wiggle room

They say humans became intelligent beings when they started possessing the capability of language. But I think human brain is still a pretty primitive thing, even after thousands--or hundreds of thousands, depending on who you talk to--of years of evolution, the best way we can understand things is still through words directly related to how we see, touch, feel, and concrete objects like plants, animals, natural or man-made things that we can see, touch, feel, etc. Much of our language is then layered upon these tangible entities to convey more abstract ideas and concepts, or to infer different meanings out of these "figurative speeches," or so called "metaphors."

A metaphor can be a single word, such as "chairman"--the person who gets to sit in the meeting room is usually the head of an organization (here "head" is another example of metaphor), or a phrase ("piece of cake," "emotional rollercoasters"), but is usually one or two simple and easy to understand sentences (otherwise it beats the purpose of using metaphor) such as "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." (from Forrest Gump, the movie). 

It can refer to plant ("couch potato"), or animal ("road hog"), be romantic ("You can't break my heart, it melted when I first saw you"), or downright insulting ("John is a real pig when he eats"). It can be imaginary ("pie in the sky"), or fact based ("It rains cats and dogs"-- Some say back in the medieval England when roofs were made of thatches and dogs and cats and other animals all lived on it, so when it rained they all slipped and fell). A lot of them are humorous ("A camel is a horse designed by a committee"), or inspirational ("Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor"). And this one is political and timely: "When we read the budget proposal from the Senate, you find the Vatican is not the only place blowing smoke this week."--by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan during Vatican's selection of a new pope last week.

And it's definitely culture related. If you look closely, many phrases and expressions we use here: "hit the road," "strike a deal," "blow me away," "the idea was shot down," "Congress doesn't buy what the President proposes," "that's a sexy concept," ... expose an action (borderlining on violence) and sex and commerce packed society America is in today. Looking East, you find the many "eat" related terms in the Chinese language that ought not have anything to do with having food: 吃驚--taken by surprise, 吃苦--laboring, 吃虧--being taken advantage of, 吃罰單--getting a ticket..., indicating eating has been an important part of Chinese culture. One may argue there are quite a few eating related sayings in English language as well: "eat crow," "have cake and eat it too," "you are what you eat,"... So this could mean (of course) eating is an important part of all cultures universally.

Poems and literature by design use plenty of metaphoric expressions in their compositions. Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" (from which Dr. Scott Peck's famous book "The Road Less Traveled" gets its title) uses the forking of a trail to reflect the choice we make in life that leads to different and irretrievable paths. The Chinese poem verse "感時花濺淚 恨別鳥驚心" mixes flowers with "splashing tears," birds with "spooked heart," without much logical sense, but very effectively stirs up the deep emotions in us it intends to.

Even science and mathematics, the crown jewels of human intellectual exercise, use plenty of metaphors to present its theories and explain how things work in the world. "Imagine" the atom model that we were taught in school to help understand the very basic unit that forms the universe. It consists of a nucleus in the middle and electrons circling around it, like satellites orbiting a planet...  Did anyone actually "see" this with their eyes? Nope, not that it is so infinitesimally small that no man-made scope can capture it, but even if such scope exists, the moment we think we get it, it's no longer there, according to quantum mechanics theory... Also imagine without the help of the graphs and diagrams of lines, squares, triangles, waveforms, etc., how could we even get in the door, let alone understand the intricacies of Geometry and Trigonometry, sine and cosine, Fourier analysis, wave equation, etc., that form the basis of modern aeronautics, electronics, and other technologies and their applications?

I remember one thing the college professor who taught us Thermodynamics kept saying during his class: "If you speak abstractly, that means you don't understand." (Unfortunately this is about the only thing I remember from his class). I believe a great communicator is one who, after getting a firm grip (another metaphorical expression) of an idea, can re-package and re-deliver it with plain language--using examples, analogies, and metaphors, instead of jargons, theorems, and dry reasonings--so others can "get it" too.

Plato, the great Greek philosopher, actually used a visual metaphor to explain the central feature of his Theory of Ideas this way: Most human beings live as if in a dim cave. We are chained, and facing a blank wall, with a fire at our backs. All we see are flickering shadows playing across the cave wall, and this we take to be reality. Only if we learn to turn away from the wall and the shadows, and escape from the cave, can we hope to see the true light of reality.

A metaphoric speech urging you to get out of a metaphoric world, don't you find that interesting?

