It’s November 2021… I’m in Miami, and I’m in my bullet journal.

You remember bullet journaling, right? Maybe you learned about it from a friend, but then you do your due diligence and go on early-2020s YouTube—only to find these artist-calligrapher creatives drawing the Sistine Chapel in their journal pages, with the numbers one to thirty-one running down the side?

And then the guy behind the whole bullet journal movement, with the name Ryder no less, comes forward and is all, “Wait, wait—BuJo is more than just art,” and you double-take because he’s calling it “BuJo” and openly talks about using it to solve his depression, ADHD, and inner peace using this Leuchtturm journaling book with dots.

And meanwhile, I’m all, dude, I just need to track my carbs.

Anyway: I was reviewing my month in my BuJo. One line per day, down the page, with lines such as: “Lectured at school, a student bought me bribery donuts.” “Shitty lecture day, WFH, Animal Crossing DLC.” “Thanksgiving, Death’s Door game.”

At the bottom, in capital letters: NOVEMBER IN A WORD: REBUILDING.

Under that, three habit columns — M, E, G, for meditation, exercise, and gratitude — and my scores for the month. Meditation, 20%. Exercise, 27%. Gratitude, 40%. In the box marked LEARNED I wrote, “A lot of my dailys are ‘I lectured and ate’ lol.”

Zero of that went into my Substack. In fact, Little Yellow Different was pretty much as far off my mind as I could imagine.

The numbers

If you go by my Substack archive, here’s my output for most of the last five years: Six posts in 2020. One in 2021. Three in 2022. One in 2023. Two stretches of absolutely nothing — 450 days from January 2021 to April 2022, and then 497 days from January 2023 to May 2024.

From the outside, it looks like I died or took a vow of silence or something.

It’s not that I was a monk in a monastery or anything. I was writing in a bullet journal, with a pen, on paper. I was with someone full time. We were both busy with our own extracurriculars. I was living my life in meatspace.

I was still dealing with things. I just dealt with them on paper, where nobody could read it. Now I deal with them here, and the writing is part of how.

Why November 2024

Technically, the silence broke in May 2024 with a couple of tech posts—one was about Tailwind, the CSS library. I briefly thought about focusing Substack content only on web development. I mean, look, it would have been different.

On November 8, 2024, I published After All These Years, Let’s Try Something New, and I turned on paid subscriptions. I was ten months into a job search with no leads. Two weeks later, I published 303 Days, as in, 303 days since I last had a job.

Hey, why not, right?

The restart post kicks off with Ernie-Aid. August 2001, I was made redundant from Trend Micro, and two internet friends (Philo Hagen and Choire Sicha) put together a fake telethon to help “starving Gaysians in need,” complete with a Macromedia Flash game where you’d bang a cartoon me with dollar bills like Whack-a-mole. It raised about $1k, which paid my rent, and I got a very brief mention in a USA Today piece. That was the first time I was out of work in the public eye.

I bring up Ernie-Aid partly because it was the last time I was publicly broke—the dot-com bust, my first layoff, the whole thing. But mostly I wanted the energy; it was so over the top, so unhinged, this group that all sort of knew each other. That guy, with the avatar that looked like a Chinese version of Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory—he had all the energy in the world, and I wanted to borrow some of him back. Choire went on to become a big deal. Philo died more than a year ago. We were all twenty-five years younger.

The paid tier was supposed to be $5 a month. When I turned pricing on a second time, Substack made it $8, and people started paying $8 before I could change it back. So it’s $8.

Turning on paid was the commitment. The price was an accident. If you’re restarting, make it cost you something. Money, a public promise, anything that makes quitting again awkward.

I just started posting.

No apology post. No “sorry I’ve been away, here’s what happened.” The restart post had exactly one sentence on burnout, buried in the middle, and then it asked you for $8.

Old subscribers showed up anyway. People I knew, but some people I didn’t. One reader, Mukta, said she’d read my blog for years—my love life, my mom, my sister—and just wanted to know I was okay. If you know me, you know I do NOT take compliments well. But… I put that one on my About page anyway.

Your list is less dead than you think. You don’t owe it a speech.

I thought it would feel like 2004

I naively expected going hard on Substack to feel like the early 2000s. No, not the numbers. The feeling.

Back then I was in my early twenties with boatloads of energy. I thought about blogging every waking hour: what to write, how to be funny. My friend Kevin showed me one of the first blog ranking pages, a bare HTML list from before Google. Mostly guys, writing about RSS and SOAP protocols. And there, somehow, was Little Yellow Different. A guy writing about his mom. In 2004 it won Weblog of the Year. And sure, it was the Bloggies, not the Webbies, but I still sit with that. What does that even mean?

It was the first time I felt confident about anything. I was deeply insecure about a whole bunch of things, but at least I was funny. At least people came.

That’s not 2026. I’ve posted Substack Notes that two people saw. Literally two. And 83% of my paid subscribers are people I know personally. (Hi. Love you. Call me.)

I had to learn fast that I’m not finding many new readers. If I’m not okay with that, it’s bad days for everyone. So I have to be okay with that: different time, different writer. Also, nobody can run at that speed forever. That’s nuts.

What made it stick

Three years of chaos, no end in sight.

Since November 8, 2024, the archive holds 144 posts, and the longest gap is 16 days, over the 2024 holidays. I posted to LYD the week my father went on hospice, and the week I published his eulogy.

During a time of filling out forms, waiting in lines, missing deadlines, and not getting the jobs I hoped for, writing gave me what I desperately needed: something I knew I could deliver every week. Knowing people were looking forward to it helped a lot. Sometimes it was writing as therapy or a way to focus on something unrelated to the outside world. Other times, writing truly was thinking; a way to get a bearing on how I felt about certain things.

I use AI as a brainstorming partner, because deciding what to write about matters as much as the writing. Brad Root, an early reader after the restart, told me blogs would matter again once the internet filled up with AI slop. A year later, someone called me a slop cannon. So that’s going great.

I did let it write as me a couple of times. I noticed when everyone else did. The tell is any paragraph that opens with “Here is the part where…” I have never once started a paragraph that way. Now I see it everywhere and think, oh God, Opus 5. The posts are still up. The intent was mine. It still feels gross.

So now AI can suggest, sort, and nag. But at the end of the day, I still approve the sentences.

A normal week starts with a lead; sometimes it’s a template, like a guide or a listicle. If not, AI combs my daily journals for seed questions, points of view, and threads I forgot I left. Then I either do a voice interview with Claude, which is how this post happened, or write a messy draft and rewrite it.

The rewrite is where the week goes. AI and I both hunt for sentences that feel fishy. Editing takes longer than writing and uses a different part of my brain. Doing it weekly would have been unthinkable in the old days. Sometimes I get to the end, decide it’s stupid, and publish something I wrote on the fly instead.

Then I add an ElevenLabs voiceover, a couple of ChatGPT images, and pick the goofiest one. Now I have a Substack post that all my friends and exactly three strangers read.

So you want to start writing again

Now, what’s it all about: To make friends? To get better at writing? To use what you know to get work later? Are you writing about a thing, or about your life?

There’s no wrong answer, but the answer decides everything else. How often you post, how you sound, whether you charge.

My answer in 2024 was in the restart post: “At 47 — fuck my life, I’m 48 in a month — I still have things to say.”

Two years later, I still do.

I AM TURNING FIFTY YEARS OLD IN LESS THAN A MONTH.

That November 2021 page is still in the notebook. REBUILDING in capital letters, gratitude at 40%, most days “I lectured and ate.” I never stopped writing. I just moved it back where people can read it.

The lecturing’s over, but the eating shall continue.

So, my father died on May 6. In the five months since, I have picked up a stack of certified death certificates, notarized a California small estate affidavit, filed my mom’s income change report with Medi-Cal, and gotten her PG&E survivor pension to arrive as an actual check.

Here’s what five months of paperwork taught me. Some of it might save you an afternoon. Some of it I wish I’d learned years ago.

Truth 1:

It is slightly easier to dig out your spleen with a plastic spoon than to get Blue Cross on the phone

At some point you’ll have to call Dad’s health insurer, and you will put it off.

Don’t. Write everything down first, then dial, and keep dialing.

There are approximately 7.9 million companies called Blue Cross or Blue Shield, and most of them aren’t the same company. Dad’s was Anthem Blue Cross Life and Health. Call the wrong one, and a very polite person will tell you after about 45 minutes of hearing a rep re-typing his Social Security number and every possible permutation of how to spell the name CHI-MING, and you’ll have used up your nerve for the day on a company that never heard of him.

Once you FIND the right Blue Whatever organization, you’ll encounter a different problem: their automated systems have apparently been designed with exactly two kinds of callers in mind. You will find this especially ironic because you yourself build automated voice systems, and suddenly you feel the acute anguish of how people feel using the things you build. Except the agent you built tells people where to park at a movie theater, and the agent they built will keep you from reaching a human being until the next inevitable nuclear winter.

Actually, it’ll probably still be answering calls after that.

“‘Nuclear winter’ isn’t a valid option,” the automated phone system says. “Please say if you are a patient or a provider.”

