” A soon-to-be divorcé uses ChatGPT to write a statement to their divorce lawyer about how they’re an upstanding, loving superparent. Umm…if you know that, you could write it yourself. Love comes from the heart. Your writing will come through. When I write about something I like, I can freely write about it (albeit not polished and perfect).

It goes back to this question: Why are some people so enthused about AI doing everything? I interpret this as nobody wants to think anymore. I do want to disclose that I do use ChatGPT, but nothing like that. It just blows my mind that people (ab)use AI like this. Personally, I see ChatGPT as a creative partner. I’ve asked it to help me title a blog post. It gives suggestions, but in the end, I settled for the title I made. Majority of the time, the titles come from something within the post. Nothing catchy but it’s more natural for me, the creator of the post. I’ve asked ChatGPT to help me create a child-friendly travel itinerary for whatever city, and it will generate suggestions. I research its suggestions and decide if I want to go there. I still do the work of planning a trip. I use ChatGPT as a reference guide but never a replacement for my brain.

On another note, I posted another Substack reflecting on finishing my professional development program. I don’t think I would ever post gossip like that on my Substack because it is a few degrees too close to me. As I’ve mentioned, I view my Substack as a weekly postcard to my family, friends, and coworkers. If it was a movie, I would rate my Substack PG while my WordPress is a PG-13.

Weekend Coffee Share

Healing looks like this

May is almost over. Thaaank goodness. It was such a rough month. I was feeling pretty feverish this week — I would say I am about to enter stage four in the five stages of burnout. I think that’s why it’s called burnout for a reason — you feel yourself getting hot. As a reminder, I had the flu a couple of weeks ago. I had to deal with that while dealing with my kid’s abscess on her finger. I’m not sure if I mentioned that. That also happened a couple of weeks ago. She was on antibiotics for a week. When I took her to urgent care to get it checked out, our options were the following:

Tell me, what do you do?

Sometimes when I am at say…a kid’s birthday party, I try to avoid the conversation about work. I try to steer the conversation towards hobbies and TV shows but inevitably it becomes “are you hiring at such-and-such employer? I am seeking a director or manager position.” It’s some variation of that. Ooh that reminds.

Creating, not waiting

Greetings from San Diego! I’m here for a friend’s baby shower. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to San Diego. It’s been a year. We arrived on Friday night, and we are leaving tomorrow morning. At first, I was just going to go to San Diego on Saturday just for the baby shower, and come home. I’m still not well enough to do a jam-packed schedule of visits. I still have that persistent cough, and I am tired. Tomorrow morning, I’ll have brunch with my cousins and then stopping by my in-laws’ place before going home to LA.

Re-Creation

Mother’s Day has passed. Phew…I received text messages saying “Happy Mother’s Day…” and it’s followed by either I know it’s a hard day for you…Take it day by day…or I hope you’re doing okay.

Simple living in the city

It’s been about nine months since I’ve lived in my apartment and so far it’s been great. Life has been simpler.

Simple living means different things to everyone. It doesn’t mean living out in the countryside — for some it’s that which is fine. I believe simple living is not about where one lives it’s about how one lives.

Meet Sabbatical Jr.

I’ve been sick since Tuesday night. I was so sick that I didn’t leave my apartment for two days. My kid stayed home from school those two days. I returned to the office on Friday and left half day. Also, during the week, I had to deal with an abscess on my kid’s finger. We went to the doctor that Sunday after visiting my parents for Mother’s Day. On top of being sick, I spent the week making sure she took her antibiotics and checked every evening to make sure there was no new pus.

But…good news came out at the end of the week — I got my few weeks of leave off approved! I will be taking time off from mid-July to mid-August. I call it a sabbatical junior! I’m not sure if it will give me the “hard reset button” I was looking for, but that’s okay. I hope that this personal leave of absence is revelatory and refreshing. What I want out of it is that it will make me more tolerant to taking more risks. I wanted a career break of one year originally, but I’ll be honest, taking several weeks off from work is very much out of my comfort zone. For many years I found even taking two weeks of vacation was out of my comfort zone — and this sentiment echoes among other millennials.