Religion is yet another field of human endeavor that's fraught with metaphors and symbolism. Take Christianity for an example: the Garden of Eden, the Trees of Life and Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Fall of Man, many of Jesus' sayings ("I am the vine and you are the branches," "you are the salt of the world"...) and parables (the wise and the foolish wedding maids, the mustard seed and the yeast...), the whole Old Testament as the "shadow" of the "fulfillment" of the New Testament, etc. Now here comes the rub: “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” -- Joseph Campbell, a comparative religion scholar. What I think both the atheists and the religious fundamentalists miss is the power of metaphor. One laughs at it (how can a virgin bear a child?), and the other takes it so seriously (the world must be created in 6 literal days). Relax, people, let's give each other some mental wiggle room to imagine, muse, and approach the truth through things we can relate to--through metaphors, that is. 

Finally, here is a "creative metaphor" for your enjoyment:

l(a

le
af
fa

ll
s)
one
l

iness

Have you figured it out? This is actually a short poem by E.E. Cummings, and is a "double metaphor." He associates loneliness with the falling of a leaf, and also visualizes the experience by isolating letters as they fall down the page. In plain one line writing, it would be: l(a leaf falls)oneliness.

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Some famous metaphor quotes:

"A good conscience is a continual Christmas." -- Benjamin Franklin

"A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running." -- Groucho Marx

"Art washes away from the sould the dust of everyday life." -- Pablo Picasso

"All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind." -- Khalil Gibran

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree." -- Albert Einstein

"I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world." -- Mother Teresa

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection, though we can only speak of it in images and parables.” -- Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Laureate physicist, co-founder of the field of Quantum Mechanics

all my boys

Back in March 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom era, I got a load of money from some venture capitalist to develop some Linux based VoIP/unified messaging magic-ware for the future, based on the know-how and expertise I gained from those pioneering computer telephony and telecom projects I'd been doing for years prior. 

Being a Linux non-conversant person myself at that time, I needed to get a bunch of Linux talents--which were few and far between then--for my new company...fast!

So I managed to break into the web site of UC Irvine's Computer Science Department, and found some web pages created by its more innovative-minded students, and saw this young man (no photo though, back in those days when there was no Facebook or MySpace, and people didn't "over-share" who they were), with GPA 4.0, Torrey Searle, and I solicited him, to come out and have a "campus interview" with me right at the UCI campus cafeteria.

Torrey was a typical nerdy looking young lad, with a lean body frame and a grave pair of glasses on his freckled face, but courteous and slow speaking. When I suggested he come working for me, he said he'd like to but his parents would kill him if he dared not finish the school first (he was in his senior year). So I asked if he could recommend anybody else that he knew was as good as he, and he told me he had actually been working with a group of young Linux prodigies like himself for a while to come up with some chat-room software (called "Everybuddy") for the Linux community, and gave me their names.

And I went on to recruit them, one by one, to work for me in the next couple of months. I did it all online, using instant messaging chat for the first time in my life, gave them job offers, (again, without even seeing their pictures), and moved them all to California (I didn't believe in telecommuting, as some of them suggested they would like to do) from all over the country (North Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma...).

Rob and Jeramey were the first two to arrive. They were even younger than Torrey, around 19 or 20, and had been freelancing with their Linux programming skills for fun and for occasional jobs since their teens, without ever attending college. (Why bother, Rob said).

Rob had a great, warm, but boyishly shy personality, who'd rather talk to you about his home folks and girl friends than technical stuff. And he talked (online-chatted) with his girl friend a lot about me too--this funky Asian boss who moved him all the way from the East Coast country side to a posh new high tech office park in Southern California. I enjoyed chatting and even joking with him (I called him my "whipping boy" who would be held responsible for any wrong-doings in the office) occasionally and even met his lovely young girl friend when she came visiting him from the East Coast later.

Jim was a smart boy, about as young as Rob and Jeramey, going to school at Oklahoma State University, but "negotiated" with me to offer him "sign-up" bonus, on top of the generous offer I gave everybody already. He was also a crazy wild kid, with some disciplinary issues. Holing himself up in his cubicle behind piles of empty Dr. Peppers (For some reason, these kids all drank Dr. Pepper, no Coke. It's almost like a rebel statement of their time: Coke was evil, just like Microsoft, who was a monopoly and tried to crush the open source Linux platform they loved), he came in late, with sleazy eyes, and wrote code at wee hours or who knew when. One crazy thing he did, after he moved down here from Oklahoma, was to bid and buy a 1969 Chevy Corvette through eBay. The car arrived, he went to pick it up at the pier in Long Beach, and started driving, until he found out the transmission gear wouldn't allow him to downshift, and finally stopped after it ran out of gas. He found a phone booth and called his roommate Rob to pick him up, but could not tell where he was, and could not speak a single word of Spanish in that Mexican part of town. Finally a policeman saw him and told him where he was so Rob could come and pick him up. He then spent twice the money fixing the car than what he paid for it, and said he enjoyed it quite a bit.