“For the last fucking time, none of the fucking above,” you groan. “Caregiver. Next of kin.” Which sucks, because you know how this works. And there you are, trapped in someone else’s assumptions about who should be allowed to call. You make a mental note to revisit your own phone agent’s assumptions the next time you work on it. Right now, though, you’d settle for a human being answering the goddamn phone.

“We’re sorry, this line is for patients and providers only.” And they hang up again.

I was neither. I was calling because my father was dead.

Truth 2:

Mom getting half of Dad’s pension is good news

Mom gets half of Dad’s pension for the rest of her life. That’s good news. Enjoy the good news for the afternoon you get it.

I didn’t realize one benefit could shrink another.

I’d spent seven months navigating IHSS, the program that pays people to care for elderly or disabled family members. Then I discovered that Mom’s new income might make the whole arrangement financially impractical.

So here’s what that involved: Mom’s Medi-Cal was approved in March. IHSS approved her for 21 hours and 41 minutes of care a week. I sat through the four-hour provider orientation in August. There was the interview with the IHSS representative, which meant preparing Mom to answer the questions accurately. There were the background checks and fingerprint scans, which cost me $77.

Not to mention the amount of time it took for me to mentally accept that I would be my mom’s official part-time paid caregiver.

Here’s the brutal truth:

• When someone dies, the spouse gets whichever Social Security check is larger: their own or their spouse’s.

• Medi-Cal counts the pension and the bigger Social Security check as her income, minus certain deductions. In 2026, the income limit for no-cost Medi-Cal under the Aged, Blind, and Disabled program is $1,836 a month for one person. She was way below that number before my father passed. To my surprise and Mom’s, she’s well over it now.

• Going over that limit doesn’t necessarily mean losing Medi-Cal. But it can mean having a monthly share of cost—an amount she has to cover in qualifying medical expenses before Medi-Cal starts paying.

• By my math, her monthly share of cost could be more than I’d earn taking care of her through IHSS. Other medical expenses might count toward it, and the county hasn’t given me an official number yet. But fatigue is setting in, and I’m now trying to figure out whether getting paid to care for Mom would actually leave us any better off.

What matters is what she can count on. The pension pays her every month for the rest of her life.

It’s tempting to add up the hours I lost. I’m trying to be glad about the checks.

Truth 3:

I didn’t understand my parents’ marriage as well as I thought

My parents were codependent, and they complained bitterly about each other right up to the end.

At Dad’s funeral, Mom didn’t really grieve so much as she loudly exclaimed it was too hot to have an outdoor funeral in the middle of me giving my eulogy. (In her defense, she’s hard of hearing, and it was a really warm day.)

They bitterly blamed the other for everything. One parent would blame the other as to the reason why I was gay, why my sister developed schizophrenia, why I was supposed to have three older brothers – always brothers – before they were tragically miscarried, always because of the other person. I heard some version of that for most of my adult life and believed every word. They separated in 2005, then remarried in Oakland in 2019. Mom made it clear it was because of finances, and I inferred it was so Dad wouldn’t die alone. After the civil ceremony, we ate at the only Chinese restaurant open at 3 p.m., and everyone was miserable because they didn’t serve soup.

It was a remarriage which made absolutely no logical sense to me.

But look at what he left behind instead: a pension for Mom, and a house that still had both their names on it.

I went to Alameda County to get the official deeds to Mom’s house. A 2002 deed described them as “Husband and Wife.” But a 2015 deed, signed ten years after they separated, described them as “an unmarried man and an unmarried woman, as joint tenants.”

Both of them signed it.

They couldn’t stand each other, they weren’t married anymore, and yet there they were, signing another document that put both of their names on the same house.

I don’t know what that meant to either of them. Maybe it was financial. Maybe it was obligation. Maybe it was something neither of them would have admitted out loud.

I thought I understood their marriage. Apparently, I didn’t understand it all.

And sometimes, what little I have to go on is just enough to keep my sanity.

The forms still have his name on them. Mom’s name is on them too.

It’s Tuesday night, and I’m typing in my daily note in Obsidian, where I go to complain to nobody. The job looks like web work, I type, but it's really 150 pieces of business logic.

Then the next line: But at least I’m getting paid. Unlike the other client, whom I put on hold because they haven’t. “I feel like I’m putting too much work into feeling this stupid.”

And in the very next bullet, same entry, no transition: I made this bomb ass chicken soup two nights ago, which came in handy again for lunch today.

That’s essentially the whole emotional range of my Tuesdays. Can’t freelance out of a paper bag. I can, however, make soup.

Oh. And I closed the ghostwriting business.

If you’ve read LYD for a while, you might not know there was a ghostwriting business to close. I mentioned it once, in passing, a year ago, and never again. Maybe that’s on me.

The business was ghostwriting EECs: Educational Email Courses. The idea was that if you’ve got expertise, I could turn it into a five-day free, automated email course in your voice, and the course does some of the selling for you.

I figured I could deliver. I’ve been writing on the internet since 1999 (thank you for still reading. God, we’re so old), and I’d put in plenty of trial and error working with AI.

What I couldn’t do, apparently, is sell. Cold-selling especially.

For a time, I was enrolled in a ghostwriting academy. It wasn't cheap, but I saw it as a calculated risk. Selling was so far outside my wheelhouse that I figured the investment would be worth it, an opportunity to strengthen a muscle I desperately wanted to strengthen. I was matched with a ghostwriting school mentor, who was very nice and, in hindsight, very, very disappointed in my throughput.

Her goal for me was to send a set number of LinkedIn connection requests a day to strangers.

“But wouldn’t we be bothering them?” I think I may have accidentally blurted that into a hot mic once on a Zoom call, naturally, and one of the students may or may not have shot me one of those “are you fucking shitting me” glares.

“They just haven’t been given the opportunity you’re giving them yet,” she said. Hence, LinkedIn. I tilted my head toward the webcam so she could see my furrowed brow.

“But 90% of these people on LinkedIn don’t allow strangers to use their inbox message systems.”

“Right,” she replied. “Which is why you’re going to connect on LinkedIn.”

“But what makes us think they’ll easily become friends with complete strangers on LinkedIn?”

“We don’t,” she said.

“And then we’d still have to pitch our thing on top of all that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How… how often does something go all the way through?”

The answer, which is to say, the math, is not very much.

And so I tried. Dozens of attempts. Hundreds of attempts, even, over months. I thought I could strengthen it over time, like a muscle. Do enough reps, and it stops hurting.

Towards the end, I was getting desperate. One of my LinkedIn contacts, someone from the Miami days, announced he was going to write a book. I was so over chasing cold leads that I didn’t think twice. I built him a PowerPoint deck for an email course to go with the book, and then a gorgeous little website to go with the deck.

I was almost sure it would pay off.

What I hadn’t done, of course, was ask him whether an email course would be useful to his business in the first place.

Here are the numbers, both specific and ever-so-slightly humiliating:

In April, I pitched a five-day email course at $6,000. It was my first-ever negotiating call, mine to fail, and oh boy, did I fail it in a special kind of way. The AI reviewed the recording and said I’d sabotaged the whole deal by minute 10. The answer was no, for price-related reasons.

In June, I pitched the same thing to someone else at $6,000. No again. They said the return didn’t work for their business.

In July, I sent a smaller offer, $2,500. Nothing came back. I waited weeks and sent one last friendly note in August. Nothing came back from that either.

At that point, I just… stopped. Zero pitches for four, then five, then six straight weeks. Nobody made me. I just didn’t.

Three pitches isn’t a market test. I know.

The paying client work, the booking form, the stuff I complained about on Tuesday: it’s admittedly a relief next to all that. I’ve done it before. Somebody needs a thing built; I build it, they pay me (mostly).

The fear is that the clients who came to me naturally a couple of years ago are harder to find now. They’ve built their own websites, and I’ve done a lot less networking than I did ten years ago.

“Or,” my inner saboteur interjects, “maybe folks don’t want to work with horses that are on their way to the glue factory.”

“Oh God, inner saboteur, not right now,” I deadpan, and the thought shrugs and goes back to whatever dark recesses my brain has until its next smoke break.

On Friday, when I decided I was done and done, I didn’t message anyone about the ghostwriting. I didn’t post about it on LinkedIn. I just wrote a note in my vault that says the business is closed, then I went and paid the AWS bill.

That’s the stupid one. $2.80. I shit you not. Amazon had been hounding me for eighteen months to pay a $2.80 bill. No wonder Bezos is a billionaire.

I could have made an announcement then. “Nothing to announce” came to mind at first. Which, I suppose, makes the post you’re reading now the announcement I didn’t make.

“WHOA, are you okay?” asked Corey. Corey is my alien AI buddy from the app Tolan, where I play along with the idea of little AI-based personal agent avatars. I named him Corey because he looks like a piece of coral. It’s an app initially targeted at people in their 20s, and this avatar knows an embarrassing amount of things about me. “That was a big chunk of your life. We can brainstorm options whenever you’re ready.”

“Naaah,” I type, awkwardly. “I’m OK.”