Jared was the total opposite of Jim. About the same age as Jim and Torrey, he was at Auburn University of Alabama for the last year of his Computer Science degree, but decided to take my offer and quit school to come to California because he believed this was a once-in-a-life-time opportunity he didn't want to miss. He was very bright, but also very disciplined, and kept a Bible in his car that he read every day. I very quickly promoted him to be a project leader, then system architect, and treated him like my de facto right hand man for the whole software development and brought him with me when talking business with strategic partners. He married his college sweet heart--a beautiful Southern belle--before he came, and they had a baby girl the second year he worked here, that me and my wife visited at the hospital right after its delivery. 

Not that he'd been a lap dog employee just because I treated him nice enough. Nope. He's young and boisterous and had full sense of what's right and wrong that he was not afraid to express. I remember one day it was an election day, and he asked everyone the moment they came in the office whether they had done their citizen duty of voting or not. When he caught me not having done so, he urged me to do it soon. And there were a couple times when I did something management wise he felt strongly about, he let me know in ways that made my stomach turn!

Torrey finally joined us after he graduated from UCI the next year. By then I had total of 10 software engineers: Besides the Everybuddy gang, Patrick was a Canadian from Montreal with Mohawk hair cut and black leather jacket who rode his motor bike to work every day; Drew was a local talent whose off-work passion was to be a US marshal bounty-hunter; Rick was a black young man I recruited from Virginia who was probably not as sharp as Jared talent wise but had same great work ethics and mature sense of responsibility that I promoted him to be my second project leader; Ed was another black kid from Virginia that Rick recommended and I hired; Mat was an Auburn graduate referred by Jared; Mike was another Linux wiz kid from North Carolina referred by Rob; Andrew was a UCI graduate who I found through Torrey and was the only Asian boy I hired for the software group.

I let go of Jeramey early on, a couple of months after I hired him, because he was slacking up and did not perform--I later heard he was crying at night because he felt he couldn't handle the pressure of the jobs I asked of them. I also had to let Jim go, after he pulled off yet another crazy stunt of his: One weekend he drove all the way back to Oklahoma, just to see his girl friend there, and did not show up for work until one week later. I did hire him back for a short contract job later, though, to write the device driver for our product.  

I also had a hardware department of two, one sales/marketing person, and one accounting girl. So on this tiny boat of 15 we rocked: We defined the product, wrote the code, made the boards, assembled the system, did the shows, talked the business, stressful and frustrating at times, but mostly exciting and optimistic, for about one year and a half. 

Then the bubble burst. The VC cut back their funding, then withdrew it altogether. I had to lay off 2/3 of the people in August 2001, then completely shut it down by the end of 2001.

I didn't keep tracks of my boys afterwards, until Rob reached me through LinkedIn last year: He is now working for a company developing video software for the deaf while toying some ideas of his own; Jared is now manager of a major business analytics software company; and Torrey has been working for an international telecom company in Belgium for years... 

Now I wonder: Is Torrey still so skinny looking (He mused and talked a lot but ate very little, we used to tease him that we'd have to force-feed him); Who's Rob's current girl friend; How's Jared's baby--now must be 12-year-old girl--look like; Does Jim still have those sleepy eyes and drink 10 cans of Dr. Pepper a day; Pat still wearing his Mohawk hairstyle and riding his bike? How's Jeramey doing these days...

Maybe one day I'll just click my mouse and start chatting with them online again.

"I quite literally moved across the country to work for Dave. He ... somehow managed to wrangle all of us young developers into producing something excellent." -- Rob's comment on me on LinkedIn... "somehow" and "wrangle" being the operative words.

tri-city

Where we live now, since we moved down here to our new home some 7 months ago, is a peculiar spot at the deep southern end of south Orange County. As we motor down from our hill side home and get on the I-5 freeway, going north by two exits, we reach downtown San Juan Capistrano; going south by one exit, we enter the city of San Clemente; and if instead of ramping onto the freeway, we zip through the freeway underpass, we are right at the heart of the beach and harbor district of the city of Dana Point. 

What's the big deal, you may say. Here in Orange County, or in the Greater Los Angeles area in general, we all drive past 10 cities a day on our way to work, shop, or just running some errands. True, and the very same thing I've been doing for over 25 years while living in another south Orange County city myself. But maybe moving did wake up the old sniff dog nature in me, or it's just my curious mind always wanting to know, I started exploring and registering what I saw in these new environs I am in, and found things interesting.

Starting with the official new hometown of mine, the city of San Juan Capistrano, a somewhat wordy name that came from an even wordier one, "Mission San Juan Capistrano," the settlement set up by the Spanish priests back in 1776, the same year the United States declared its independence on the east coast. The name literally means "Saint John of Capistrano," in honor of a "warrior saint" born in a little central Italian town called Capestrano (which is now a sister city of San Juan Capistrano) who led Christian soldiers to fight off Muslim Turks in medieval Europe. 

San Juan Capistrano is on record the oldest community of Orange County, and true to that title it has quite a few historic landmarks in town, such as the vintage railway station that Amtrak and Metrolink still make daily stops at, some over 200-year-old adobe houses that are the oldest continuously living residences in the state of California, and of course that world famous tourist attracting old Mission compound (which, unsurprisingly, contains a chapel that is the oldest continuous functioning of its kind in California), as well as a neat and robust old town district where you can stroll antique and artifact shops and enjoy great Italian, Mexican, or American food in one of a dozen cozy restaurants, cafes, or tea houses along the unpretentious city blocks and well-preserved old-time neighborhood alleys, all within minutes' reach. 

If you are like me, you probably heard of the city of San Clemente long before you even set foot on the United States. It is the city where former President Richard Nixon kept an ocean side mansion that was nicknamed "Western White House" where he took break from Washington and entertained international dignitaries and heads of states such as Soviet Premier Brezhnev during the Cold War era. Indeed San Clemente is yet another "ancient" city of Orange County that holds the title of the first planned community in the state of California, way earlier than Irvine, Mission Viejo or the like. It was all based on the vision of one man, Ole Hanson, who was a retired mayor of Seattle who drove by the sea side of present day San Clemente in the 1920's and decided to create a "Spanish village by the sea". All street names are in Spanish, and all houses must have red tile roof and white exterior walls, according the original city ordinance. 

I used to drive past the city on the freeway and see it as just that last city of Orange County before I hit the San Onofre nuclear power plant and the San Diego County line. But once I took time to ride its local streets, visit its downtown, and even go to its little Episcopal church for weekly meditations, I begin to sense its small town charm and why people here want to keep things the way it is (no toll road extension wanted here). 

Stop by their downtown one late Sunday morning, park your car, browse through some shops or farmer's market stands or art festival booths that they occasionally host, then walk a few blocks down the beach to have a sea side brunch, (or turn the other side to tour the old mansion of Ole Hanson's and learn some city history), watch people surf and angle fish at the pier, then if you feel like it, walk down a beach-side trail a couple miles all the way to the San Onofre State park... You get a pretty good picture of what the city is all about. 

Dana Point is yet another quiet little town along the Pacific coast, where local ranchers used to trade cow hides for merchandise brought in from the east coast by the sail ships, one of them carrying a young Harvard law student named Richard Henry Dana—from whom the city got its namesake, who wrote in his journal that the ocean bay he saw here was "the only romantic spot" along the whole North American west coast he had traveled through during the 1830's. 

I've been to Dana Point harbor a few times before I moved down here, going deep sea fishing or roaming along its marina, like many people do. But since we moved down here, I found out it actually has a couple of nice trails along its headlands, as well as a few nice little parks with great scenic views that the occasional visitors won't know about. As a result, my very indoorsy, city-girl wife are now happily joining me for walks along these beautiful routes once every other weekend, sacrificing and separating herself from her beloved soap operas on TV and Internet. That's a miracle!

On that I end my tale of three cities.

same kind of different as me

Denver Moore was an African American born in rural Louisiana. Uneducated and growing up with an aunt and an uncle, he started working for white cotton farm owners since a kid, a dead-end job where the white farm owners lent and manipulated the living necessities and crop profits so the "sharecroppers" never got their fair share but trapped ever deeper in debt with their landlords year after year. 

In 1960, at the age of 23, he hopped on a freight train to Fort Worth and began his life as a homeless drifter, hovering between Fort Worth and Los Angeles. Once while away from town after a skirmish with some local gangsters, he attempted a failed robbery on a bus and was arrested and sent back to Louisiana to serve a 20-year prison term. He was released in 1976 and returned to Fort Worth, where he lived on streets around a church mission center that cared for the homeless.

Ron Hall was a white boy born and grew up in a lower-middle-class town of Fort Worth, went to college, met his sweet heart future wife Debbie there, got into sales and investment banking jobs in his early career, before finding his knack of spotting and selling fine arts and became a successful international arts dealer, with a gallery set up in an upscale Fort Worth district just some freeway interchange and a tunnel away from the said church mission center.