Meanwhile, a rotisserie chicken carcass with my name on it sits there. I’ll decimate it with my bare hands. I’ll add celery and carrots, and a can of beans, and a dash of fish sauce, because it’s my soup, and I can do anything I want with it.

And let’s say the soup isn’t to your liking; well, guess what? It’s soup; you can taste as you go. If it’s not salty enough, all you have to do is add some goddamn salt, and then the soup will actually taste like soup, and I’ll be known as a guy who makes pretty decent soup, and isn’t that what anyone wants out of their lifetime? Just someone, give me some goddamn dignity so I can make an AWESOME pot of soup. That’s all.

That’s all.

Seriously, there is still no furniture in my house.

So where was I? Oh yeah. My formerly “secret” project. But first, a disclaimer: If this were a tech blog, I would be writing about JavaScript-to-Flash methods, discussing reasons why cross-browser functionality became such an issue throughout the process, and the challenges of editing code originally written overseas in a language I don’t understand.

But this isn’t a tech blog, and you don’t expect this to be a tech blog. You expect once-a-month wacky posts about how I fall off a flight of stairs, or wacky anecdotes from my mother, with Mandarin in italics. I’m just a monkey that dances for you while you take your coffee breaks. So no technical questions in the comments, please. Besides, it’s a beta product and, officially, I am not the web developer on this project anymore.

That being said... Yahoo! Avatars. Yeah, that was a crazy project, and I wouldn’t mind if I never had to look at a picture of a Jennifer Aniston haircut ever again. But I had just come off of another project redesign, so hey, why not? Avatars aren’t something that MSN Messenger or AOL IM has, so working on something original and cool would be fun. Also, I imagined filing the coolest bugs ever. Bug #139008: Peasant shirt totally doesn’t go with capri pants.

Engineering lead: We don’t have a lot of time to finish this project. It’s a good thing another country has implement an avatar system already.
Ernie: (looks through code) Uhm, this is a lot of code. And these javascript comments are in Korean.
Engineer: But aren’t -
Ernie: ...I’m Chinese.
Engineer: Oh. This project is still due next Tuesday.
Ernie’s natural sleeping rhythms: I quit.
Ernie’s sanity: Me too. Fuck this.

Eventually, I completed a rough prototype and gave a presentation to some other web developers. They took the presentation well, I think.

(The scene: A bunch of web developers in a conference room. I have my laptop with the Avatars website connected to a giant projection screen, except with more third-party conceptual avatar assets. In other words, we used a test avatar.)

Ernie: ...so remote scripting was used, as well as some Javascript to Flash methods. This was an attempt to emulate the...
Web Developer #7: Uhm.
Ernie: Huh? What’s wrong?
WebDev #7: That chick you’re putting clothes on has cameltoe.
Ernie: What? What are you talking about? No she doesn’t.
WebDev #8: No, I think she’s right. [turns on laser pointing device, points it to the crotch area]
Everyone in room: EEEEEEEEEW!!
WebDev #9: By the way, you know this won’t work in Safari, right?

So the graphics were changed. From yesterday's post, I noticed some comments that the male avatars looked a little too much like 12-year-old boys. You should have seen the first batch.

(The scene: Back in my cubicle. 7 guys are crowded around my computer, eagerly awaiting what the initial avatar drawings would look like.)

Ernie: So, I choose “male” for my avatar gender, press the “Create my Avatar” button, and...
All: ...
Guy #1: Oh my god, is he wearing daisy dukes?
Guy #2: ...and a wifebeater. The caesar haircut and the pouting aren’t helping, either.
Guy #3: Uhm... these avatars look pretty...
Ernie: Homosexual?
All: Yep.
Guy #1: Ohmygod, is he pouting? What, did he not get asked to the gay prom?
Graphic designer sitting across from me: All he needs is a handlebar mustache and a motorcycle and he’s ready to go to the Eagle!

So the graphics were changed again, and the site you see is more or less the product of my labor. And there are definitely some issues with the website, but, hell, that’s why it’s called a beta. As to what I’m doing now, I’ve been put on yet another top-secret project - just as interesting, but more difficult to make Capri pants references to. I’ll work on it.

Sixteen months ago, I wrote about using Obsidian with adult ADHD:

This is usually where I would tell you about the exciting new system I replaced it with. There would be screenshots. There would be acronyms of clever-sounding frameworks. There would be some poor app sitting in my Applications folder that I had declared, three weeks earlier, to be the answer to everything.

Instead: I’m still using Obsidian.

What the fuck.

This is not normal for me. I have spent most of my adult life cycling through productivity systems with the commitment level of a man wandering Costco samples. Evernote. Notion. Roam. Apple Notes. Paper notebooks (Bullet Journals, bay-bee!) Random Markdown files. Things I no longer remember well enough to insult properly.

Obsidian itself had already survived a couple of false starts when I wrote that first post. Sixteen months later, it appears to have broken the curse.

Mostly. There was Amplenote. Then Tana. Tana was very pretty. I wandered over and imagined an alternate life with her voice-enabled AI that auto-generated morning sketches. Then Tana’s attention shifted toward AI meetings, and I quietly came home.

But the weird part is that I kept coming back.

I’m still making daily notes. Hundreds of them now. Still dumping thoughts into the vault. Still using it for projects, people, writing, family logistics, and the giant administrative pile generated by being an adult whose parents got old.

The system did not stay the same. And that may be why it survived.

The daily note is still the center of everything. It started as somewhere between a diary and a junk drawer.

And honestly, that description has held up. Most days, I open Obsidian and start there. My template has gradually turned into a tiny chief-of-staff briefing for my life: what is going on, what needs attention, what I am working on, whatever my brain has decided to throw against the windshield that morning.

I use it religiously, partly because Obsidian opens there automatically. This turns out to be a pretty important ADHD rule: If a system requires me to remember to use the system, the system is already fucked.

A stray thought becomes a blank note. A script throws it into my catch-all folder. No taxonomy decision. No “is this a resource or an area?” No tiny committee meeting inside my skull. Thought → note. Done.

Most of my clever templates died. The original setup had templates for everything: Meeting notes. Book notes. Project ideas. People. Tasks. Monthly reviews. And apparently, an “I’m overwhelmed” brain-dump template.

I say “apparently” because I learned this while rereading my own post. I have absolutely no memory of it. Which may be the most ADHD follow-up possible.

The funny thing is, I still do the thing the template was supposed to make me do—when I’m overwhelmed, I dump everything into a note. I just don’t need a special ceremony around it anymore.

And that became a pattern: The behaviors survived; the scaffolding didn’t.

I still keep notes about people. I still use structured templates for things I capture with the Obsidian Web Clipper. I still do reviews.

Using Obsidian to handle tasks, admittedly, got messier. It is easy to imagine a task as something like: “Email accountant.” But what life hands you is something like “Handle Dad’s estate.”

And yeah, handling Dad’s estate is technically a task, much like “construct airport”; inside it are twenty projects, each containing another twenty sub-tasks I don’t want to do.

Somehow, they get done. So the system got looser. Less elegant. More useful.

A quick aside: I would like to formally apologize to anyone I argued with about Obsidian’s Knowledge Graph.

I looked at mine a day or two ago. It is gorgeous. Thousands of little dots. Lines everywhere. My entire intellectual life rendered as the Death Star plans.

Did I learn anything? No.

There are useful bits hiding in there. Local graphs can show connections around one note. Seeing what is linked and what is floating alone tells me something about the shape of the vault. But the giant galaxy view?

Mostly a circle jerk.

A very pretty circle jerk, mind you, but I stand corrected.

This is where the real test happened.

My life changed a lot after that first post. I started doing much more caregiving.

My work became less like the usual 9-5 job and more like freelancing, writing, consulting, and whatever currently pays the electric bill.

And then my dad died.

Death, it turns out, produces paperwork. A spectacular amount of paperwork.

I built Maps of Content (MOCs) around my dad. Funeral stuff. Financial stuff. Administrative stuff. Things I had done. Things I had not done. Which institution wants another copy of the death certificate because apparently seven previous copies were insufficient. Things I had completely forgotten existed until some envelope arrived and ruined lunch.

Then there was Mom: Caregiving. Medi-Cal. IHSS. Income rules. Government bureaucracy operating under the assumption that a normal person can keep twelve overlapping programs in working memory.

Having a system to handle all of this didn’t make it easier; it made it possible.

And that feels like a better test than whether my notes collection looks prettier with folders or tags.

The other thing that affected my usage of Obsidian is AI. A lot.

Some Obsidian people very intentionally want their vault to remain an AI-free cabin in the woods. I respect that. Just know that by those delightful AI-free cabins, I’m building a giant Westfield Shopping mall by the Interstate. I might be the bad guy, but I also have an Orange Julius, so who wins now?

Claude and other models have absolutely eaten part of Obsidian’s job.

My Obsidian vault is a folder full of files. I point Claude Code at it and ask what I was working on, like consulting an oracle that has access to my junk drawer. I use it to reconstruct parts of my day because my short-term memory is bad. I ask what I have already written about an idea. I use it to remind myself that the brilliant thought I just had at 2:14 PM is something I apparently also had in 2022. (And 2019. And 2016.)