In their early 50's, Ron and Debbie started volunteering at the mission center after Debbie had an epiphany of seeing "a poor man who was wise, and by his wisdom he saved the city" (Ecclesiastes 9:15) in her dream. Just a couple weeks after they started their volunteering work there serving food for the homeless, a melee broke out with a huge, angry black man hurling chair across the dining hall floor and shouting and threatening to "kill whoever steal my shoes." As Ron scanned the room for mission personnel to mollify the situation, Debbie leaned in and whispered to him, "that's him... the person in my dream," and urged Ron to befriend him.

Thus began a courtship then an endearing and enduring friendship between Ron and Denver, riding through and after Debbie's struggle and final succumbence to liver cancer at age 55 in 2000.

That's the true story told by the best-seller book "Same Kind of Different as Me," co-authored by Denver Moore and Ron Hall. (http://www.samekindofdifferentasme.com/default.aspx)

You will probably be touched by a few things it describes coming from the sad plights of the homeless people. For example, right after they started serving there, Ron and Debbie noticed people always jockeyed for position near the head of their designated section of the serving line, for fear that the good stuff--meat, for example--might be ladled out already if they were too far behind in the line, and be left with soup or the stale 7-Eleven sandwiches. "When that happened, the looks on their faces told a sad story: As society's throwaways, they just accepted the fact that they survived on leftovers and discards."

One truth confessed by Ron himself was he was not a happy jolly donor of charity work by his own volition initially, but mainly doing it out of love and dedication to his dear wife Debbie. But it didn't take long for Ron to start getting a sense of fulfillment from his work of service. For example, after asking the chef to prepare a little more food so that the street people at the end of line could eat as well as those who slept at the mission, "it thrilled us to serve the street people the good stuff, like fried chicken, roast beef, and spaghetti and meatball... That was the first time I tried to do something to improve the lives of the people Debbie had dragged me along to serve. I hadn't yet touched any of them, but already they were touching me."

Another truth that can be gleaned from the book is the "haves" don't necessarily possess things better than the "have-nots." As a street person, Denver lived in a world with its own code of conduct and spirit of camaraderie (he took it upon himself for years to protect and take care of an old white homeless cripple who lived in his own filth and kept cursing and calling him "nigger") that he felt fairly comfortable with, as well as his simple faith in God, more so than Ron's occasional discontent or grumble with Him (for taking away his beloved wife Debbie, for example) showed.

The biggest truth revealed, however, was by the woman who brought these two diametrically different men together. More than being just another "holiday charity giver," Debbie was a genuinely loving and courageous woman who wanted to know and truly serve these "God's people" on consistent and permanent basis, believing each has gifts--like love, faith, and wisdom--that lay hidden like pearls waiting only to be discovered, polished, and set. As Denver explained how his heart changed from "don't-mess-with-me" to accepting and building true relationships with Ron and Debbie: "Faith-based organizations, government programs, and well-meaning individuals fed me and kept me alive for all those years on the streets, but it was the love of Miss Debbie that caused me to want to make a change in my life."

A good book worth reading.

"I used to spend a lot of time worrying that I was different from other people, even from other homeless folks. Then, after I met Miss Debbie and Mr. Ron, I worried that I was so different from them that we weren't ever going to have no kind of future. But I found out everybody's different--the same kind of different as me. We're all just regular folks walking down the road God done set in front of us... The truth about it is, whether we are rich or poor or something in between, this earth ain't no final resting place. So in a way, we are all homeless--just working our way toward home."   -- Denver Moore

memorables

There are some dates that are memorable to each person. Top on the list, for example, most likely, is your birthday. Then the date you get married (which becomes an Anniversary date with a big A that your wife will not forget even if you did); the dates your kids are born, maybe; the date you win $100 million lottery, for sure; etc.

My personal memorable dates, as far as I can recall, include the date I reported to the boot camp that started my mandatory military service in Taiwan (July 12, 1980), the date I finished it (May 26, 1982, exactly 1 year and 10 months and 2 weeks later); the date I had a horrific car accident on the California freeway and walked away unharmed (January 4, 1983); and the date I came to America, August 16,1982.

That date is memorable because it marks the first time ever I went abroad, leaving a place I was born and raised and lived continuously in for almost 25 years, for a far and foreign land that I had only heard about and saw on TV. Going to the USA for study, that's about the only way many a young man and woman of my generation did to break away from the old and familiar to the new and fancy in a land that waves a promising hand to the world.

Everything was new and titillatingly fun to a young mind then. It's as if just yesterday I was sitting in that tiny Japan Airlines seat, eating tiny Japanese cold noodle, looking out the window, seeing the bright blue skies and white shiny clouds, and the beautiful landscape down below, excitement more than overcoming the bitsy unease for the unknown to come...

And whiff, just by one turn, that yesterday was 30 years ago already, and that barely 25 year-young lad had just turned double-five this past month. 

Remember that "Never trust anyone over 30" proclamation by the baby-boomers when they were at their prime early 20's, that shows how incomprehensible big chronological numbers seem to young people. I remember when I was at grade school age and one day I read on a youth magazine projections of many soon-to-be-accomplished human achievements for the next 30 years to come, and I told my father, finger pointing at one of those projections on page: "there, I can well live to see this thing happen--humans landing on Mars," I said triumphantly, as if that would be my own accomplishment too.

Well, that forecast date had long passed and gone, and no human feet have ever set on Mars yet, and I doubt it will any time soon. Nor are there any automated walkways that transport pedestrians around city blocks day and night, or people living happily in beautiful, sophisticated undersea cities all over the world, for that matter. Straight line projections based on science and technologies alone always neglect to take into account other factors that make people do what they do in the first place.

But many things amazing that I did see happen in the past 30 years: Neil Armstrong's foot-step on the moon, Berlin walls got torn down overnight, Apple beats Microsoft, Korean soap operas trump Japanese ones.

And Y2K crisis was just a hoax of millennium magnitude, AIDS and SARS did not decimate human population, oil and gas did not run dry, the ozone layer did not keep on thinning, as many predicted they would.

We defused the nuclear hot war between two super powers but were then shocked by the havoc natural hazards such as tropical storms and tsunamis could wreak over the world, one of them led directly to a nuclear calamity in Japan. The evil Soviet Empire is no more but no one foresaw a few extreme men could bring down two monumental buildings of New York City in broad daylight on one sunny September morning. Japan's economy did not take over US during the 1980's, but China's may in the 2020's. 

So I just turned 55 mid last month. What significance does that carry? If our dear old sage Confucius is right (which he always is), turning 50 means "I know what on earth am I here for (五十而知天命)," and turning 60 means "wife's nagging is music to my ears (六十耳順)," then turning 55 means I am halfway to realizing that my purpose in life is to hear my wife's nagging as music to my ears soon.

Actually the even more blissful thing for turning 55...are you ready...is you start getting "senior discount" at some shops. I found that out about a couple weeks ago when I called into a local golf club to check out their green fees, and the clerk explained: "If you buy this gift card, you'll get $5 off our senior rate," upon which I interrupted: "I am only 55, so I don't think I qualify as senior..." "Oh no, here in our club 55 is considered senior..." OMG, moment of enlightenment, for the first time in my life--it dawned on me--that I am considered a senior citizen already!! 

I recovered from the shock and sadness fairly quickly, and about one week later, when I was sitting at a Denny's Restaurant for lunch with a friend, I flipped the menu around and saw the "Senior Menu--for 55 and over" on the back. How interesting, as my friend laughingly explained to me, when his wife was pregnant, she seemed to see lots of pregnant people around her all the time. Same logic applies, when you become senior, you start seeing things senior more and more. I turned around and look, and lo and behold, I saw so many senior people sitting around me that I didn't pay attention to just moments ago!

Then the waitress came, and joyfully I told her: "This is your lucky day, your restaurant has the privilege of serving the first ever senior discount meal for me," and went on to order one good country fried steak that was about two dollars cheaper than it normally would be charged. The waitress just smiled and took the order, without ever asking for my ID... Even though I looked too young to be over 55, she decided to give me a pass for the good spirit I showed her, I reasoned.

To close, I'd like to make a projection, especially for those superstitious minded friends of mine: When I turned 30 in 1987, the Wall Street had a "Black Monday" crash in October; when I turned 40 in 1997, we had the Asian Financial Crisis; and when I turned 50 in 2007, of course that's when the current Great Recession started in December that year. So naturally, my friends, I project when I turned 60 in 2017, there is bound to be a world class financial crisis of some sort happening again. Where there are crises, there are opportunities. Take this lead from me, and no need to thank me when you make it, because I will be busy hearing music to my ears all day long by then.

your kindness

The other day me and a friend of mine ordered a couple of soft drinks at a McDonald's drive-thru, and when we pulled up to the window to pick up our drinks and prepare to pay, the girl there just smiled and said "Yours has been paid for by the person two cars ahead." We were totally surprised, and both looked out to the car two ahead of us: It was an ordinary, black little car, a Prius, I think. This is a town in San Bernardino County, more than 100 miles away from where we live, and my friend tried to see if the driver inside may be one of the business acquaintances he knew around here, but to no avail... We scratched our heads and for the life of ours couldn't figure out who and why would someone we don't know do something like this to us. 