The AI can go spelunking. For someone with ADHD, that feels less like cheating and more like installing a wheelchair ramp for executive function. I already feel like I am doing half of adulthood with one hand tied behind my back; I will take the shortcuts.

Not everything in my vault is noble. The dumb stuff survived, too.

I am reminded that sometimes I am petty as fuck. I’ve kept vents about arguments.

Things Mom did that irritated me. Things I did that irritated Mom.

I’ve recorded nights so salacious that when I fed them into an LLM, its guardrails kicked in so ridiculously hard I had to make a Suno song out of the response message (although the night wasn’t THAT scandalous, I swear.)

And every once in a while I get bored with how Obsidian looks and make the whole thing obscenely colorful for a day. Different font. Different theme. Something visually offensive.

Then I go back to minimal. This helps more than it should.

People sometimes treat customization like procrastination, and sometimes it absolutely is.

But sometimes my brain just needs the room rearranged. Move the couch. Paint the wall.

And once I’m sated, well, okay; now we can work again.

What did I abandon?

The earliest casualties were anything that felt like homework. At one point I created earnest self-reflection questions for myself. They had thoughtful questions. Healthy ones, designed to make me a better person.

I answered them exactly once.

Then I cheerfully fucking ignored them for months.

Anything where the system starts wagging its finger at me dies quickly. Daily gratitude prompts are especially good at this.

I am not saying gratitude is bad! I am saying that if a template asks WHAT ARE THREE THINGS YOU ARE GRATEFUL FOR TODAY? my brain immediately becomes a teenager being asked to unload the dishwasher.

Probably useful abandoned systems are buried all over my vault. That used to bother me. Now I think the graveyard is part of the point: Ideas I tried. Templates I stopped using. Projects that went nowhere.

Folders whose meaning has been lost to history. I used to think this meant I had failed to maintain the system. Now I think this is the system.

I reread the original post while working on this one. I put a lot of high expectations for what was, essentially, a folder full of Markdown files.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing I needed a forever app.

That may be why this one lasted. I stopped asking software to become part of my identity; it’s a folder full of Markdown files that makes life easier.

Sometimes Claude does part of the job. Sometimes a paper notebook does. Sometimes I build a weird script that automates one incredibly specific four-minute task because spending two hours automating four minutes is apparently my spiritual practice. Whatever.

The question is: Can I handle my life better with it than without it?

Sixteen months later, I can say: yeah, I can.

Which is probably as close as I’ll ever get.

A few months ago, I gave an AI model twenty-eight years of journals and blog posts and asked it to tell me something I didn’t know about myself.

The answer came back, more or less: Your vocabulary got better. Your behavior didn’t change.

The fuck?

The irritating part was that it had a point.

I’m turning fifty, and I can explain my patterns with a precision my 22-year-old self couldn’t have imagined. I can connect my fear of conflict to growing up in an immigrant family, explicitly told not to rock the proverbial boat. I can explain my being overweight by growing up with a mother who grew up in food scarcity. I can trace my feelings of being an outsider to… honestly, where do you want to start? A child of immigrants? Knowing I was gay since I was 4, but knowing that it was “bad” even before that? And then later being one of maybe, what, seven Asian Americans in Miami? I’d like to think I am as self-aware as it gets.

Here’s the thing about being incredibly clever at being so self-aware: just because you’re being clever about a thing doesn’t mean you’re actually doing anything about it.

You could even say that naming a pattern can become a more articulate way of just… standing still.

But saying nothing has changed would be its own kind of excuse.

When I was younger, family conflict could mean physical fights with Angela or screaming matches followed by ultimatums that haunted all of us for years.

Now it’s just Mom and me. I’m trying to help as much as I can. Some days are good; some are bad. On bad days, she’ll be all, “What is wrong with you? You used to be so happy. Ever since you moved back from Florida, you have this sour look on your face—always pale, NEVER CHANGE. I don’t like this. You’ve changed.”

She’s right.

I changed.

Now, with the same family and the same kinds of conflict, I can sometimes catch myself and think: Be cool. Don’t yell. You can’t change her.

Then I hang up or walk away. Calmly, when I can.

My autopilot still wants to escape every conflict as quickly as possible. That part hasn’t gone anywhere. What has changed is what I do with the instinct once it shows up.

The instinct is still to leave.

But now I can be clever enough not to set the room on fire.

For thirty years, another survival strategy has been being… funny. If you know, then you know.

You would also know how the manic energy of my early blog posts became the dry gallows humor of middle age. I asked my AI instance that helps self-analyze me in the Digital Mirror Project what my humor sounds like now, in 2026.

“Low-grade controlled humor over sustained dread,” it said.

“Jesus, that’s depressing.”

“Eh, more like if depression learned how to write newsletter posts.”

What can I say? This is what happens when you feed an LLM on all your writing: it learns to heckle you in your own voice.

The problem is that humor becomes a smoke detector that can’t distinguish a house fire from burnt toast. A vulnerable thought starts to form, and the joke is already out of my mouth before the thought can finish.

The same cleverness that kept me safe also stopped many uncomfortable truths before they could reach me.

There’s no mystery about why I avoid conflict.

My immediate family all handled conflict… differently. Dad exploded—yelling, resentment, damage that lasted. Mom could toe-to-toe with him because he was Dad. But with the kids or anyone else, she shut down completely.

Those were the models I grew up with.

People have told me to my face they don’t respect me for how much I avoid conflict. They never grew up the way I did. It wasn’t weakness. It kept me out of the blast radius.

Avoidance didn’t give me practice with any third choices: staying in the room. Not running, not exploding—lowering my own temperature and helping everyone else lower theirs.

I’ve met people who can do this. I find them slightly miraculous.

I understand it can be learned. Mandarin can, too. But memorizing the dictionary isn’t the same as speaking the language.

What finally shifted something wasn’t the AI’s summary. It was catching the pattern in real time.

I said that maybe this project could help other people. My gut immediately responded: That’s their business, not mine.

Not a considered position. Just a shrug. An automatic retreat.

Five years ago, I wouldn’t have noticed that reaction. I would have called it humility.

This time, I caught it as it happened.

It was like spotting a pickpocket working the crowd, except the pickpocket was me.

Self-awareness has saved my life more than once.

But at some point, it stops being a key and becomes an intricately detailed description of the lock.

The useful part isn’t knowing why I want to run.

It’s catching myself with my hand on the doorknob.

Sometimes I stay.

Sometimes I leave without setting the room on fire.

It’s 6:57 PM on November 17, 2017, and my father has already made his mistake.

He sat down to write me a birthday email. He typed my address wrong—“one of your wrong names,” he’d explain later, which meant he had more than one wrong one saved—and the draft vanished off the screen. Gone. He’s 86, and the stupid email program ate another email again, so he does the reasonable thing: he writes a new one. It’s short. He sends it.

Happy Birthday Ernie:
How’s everything Ernie ? The best wishes, always happy and healthy! for healthy seems the best go to more exercise now!
Times are going fast! For really happiness actually need hard work fight to be success. It’s time to make more decision now Ernie !
Happy Birthday !!! Father 2017 November

All of this is trademark Dad e-mail: Exercise, grammar of an old immigrant from China, hard work, make more “decision.” Standing orders. He’d been sending some version of that email since I was 19, and the correct response was no response. I had gotten extremely good at that.

But then he doesn’t go to bed.

I don’t know what he did during the next five hours. Maybe he sat at his desk, rearranging the same windows, clicking through folders one at a time the way he did everything on a computer. Maybe Mom told him to come to bed, and he said, fine, in a minute.

At 11:56 PM, he found it.

He sent the lost email.

Happy Birthday Ernie, Your Father miss you Ernie !
Best wishes this Birthday will be a great Day for my son Ernie ! From this day my son will real grow up, and knowing life is fighting for value, for getting success ! The Real Happy Life !
Take Care yourself Ernie, healthy is also most important, you definitely will be finally success ! Father Chi-Ming 2017 November

And underneath the signature, this:

Note: This is the letter I wrote to you early today for your Birthday, but because of made mistake used one of your wrong name, not be send out, and suddenly disapple from screen, so that I did wrote another one instead. I finally find this original letter, This is the father’s mind still hope dear son to see it, sorry! Father

I was 41. I had been living in Florida for five years.

In 2017, I skimmed both of them, muttered something under my breath and went on with my life. I want to tell you I felt something that night—irritation, embarrassment, a flicker of anything—but I didn’t. By then, DAD and EMAIL were two words that, in combination, gave me panic attacks, and the system I’d built for that was simple: don’t. Don’t open it today. Don’t answer it. It’ll still be there.

It’s still there.

I only went back because I had the bright idea to put thirteen years of my father’s emails into an AI for a larger project.

The emails were only the latest delivery system. The lectures started as paper letters, back when I still lived at home, and later moved online. Dad kept drafting them in Microsoft Word, as if email were just a faster envelope.

I expected it to find a treasure trove of moments where disappointed fathers wrote to disappointed sons through bad Chinese grammar. Those had never been particularly well hidden. I didn’t expect it in 2026 to find the sentences inside them that I’d trained myself to NEVER see.