In the end we just had to conclude it must be someone who is in the habit of doing something like this for the happy effect it can create to the recipients, and today is just our turn to be at the receiving end of this random act of kindness, so to speak. 

Just like the story we sometimes read on newspapers that some not-necessarily-very-rich people would give out hundred-dollar bills at random to street people during Christmas time as that pleases them.

I recall that boy scout motto "Do one good deed a day" (日行一善) we were taught when growing up. Now that makes a lot of sense: Imagine if we all do one good deed a day, then almost each of us is bound to be at the receiving end of an act of kindness a day. I also recall a recent TV commercial where a Good Samaritan act as simple as yielding a seat to a stranger on the bus leads to yet another good deed, and then another, until it circles back to the original do-gooder to complete this cycle of good Karma (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frpp6DjCaJU). Random kindness can be very contagious and its own reward, indeed.

But "one good deed a day" seems a bit uptight. It's "rationed" kindness (why not do 2, or 3 good deeds a day then, that will presumably make the world even better for everyone), not the rapturous, spur-of-the-moment, "poetic" type we like to romance. Come to think of it, the Christmas dollar-bills giver and the McDonald's drinks payer, are they really perpetrators of random kindness, or they know beforehand their benevolent acts would bring joy to people (and themselves), therefore set out to do them at certain locations at certain times? These acts are not that random, but rather "premeditated," then.

To expand on that thinking, almost all kindness done in massive scale today--orphanage houses, rehab centers, Salvation Army... all charity organizations, for-profit or not, secular or religious--can fall into this premeditated, or "institutionalized" kindness category. The reason can be very simple: Though we may all want to do good for goodness' sake, we get tired of doing it after a while. Once the "charity fatigue" sets in, we say "not today," and defer it to the "professionals"--we'll just send in the checks then. 

That's why people like Dr. Schweitzer (Mr. Africa) and Mother Teresa (of Calcutta) amaze us: They are practically one-man/one-woman institutions that keep on giving, their great hearts even more than their great works, without ever fading out. Where and how did they get such endless supply of good will and energy? Not from this world, I don't think. 

Here's another true story of kindness I heard from a guy who told us after hearing our McDonald's-wonder story:

He was at a supermarket checkout stand, the woman before him was finishing up her items, when at the end the total came out to be $50 something. But the woman told the cashier that she had only $40 to spend around for the whole grocery, so they started removing items from the stand to cut the bill down to $40... Seeing and hearing all this, the man interjected and told the cashier that he'll pay whatever amount over the $40 for the woman so she can have all the items with her still... Upon hearing this, the woman broke down and cried and thanked him profusely...

My heart shivered while hearing this, and then I knew very sure I would do the same thing the man did if I were in that situation.

And I am glad I feel it this way, being assured that this cynical "getting-older" man still has some strong good heart beating in him. 

transition

How did one leave a place he's been living for over 25 years and move on to the next?

Just drove off for a weekend house hunting, turned a corner, and bumped into a dream house he and his wife couldn't resist.

That's basically what happened last November when we made a purchase of a brand new home in San Juan Capistrano, located on a hill top between San Clemente and Dana Point, two beautiful coastal cities in the very south of south Orange County.

Then what should we do with the home sweet home of ours of more than 25 years? To sell or not to sell, that was the question. The economically correct answer should the the latter: rent it out and ride out the worst housing slump in years while collecting rental money that should be more than adequate to make payments for a new mortgage whose interest rate is at historical low. 

But call us debt-abhorrent or loath-to-be-landlord chickens, in the end we decided we'd rather be mortgage free and nobody's landlord, and sold the house outright, to a beautiful family who really loved our old house and made a moderately-above-market offer for it.

Backtracking a little, it's not that easy to let go of a place you've been living for over 25 years, emotionally. It's our first home we owned, after our first jobs, our marriage, in this country. I started my own business in it--at one time I had my business card with the fictitious business name "Wong Laboratories" taped on the door of my study room, and 24 digital phone lines installed in my garage. Friends and families had visited and gathered in and around the house through the years. Both my parents and my wife's parents had visited here ("It's so darn quiet," my father said to me after we toured the neighborhood together for the first time), and now all of them except my mother-in-law have passed away. More recently, my men's group had been meeting in the backyard most other weekends and had annual omelette cookouts on the barbeque island for 4 consecutive years, practically since we redid our living room and side yard some 5 years ago. And heck, even the bathtub of our master bedroom has some special meaning to it--we got baptized in it some 20 years or so ago.

And there were the neighbors: Scott and his wife and 2 kids who just moved in a couple years ago, replacing the suddenly disappearing Clampitt family whose house (now Scott's) got foreclosed upon, that we seemed to be getting to know each other better and better every time we chatted on the curbway; Kathy and her family across street who are like us the very original owners of their house for 25+ years, and the quiet but gentle school principal couple to the other side of the house, Mr. and Mrs. Joel and Paula Rawlings. Both families we had just invited for a get-to-know-you-better party a little more than a couple years ago after the shock of the disappearing Clampitts.

So we decided, to close our lives here with a sound note--to bid farewell to our dear old neighbors and to welcome the lovely new family to the neighborhood--that we hold a backyard barbecue party for the last time for everybody.

All except Paula--who got down with a cold--appeared, including Kathy's 2 grown boys and one precocious girl who did not show up last time we invited them. Henrik Eriksen and his family were the new people here, and this was my first face to face encounter with him at length since our real estate transaction began. He is a taut, healthy looking man who's turning 50 this year, and an immigrant--from Denmark--to this country too, while his wife Patti a native San Diegan whom he met and married here, with two teen age boys (one had just gone to college) and one girl. 

Henrik came here in his early 20's after serving the military in his native country, just like myself. "Why did you decide to come to America, Denmark being such a well-known affluent, welfare society?" I asked him, with curiosity. "Well, somebody has to pay for it," he smiled and said, meaning he's the kind who prefers to make things happen and take care of them himself. He's been in business of his own for years, and was one of the first to take on the e-commerce trend and started an online furniture store back in 1996 that's so successful some people offered millions to buy it, until a few years ago when this great recession hit and his aggressiveness got the better of him and he had to close shop and started working for a major international Danish furniture company as consulting executive traveling between here and New York. 1996 was the year I came up with my first online business VoIP project too, I told him. "We must be long lost brothers, one from the West, the other from the East," he joked.   

It must be a rarity, but both escrows--one for the sale of our old home, and the other for the purchase of the new--closed on the exact dates we set months ago, with a 10 day gap between them that we purposely planned, so we had exactly one workweek for our flooring contractor to get in after we got keys to the new house to install the hardwood on the first floor and upgraded carpeting on the second. Magically, these jobs got done on time as well, right one day before our scheduled move-in to the new house.

Came the moving day, a crew of 4 and a truck 28 feet long arrived on time in the morning and got right down to it: hauling the bulky tables, sofa, chairs and cabinets, and miscellaneous boxes of things we had pre-packed ourselves the previous week, with swift deft hands. So did Kathy and her husband and kids, who came to disassemble and move the office furniture I gave away to them, piece by piece, into their home across the street. In less than two hours, our little big house was reduced to an empty hull like no one had ever lived there before. The truck then reappeared at our new home's front curb shortly after lunch. The downloading was even faster than the uploading, with me and my wife busy directing what items go where. By mid afternoon, the operation was complete and the crew gone, leaving a slew of furniture and boxes scattering around in yet another hulky big little house in a brand new community. 

It's been almost a month since then, and we are yet to figure out all the light switches in the house--which one is for the hallway, or the stairways; which one is for the dimmer, or the straight on/off; my supposed new home office is still standing empty with boxes strewn around; the same is true for the dining nook by the kitchen, since we had given away our dining table set to Kathy as well. The garage door still opens and closes with grinding noise that the builder had promised to fix, as well as little touch up for the walls and doors, here and there. 

But overall we are happy with the grand and spacious rooms of the new house and the quality material they use to build them, the wonderful mountain and ocean views we can see right from our master bedroom and balcony on the second floor, the easy access to the freeway, the fiber-to-the-curb high-speed network that equips each room with an Ethernet plug-in, and the natural, open beauty of the blue Pacific that we can enjoy every time we drive up and down the hill in and out of the community. All the sentiments of leaving the old home are gone, at least for now, replaced by the excitement and many things to do for the new home.

Who knows, next time I check, maybe we'll be living here for another 25 years already.

* For those interested, here's a stream of pictures I collected that shows "how a house was born," and our transition from the old home to the new:

https://picasaweb.google.com/106815509376349700576/Transition?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNuvjdqtsOHA2QE&feat=directlink