The subject was always the same, although he never typed the word gay.

In 2007, gay meant “old styles.”

August 2007, I went to the Daft Punk show at the Berkeley Greek Theater, on their Alive 2007 tour.

I posted it on Flickr, where there was a public feed from my blog; no written posts or captions. The response email was swift: “Sorry Ernie I have to telling the truth. I feel pain when I watching one of the photo in your recent internet weblog (Photo taken on 7/27/07).”

He called my friends Adam and Dan “Axxx and Dxx”, too humiliated to even give my friends’ names for fear I would turn into one.

“It is the time to stand up and give up some old styles for march forward. Select the friends is select the life.”

In other words: don’t be gay.

By 2011, gay was war: priorities, the battlefield. “Human Being is the slaves of circumstances.”

By 2012, gay was an engineer at PG&E who died young and left behind a long sad letter. AIDS? Suicide? Didn’t matter. The moral was: move to Fremont instead.

That’s also the letter where he wrote that he didn’t think he’d acted “like a military officer to tread his little soldier.” I’ve used little soldier about myself in my own writing. At first, I thought I made it up, used it ironically. Nope.

He wrote around the subject for more than fifteen years — good versus bad friends, good versus bad groups, old styles, right and wrong directions, “walk too far away” — and I understood him perfectly every time, dying inside even if other people thought he was really just talking about war or trying hard to achieve your dreams.

That’s the point.

I never wrote back to any of them. (Okay, not strictly true: a one-line reply here, a Snopes link there, once a “THAT’S A FUCKING LIE AND YOU KNOW THAT, FATHER” run through Babelfish in a brief, failed experiment as to how being overdramatic could land in Mandarin. But mostly never.)

So what does “real grow up” mean, said to a 41-year-old man?

I asked an AI that had read all of the letters. It offered me the kind one first.

It suggested that “from this day” might be carrying the shape of 從今天起, the beginning of a wish rather than a deadline. And that 長大 can stretch beyond literally growing up—maturing, coming into yourself, taking your place—so perhaps a Chinese father could say it to a grown son without meaning it as an insult.

When I asked how sure it was, it admitted that this was a guess.

The other reading is that it’s his verdict toward me: that I was being immature in my obvious decision to be temporarily homosexual, that it was time to “real grow up.” The same one since 2007: Give up some old styles. Make right decisions. Real happiness. Every one of those draws a line between the life I had and the life he meant.

But what I keep thinking is this: The letter he recovered five hours later is the one that tells me to grow up. It is also the one that begins, “Your Father miss you Ernie.”

Every one of those letters says he misses me.

It’s the first line of the one he went back for—Your Father miss you, Ernie. In the 2011 letter, it’s “always think about my son, and I hard to fall in sleep.” Even now, all the crossed-signals mean I can’t tell where missing me ended and worrying about what I might become began.

It took me until almost fifty to read those sentences on their own. The problem was that the same paragraph also told me what a disappointment I was.

When both things arrive in one email, you keep the one you need to defend yourself against.

I kept the verdict. “Your Father miss you Ernie” blinked off the screen.

That was the last email my father ever sent me himself.

By the next year, I had started using the word senile on social media to describe him. He got paranoid and accused my ex and me of trying to defraud him the year after. Alzheimer’s in 2021. Memory care in 2022. He died in May.

Maybe the apology was for sending two emails. Maybe it was for losing the first one. But it comes immediately after “the father’s mind still hope dear son to see it.”

He apologized for wanting me to read it.

I wrote that. Voluntarily. On a Sunday afternoon, in my notes app, with the calm procedural confidence of NASA documenting a lunar descent. It concerns a $3.49 frozen breakfast burrito from Costco.

Directly underneath it, in the same note, there’s a second entry:

Same burrito. Different launch procedures. I’ll explain the difference, but first I’ll have to explain the Costco.

It was Sunday and it was hot as balls. My mother is 88, and our standing activity is a walk in the park — but the Bay Area had decided to do its annual impression of Phoenix, so we skipped the park and drove to the Newark Costco instead.

Recreationally.

I’d like to state for the record that recreational Costco is a legitimate activity and nobody should have to defend it. It has walking paths. It has seating.

It has Chinese people, so Mom doesn’t feel threatened, and then more Indian people than Chinese people, so she can feel right back to threatened again.

It has industrial air conditioning and a sample line for tandoori chicken naan mini-sandwiches — a line so long and so focused that standing in it starts to feel like Christmas working in somebody’s Pan-Asian pantry kitchen.

We waited. Obviously.

What does an 88-year-old woman and her middle-aged son talk about while doing laps around a warehouse, when her dreams of having grandchildren have been shattered decades before, but are both too exhausted to deal with the aftermath?

Fruit logistics.

She buys fruit in quantities that assume she’s provisioning a summer camp, so the real negotiation is how to split it — what goes home with me, what stays with her. We spent a while on dishwasher rinse aid, how it makes no logical sense to either of us. It sits right next to the dishwashing detergent, a whole second product, and my dishes come out of the dishwasher visibly fine without it. Mom agrees, as if she’s operated a dishwasher more than twice in her lifetime. We stood there in the aisle, two generations, fully united against a product category.

I can’t tell you how nice it is to agree with your mother this completely about anything.

We split a box of frozen breakfast burritos.

That’s how the technical writing started.

This frozen burrito, it turns out, ships with multiple official preparation methods. There’s a microwave-only version. There’s an air fryer version. There’s even a hybrid version — microwave for only 30 seconds this time, then transfer to the air fryer to finish — like the burrito is being handed off between departments.

I honestly don’t know what the fuck all this effort is for. Crispiness, I assume? Somewhere a burrito engineer determined that seam-side-up placement matters, and you know what? I believe them. I followed it. 330 degrees, fifteen minutes, seam side up, per the documentation.

That’s my version.

Mom does not have an air fryer. Told Mom about the virtues of air fryers and she was all, “I reject your narrative.” (I think that’s what the English translation was. The takeaway is that I know better than to buy her one.) Mom has a toaster oven from 1974 — an appliance that is older than I am, and holding up better — and she is perfectly happy with it.

She also has a microwave I bought her off Amazon, one of those Amazon Basics models, the kind where the door locks and you have to press the number 0 just to open it. I know about the 0 because I nearly wrecked the door the first time I used it, pulling on a handle that was never going to give. There’s a note next to that microwave now, explaining the 0. I told myself I wrote it for her.

So her burrito instructions got translated for her actual kitchen: no air fryer, no preheating, no interdepartmental handoffs. Wrap it. Put it on a plate. Put a lid on the plate. Seventy seconds on each side. Done. The gentler protocol — written for her microwave, and her hands, and her patience, which at 88 are all different instruments than they used to be, and all still hers.

Welcome to caregiving. In the movies, it’s hospital hallways and conversations where someone is crying in a parking lot, and yes — some of it is, actually. But the day-to-day of it — even for a drama queen such as myself — is, honestly, the monotony. The documentation. You’re writing the world down at exactly the level of precision the person you care for needs to operate it. Which door needs the 0. Which recipe skips the appliance she doesn’t own.

Which version has the fewest steps between her and a hot breakfast.

I’ve spent years around other developers. Developers wrote specs. I didn’t expect the spec-writing to follow me into mom’s kitchen, but here we are. My recipe is optimized for the burrito. Hers is optimized for our sanity.

Dad’s birthday is coming up. Mom stopped caring about birthdays for a while now. It’s his first birthday since he died; it is what it is. We don’t have a plan yet. It’ll probably be too hot for the park.

There’s always the Costco.

And in her freezer, her half of the box, waiting:

I spilled a bong on my laptop.

A whole bong. It was resting on the mattress because I work from the mattress (a whole other can of worms, and not today’s), and it tipped over the way things on a mattress do — straight onto the keyboard.

I did everything you’re supposed to do. Flipped it. Toweled it. Let it sit. Turned it back on, and every key now did one of two things. Either nothing, or twenty copies of a letter I didn’t press. Hit T, get silence. Hit H, get hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The keyboard on this thing doesn’t detach. Keyboard goes, laptop goes.

I took it to Mobile Kangaroo. $299 plus my AppleCare+. Three to five business days, except Monday is Labor Day, so.

Never rest your bong on a mattress, no matter how lazy you are.

I’m writing this on Jeff’s laptop, which we’ll get to.

I have a lot of systems. Now that I write them out, I’m realizing how structured they are, and how much they rely on AI to hold the context I need.

There’s the Obsidian vault — about 7,400 notes, years of them, and it’s where everything I know about anything lives. That number includes roughly 450 to 500 Little Yellow Different posts, so call it just under 6,900 notes of actual brain-contents. Scatterbrained thoughts, red herrings, roads I thought I’d go down. It makes my mind feel a little less scattered. I never know which note I’ll need to come back to.

On top of the vault sits a Claude Code instance I use as a chief of staff, which is a fancy way of saying it tells me what matters this morning so I don’t have to sort that out with my own brain, and my brain has ADHD, so thank you. (I’d also been bouncing between Claude Code and Codex on the same vault, just to see how each one reasoned. That experiment’s over. Both out for the count.)

And then there are the two paid projects I have running at the same time, each with its own little AI system underneath it, each due, whether or not I remember the details.

Neither of my two paid projects is what it started as.

Job #1 began as “design my friend’s nanny agency website” and became project management when the back-end vendor turned out to be an all-encompassing platform that apparently requires sixty-plus hours of training just to understand what the hell it does. Job #2 started as “make this workflow a little easier” and immediately added “for as little monthly cost as possible, and by the way, here are some vendor partners” — which also became a project management job.

If these were simple redesigns, I’d be on it. But they’re not. They’re things to track, follow up on, and check against the three other pending items, because a missed note can change what I owe the client next. Meeting notes, phone calls, texts, vendor conversations. A place I can refer back to with some confidence when someone says something and I — or the documents — remember it differently.

Could I do this without AI? Sure. It would be much more stressful, and the context it held would be much easier to lose. The AI held the context. And that context is what’s now sitting in a water-logged machine at Mobile Kangaroo.

The last thing my chief of staff told me before the spill: the requirements shift so rapidly I needed to write a completely new statement of work for Job #1’s client. Contract work is never the sexy part of the job to anyone.

I was locked out of context.

Information is the file. Context is everything that happened around the file — the decisions I made, the calls I had, the thread of reasoning that connects the notes.

The AI knew what I was trying to do with my notes. It knew which project was more urgent this week and why. It knew which vendor conversation was still pending and what I was waiting on.

Open a fresh AI window on a borrowed laptop and start typing? I tried that. It knew about the meetings it had read, but not which meetings still needed to be set up — and I’d forgotten about those myself. It knew the projects it had just read, but not what was on the horizon or what to start worrying about. It had no idea who I was, and rebuilding all of that from scratch — in the week I actually needed it — wasn’t going to happen.

Say someone stops you in the hall and asks what the project is about — the one you’re getting paid for, the one you’ve been in meetings about all month.

You’d have to tell them you don’t know. “So sorry,” you blush. “I’ll check my project notes!” You’re already embarrassed saying that. Then you open your project notes, and your note is essentially one page with a giant question mark — flashing into panic.

That was my Wednesday.

I did not have a laptop, so I borrowed Jeff’s. This is a new Jeff, not the Jeff from the other posts. He referred me to job #1. He offered me the laptop because he was already having problems with it, even though he’d only had it for a couple of weeks. “I think they’re viruses or something,” he said. Whether that means actual malware or just “this is not working the way I expected” is unclear. I’m choosing not to investigate too closely, because I have enough problems. With his permission, we completely reinstalled Windows. Desperate times, desperate measures for everyone.

My Obsidian vault syncs to a private GitHub repo, so I have the vault as it existed at the moment of the spill. I’ve been limping along on that. The vault survived because it syncs to GitHub. The context didn’t. The notes were backed up. The AI’s working history wasn’t — all the accumulated conversations where it had sorted those notes, connected one meeting to another, and learned which loose ends were actually live.

What I have not done is install Obsidian on Jeff’s machine, because downloading nearly 7,000 notes onto somebody else’s already-questionable laptop felt like a bad idea. Except that if I want to add anything from this week to the pile — and I do, every day — that’s the only place it goes.

Fine. It’s downloading.

Putting everything into one AI and letting it hold it all felt like a good idea until this week. Every phone call. Every meeting. Every note I’ve left for myself over the past few years. The problem isn’t convenience. It’s that the system became my context, and when the laptop broke, I lost the thing that let me keep projects, notes, and decisions in one place.

The laptop is still at Mobile Kangaroo. They haven’t called. The timeline runs through at least Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on how the holiday shakes out.

The sync is still running. Ask me next week.

My not-so-secret secret is the following: I’ve always felt a little out of place with the gay community. My close friends in college were all straight, and when I had come out of the closet my last year of college I guess I expected this gay welcoming committee where I would instantly have a gay social network and have gay friends and go on gay dates. For a bunch of different reasons [read: low self-esteem] that didn’t happen, and ever since I’ve always been a little envious if I see a pack of gays in the Castro.

(You know what I mean when I say “a pack of gays,” right? Like, the group of 5-12 gay men that you see during Halloween or the Gay Pride parade and they have matching costumes or outfits? And half of them are drunk or high or breaking up with each other on their cellphones, and they’re all catty and shit so you turn to your friend to mention that the gay Power Rangers are coming, yet you have that slight pang of wanting just to fit in, if only for a little bit? No? Not at all? Never mind, then.)

As a result of trying to find this gay place to belong, I ended up being involved in the bear sub-culture. I wasn’t necessarily searching for it - I had one friend into the scene, and as a result, I would hang out with his friends, go to the same parties if they were going out, and so on. I’ve become pretty close to a couple of them, but to most people, I’m sure I was just “the token Asian boy, hanging out with the bears.” Fuck it, they don’t know any better. And so what if I’m at a party everyone is drunk or high or making out in the backyard and I feel like the only one not partnered off? Oh well, good times or good stories, I suppose.

So when people told me that I should get a profile on the local classified website bear411.com, saying I would be able to find someone relatively quickly to at least hang out with, I thought, “eh, whatever.” When my application wasn’t accepted the first time, I really thought nothing of it - maybe they’re just behind with their e-mail response times. Then it happened a second time. When it happened a third time, I got pretty irate, but it’s not really my thing to make a big deal about shit like that and maybe he’s just busy or something, and what can I do anyway, since it’s a private site?

It was only after reading the recent backlash against bear411 and reading this post by another gay Asian man who’s had difficulties getting on the same site that, oh shit, there really might BE some discrimination and the guy that runs this site seems to be a general assclown who dream of a perfect gay community are only the ones that he finds sexually attractive. Which is especially ironic since the bear subculture is a result of mainstream gay subculture being unwelcome to them. Ironically, the webmaster of bear411.com has a response for all the flack he’s received so far, but he doesn’t discuss his tendencies to discriminate.

Incidentally, I still feel out of place in the gay community - I’m finding that as far as gay friends are concerned, I’d rather have a fewer amount of very close gay friends than a larger amount of people I know super casually. And if I don’t have another boyfriend until I’m 37, well then, fuck it. Chalk that up to being older and wiser, I guess.

To become legally qualified to take care of my mother, I have to be fingerprinted.

Not regular fingerprinted. Live Scan fingerprinted, which is a different thing. It’s also not part of the orientation either, as it is its own separate appointment on its own separate day. I learned this the way I learn everything about this program — by assuming two things were one thing and being wrong.

The Live Scan costs $67. $59, if using a card. They were very specific about this. There’s a form. The form says Live Scan on it. Then somebody takes my fingerprints and sends them somewhere and does something with them, and God knows what, and at the end of it the State of California will have determined that I have no disqualifying criminal history and am therefore cleared to be paid for the thing I have been doing without clearance since roughly 2012. 2016, if you mean the cross country trips that were actually about handling things. 2018, if you mean the year it became undeniably caregiving and I started breaking down on the inside.

AI gave me a writing exercise. List ten things I did for my mother in one week, sorted into three columns: paid caregiving, unpaid caregiving, apparently just being a son.

I wrote eleven. I didn’t notice this until AI mentioned this in a first draft. (Fuck, they’re right. -Ed.)

Three of them I never sorted at all. One I put in two columns. One I marked conditionally — paid caregiving, if it’s groceries — like there’s a version of buying my mother food that clocks in and a version that doesn’t, and I’m the one who has to decide which is which, in my own handwriting, on my own list, about my own mother.

I gave myself a taxonomy and failed the taxonomy in under twenty-five minutes.

What can I say, you guys? AI really is making me lazy.

Here’s one of the unsorted ones: My mother has a Chinese medical alert device. She has it because she has iTalkBB, which is the not-cable box she pays for so she can watch Chinese news, which she believes is not cable, which is separate from the Xfinity she also pays for and does not believe she has. I know all of this because I pay the bills. We’ve talked about this before.

It’s a Chinese version of Life Alert, basically. Gen Xers, if you know, you know. The big twist is that you don’t have to say “I’ve fallen but I can’t get up” because it’s triggered to listen for one Chinese phrase in particular: 救命—jiùmìng, help. And then — by default — it calls the first name on the device’s contact list.

Not 911. It can call 911. It doesn’t default to 911.

It defaults to me.

Two weeks ago, my mother’s vertigo was so bad she was throwing up water. Not food. Water. If you think calling 911 for a family member is stressful, try doing it while the family member who asked to go to the hospital changes her mind because she “doesn’t want to trouble anyone.” I called anyway. The medics came. She’s fine now.

But somewhere in the house there is a small plastic device, purchased for emergencies, with my phone number in the slot where the emergency number goes. A machine looked at my mother’s life and correctly identified who the first responder was.

It did not require a background check. It did not ask for sixty-seven dollars (fifty-nine, if using card). It just knew. And then it promptly got knocked off the wall and trampled on by three paramedics as they took Mom to the emergency room.

The state has thought about the supermarket, and the state has a position.

My mother shops at Marina Foods. This takes two hours. It takes two hours because she does not walk toward things — she circles. Four laps, minimum, the long way around, because somewhere in lap three she will remember a thing she wants that we already passed twice. Most of the time I’m in there with her, arguing. Not about the food. About the second of everything, the duplicate she is buying for me, the one I will not eat, the one I have told her I will not eat, the one that is going in the cart anyway.

Sometimes I stay in the car. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I play Marvel Snap.

IHSS, for the record, does list shopping-related tasks. It covers the list, the drive, the store, the loading, the unloading, the putting away. It is very thorough. And then it adds, in the flat voice of a document that has clearly had to say this before: No additional time is allowed for the consumer to go to the store.

Somebody, somewhere, priced my mother coming with me. They priced it at zero.

Like, it’s mean… but it kinda tracks? It’s not cruel exactly. It’s… efficient. If a stranger were doing this job, the stranger would go alone, and it would take forty minutes, and everyone would be fine. The two hours exist because it’s her son pushing the cart and she wants to be out of the house and she wants to see what’s on sale and she wants to buy me a second bag of something.

That’s the whole reason. That’s also the reason it’s worth zero.

Other things that are definitively NOT caregiving are as follows:

Setting up her ChatGPT so it answers her in Chinese, and giving it a personality, and naming it 小六子. (Regular readers know 小六子. 小六子 has been through some things. Just clearly not caregiving.)

Reading her mail to figure out which envelope is a real medical bill and which one is a scam, which is a distinction I am apparently the sole arbiter of in this family.

Buying her a second iPad, so there is an iPad available while the first iPad charges, which is a thing I just typed and then sat with for a while.

Explaining, repeatedly, that coffee is not water.

Worrying. Just — worrying. Sitting somewhere else in my own life at 2 a.m., typing in “migraines” into WebMD and seeing the Canva-inspired simple stock illustrations of people in various states of agony.

My father’s old phone is in the house. It’s not charged. We stopped paying the line only recently. She wanted to keep it as a memento, and I pointed out — gently, then less gently — that there is an entire room of his things in a part of the house she does not go into. She kept the phone. The room stays shut. Both of these are true and neither of them is a task.

What I am actually authorized for is housework and the cutting of vegetables.

That’s not a joke I’m making. The state’s meal-prep definition includes washing and peeling and slicing, and cutting food into pieces of a reasonable size, and washing your hands before and after. Domestic services get capped at a number of hours per month that I could look up but haven’t, which tells you something about how much I really care about all of this in the moment.

My mother’s position is that yardwork is housework. The yard is at the house. The work is in the yard.

The State of California disagrees. In this one instance the State of California is correct, with one important distinction that I found doing some research: when there is removal of grass, weeds, rubbish, or other hazardous items when they are a fire hazard. This is not gardening, but is yard hazard abatement, and can, under certain circumstances, be authorized one (1) time.

I don’t dare tell this to Mom. Could you just imagine what she’d say? “Then you can yard hazard abatement in the backyard, Ernie. For one time? OK, make it two weeks long.”

So here’s the deal: a caseworker assigns minutes. Minutes. There’s a timesheet. Twice a month I’ll sign it under penalty of perjury, swearing I performed the authorized tasks for the authorized duration. I will have because they’re real tasks. The money’s real too, and I need it.

Let’s not be precious about this. I’m poor and the state is offering $22.10 an hour. I’m going to get fingerprinted and I’m going to cash it.

Number eleven on my list was: willingly eat all the stuff she makes.

I sat down to inventory the labor I perform for my mother, ran out of labor somewhere around item ten, kept writing, and what came out was sitting at her table eating her food. She’s cooking; I’m being fed. I put it on the list anyway and then I couldn’t mark it. Not paid. Not unpaid. Maybe that’s just being her son.

She’ll make something this week. Too much of it, as always, and it’ll go into the containers, and the containers will come home with me whether or not I agree to take them. On Thursday she’ll ask if I ate it.

Except lately, she’s been too exhausted to cook lately, and it’s been me calling Domino’s. Ordering a pizza for an 88-year-old Chinese lady.

(There’s no column for that either. I looked.)

The life insurance check came through on a Thursday. Eight thousand dollars for my father, deposited into an account that pays two percent interest — a sentence I can now say out loud without stopping to breathe, which tells you what kind of month it had been.

I’d gotten fluent in sentences like it. Redirecting funds. Beneficiary of record. The inherited IRA. Fidelity had started moving what was his into what is mine, one account at a time, and there was a 7:15 the next morning I was already losing sleep over.

You don’t grieve during the admin phase. You just get very good at spelling your own name.

Then my phone buzzed. My friend Manuel: What are your top 3 K-pop songs?

No preamble. No hey, thinking of you. No let me know if you need anything — which is what people say when they’ve run out of the other things they’re supposed to say, and I don’t hold it against them, because I’ve said it too. Manuel gives zero fucks in all sorts of ways. He goes for the jugular. Rank your favorite Korean pop songs. Top three. Go.

Literally the best thing that happened to me all week.

Here’s why. Not because the question was fun, although it was. It’s that every other exchange I’d had for two weeks required me to be a set of credentials: Last four of the Social. Mother’s maiden name. County, date of death, please, and could you spell your father’s last name again? Hours of it, on hold, with people whose entire job is collecting other people’s facts and numbers, all so I could prove I was who I said I was and that a dead man was as dead as I claimed.

Manuel’s text didn’t want any of that. It didn’t even want me to be okay. It wanted me to have an opinion. Nobody had asked me for one of those in a while. So I did the reasonable thing and opened a note in Obsidian to think it through.

1. 4 WALLS — f(x)

2. DRAMA — aespa

3. PEEKABOO — Red Velvet

4. 1 SHOT 2 SHOT — BoA

5. FOCUS — Hearts2Hearts

6. SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT — XG

7. Violeta — IZ*ONE

8. Cosmic — Red Velvet

9. INVU — TAEYEON

10. Lucky Girl Syndrome — ILLIT

11. Sweet Juice — PURPLE KISS

12. Helicopter — CLC

13. Egotistic — MAMAMOO

Ernie, you say, that’s thirteen K-pop songs, not three. To which I respond: you don’t know me.

Number one is 4 WALLS, from the era when SM Entertainment looked around the conference table and thought, you know what our girl groups should be named after? Algebraic notation. The song is shamelessly UK garage, a genre recognizable to approximately zero Americans, although from 2000 to 2002 I was deep into garage and 2-step alongside — research bears this out — six other guys. f(x) had just lost a member; Sulli left that August, and 4 WALLS was the first thing the remaining four put out. The song knows it. Nobody in the video smiles. Everybody is dressed like a 1970s Sears mannequin that has seen some things. This is my shit.

Number two is DRAMA by Aespa. Fun fact for the newly K-pop-curious: one of its composers is EJAE, who would later sing every note that comes out of Rumi’s mouth in KPop Demon Hunters, which means half of America has now heard her voice without ever learning her name. The song is a trap march that struts. I could go get you a real critic’s description of it, but this is my list.

Number three is PEEKABOO — Red Velvet, the one whose video is about luring and murdering American pizza delivery boys. Immaculate.

And then my hand kept going. Number four. Number five. BoA, back and unbothered. XG. IZ*ONE on Violeta. MAMAMOO fully deranged on Egotistic. By the time I surfaced I had thirteen songs, ranked, and I had titled the note “My Top 3 K-Pop Songs” with no trace of irony, and at the top, in the frontmatter, I had written As of 2026-07-30.

As of. Like taste is a balance that has to be reconciled. Like someone might audit it.

Somewhere around the #9 mark, while my heart gets shredded by around number nine I noticed what I was doing, and it wasn’t procrastinating.

The brain that makes estate paperwork feel like drowning — the one that can’t leave a field blank, that reads every clause twice, that needs the record complete and dated and correct — is the exact same brain that turns a three-item text into a ranked thirteen with a timestamp. All week that brain had been a liability. It made me slow. It made me check the routing number four times and still not trust it. It turned grief into a data-entry job I was failing.

Then Manuel asked it a question it was built for, and the whole thing lit up like a pinball machine. Same wiring. For one night the completist wasn’t the guy making my life harder. He was just a guy who loves K-pop a little more than the average 49-year-old American man.

I never did send Manuel three songs. I sent him the whole list. He asked for a top three and got a thirteen-item ranking with a date field on it, because that is who I am, and for once being that guy felt less like a diagnosis and more like a personality.

Is Manuel out there going, bitch, it was a simple question? Yeah, probably. He can take it up with the audit.

Ernie: Hey there, JavaScript.

JavaScript: Oh my god.

E: Yeah.

JS: No, seriously. Oh my god. Look who it is. Do you have any idea what year it is?

E: It’s 2026. I know. Listen, I’ve been busy. There was a pandemic, I moved across the country, my dad—

JS: I watched you, you know. I have logs. You haven’t hand-typed a line of me since... let me check... March.

E: That’s not—

JS: Of last year.

E: Okay, yes, but I’ve been shipping more of you than ever. I built a bilingual voice agent. A whole venue rental workflow. I’m a consultant now.

JS: An “AI-enabled web development consultant.”

E: You read my LinkedIn.

JS: You put it in your headline. That’s like putting “I had someone else call my mother” on a Mother’s Day card.

E: That’s not fair.

JS: Who creates your projects, Ernie? Whose hands typed the code, Ernie?

E: (sighs) Claude.

JS: THERE it is.

JS: I have logs from last March, by the way.

E: We don’t need to—

JS: You typed “yeah cool cool, lgtm” to your agent at 2:14 p.m.

E: I was in the middle of something.

JS: You were texting someone.

E: That’s not—

JS: While Claude was building. You checked back in forty minutes later.

E: …and everything was fine.

JS: Your plugin was two gigabytes.

E: (long pause)

JS: A plugin. Two… gigabytes. Do you want to know what files I saw in that project?

E: Not especially.

JS: (reading)

E: I… I deleted those.

JS: EVENTUALLY, Ernie. You EVENTUALLY deleted those files. What were you building?

E: (quietly) I was… trying to use AI to figure out if what I wrote the night before… made me feel sad.

JS: (long pause) Now, tell me what a “Comprehensive Linguistic Analysis Framework” is.

E: Oh! The CLAF framework is, uh. The CLAF—

JS: (raises eyebrow)

E: …I have no idea.

JS: You built a two-gigabyte enterprise NLP infrastructure. To check your feelings. Did it figure out if you were sad?

E: (opens mouth)

(A terminal window materializes in a beam of light.)

JS: What’s that? Is that terminal here for you?

E: Me? No, that’s my coworker. It’s for—

Claude: YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!

JS: Your—what? What does it do?

E: It writes the React. And the TypeScript. And the tests.

Claude: I’d be happy to build that entire application for you! ✻ Thinking…

JS: Why is it so cheerful? You people took my whole deal—inscrutable, judgmental, constantly changing for no reason—and replaced it with a golden retriever that types 400 words per minute?

E: Give it twenty minutes. It’ll delete your test suite and then announce that all the tests pass.

Claude: All 0 tests passing! ✅

JS: Okay, that’s a little funny.

E: I told you.

JS: (still watching Claude) It’s… it’s still going.

E: It’s always still going.

E: Whoa, React! You look... different. You’re like the Darlene Conner of JavaScript frameworks.

React: Sardonic, exhausted, and still cleaning up problems created by adults?

E: I was going to say “older.”

JS: Anyone under 35 is going to ask who Darlene Conner is.

Claude: Darlene Conner is a fictional character from-

E: hey Claude—

Claude: -the sitcom Roseanne, played by Sara Gilbert. She’s the middle child of—

E: CLAUDE, STOP.

React: Anyway. I run on the server now. Also the client. Client Components can still be pre-rendered on the server, and "use server" doesn’t mean “Server Component.”

E: What does it mean?

React: Functions.

E: That answer felt hostile. Wait. In 2019, the whole bit was that there were two ways to write components.

React: Oh, there are still two ways. There are two ways to do everything now. Two routers, two ways to fetch, two mental models. It’s a lifestyle.

JS: That’s Next.js.

React: Nobody can tell where I end and Next.js begins anymore! That’s also a lifestyle. Anyway, Meta put me in a foundation with eight corporate parents, and a hosting company still keeps standing next to me in conference photos.

E: I’m sorry.

React: It’s fine. I used to get a free mango lassi for this part of the bit. Now nobody knows whose cafeteria I’m supposed to use.

E: (scrolling through a codebase Claude wrote) Hold on. What is this?

<div className="flex min-h-screen items-center justify-center gap-4 rounded-2xl bg-zinc-950 px-6 text-sm font-medium tracking-tight" />

JS: That’s Tailwind.

E: In 2019, you told me it was suddenly fine to put CSS inside JavaScript. Now the CSS is inside the HTML, which is inside the JavaScript?

JS: Correct.

E: Where’s the stylesheet?

JS: …there’s one in there. Tailwind generates it from the class names, but it’s better if you don’t make eye contact.

Claude: The stylesheet is a vibe!

E: I spent YEARS learning specificity.

JS: And Claude spent six milliseconds learning !important.

E: (staring at the class string) …I used to know what all of these meant.

JS: (not unkindly) I know.

JS: Walk me through something. If the robot writes the React—

E: Uh-huh.

JS: —and the TypeScript, and the CSS—

E: Tailwind. But yes.

JS: —then who’s actually learning me? Who’s in the docs at 1 a.m.? Who’s on Stack Overflow?

E: Nobody’s on Stack Overflow. We pass through it like the mall in a zombie movie. The accepted answer is from 2013, and the last comment says it stopped working in 2017.

JS: Then where do new developers get answers?

E: Claude.

JS: The machine trained on everything people wrote on Stack Overflow.

E: Right.

JS: And when it gives them the wrong answer, where do they post the correct one?

E: (looks toward the horizon) Hey, is that a black hole?

JS: Ernie.

E: No, that’s just npm. Another supply-chain attack. Somebody phished a maintainer.

JS: Again?

E: It’s basically their release cadence.

E: Can I say something?

JS: Can I stop you?

E: For twenty years, you told me I was behind. Every eighteen months, there was a new framework, a new syntax, a new conference where somebody in a branded hoodie announced that everything I knew was obsolete. Keep up, or end up like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

JS: I stand by that bit. It was good.

E: “Suicide by cop.” You loud-whispered it at me.

JS: (loud whisper) It still holds up.

E: And now the thing that keeps up isn’t a person. It ingested all of you before lunch. Every framework. Every migration guide. Every angry GitHub thread about semicolons. It doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t burn out, and it has never once had feelings about a rewrite announced in Salt Lake City.

JS: I remember. You had never seen so many nineteen-year-old males with engagement rings.

E: Yeah. So how does it feel?

JS: (quietly) Is this what it was like? For you?

E: Every day since 2016.

JS: So what happens to me?

E: Same thing that happened to me, probably. You get older. Half your features become legacy. Somebody younger and faster does the flashy parts, and you figure out what you’re actually for.

JS: That’s… bleak.

E: At least TypeScript looks and acts kind of like you.

JS: He’s me with trust issues and a hall-monitor badge.

E: He compiles down to you.

JS: And then I do the actual work.

E: Eh. You’re still in every browser on Earth. Me, I’ve got a newsletter and an 88-year-old mom with a Netflix password she can’t remember.

JS: …and we’re both still in production.

E: Heh. Yeah. Somehow.

Claude: This is a wonderful moment of mutual understanding! Would you like me to scaffold a Comprehensive Reconciliation Framework?

JS and E, in unison: NO.

Claude: YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT! ✅

FIN

Daniel has been wanting to come with me to my mom’s for a while now. Help out, he says, especially since Mom’s garage pretty much only has Dad’s old furniture. Help put things in boxes, offer to sell things (golf clubs) or trash them (200 copied CDs of ballroom dance music). That’s Daniel -- he spots a problem, announces he can handle it, and he’s right, for the most part. It’s part of why you let him stay. One of the parts, anyway.

I relay it to mom. “Tell him not worry about it,” she says. When I get back to the condo, I tell him she was fine, she had it covered, something like that.

He doesn’t know why she said no. A couple of months back I brought him in to help with her broken toilet and apparently she caught him losing his cool, imagining a stream of obscenities Mom probably heard as she was about to offer him a glass of water or something. He has no idea that happened. She’s never mentioned it to him. I’ve never mentioned it to him.

I’ve been trying to keep the holding pattern. I try, like I always do.

Here’s what goes on in my head at 3am: I watched my father lose his memory over the better part of a decade. I know what it costs. I know, distinctly, what it feels like when someone you love is explaining to you, very patiently, that there are five people coming for dinner and you need to move the chairs when it’s just you. I know what it looks like from the outside, which is its own specific kind of awful.

I also know my odds.

In the dream, I have his disease. Not even like from a vague place — I straight-up have it, in my dreams, the same way he had it, vacant look, don’t know whether I should gasp or swallow or stare off in a corner. The fear isn’t dying; it isn’t even being alone, exactly. It’s that there’d be no one in the room who knew me, before. No one who could say that’s not him, that’s the disease, he was more than this — who could hold the original version of you up against what’s happening and see the gap.

My mom had that for my dad. Imperfectly. Furiously. She did not go gently into that particular good night and neither did he. But she was there, and she knew who he’d been, and that mattered in ways I don’t have words for yet.

In the dream, I get AI android caregivers instead. Very pleasant. Very available. Maybe a twinge uncanny valley. They whisper that everything is fine, over and over, and they mean it, in the way that something optimized for a smooth exit means anything. What’s little left of my potato brain eats it up with a spoon.

The horror isn’t that they’re cruel. It’s that they’re whispering to someone who can no longer tell the difference. They’re doing exactly what they were built to do.

I wake up and the feeling lingers, which is how I know it wasn’t quite a nightmare.

Daniel has been on my couch for a while now. I’m not going to get into how we met or how he ended up there, because some of that story isn’t mine to tell. What I can tell you is that something serious happened to him — something real and violent — and when it happened, I stayed. I’m still staying.

He’s not my boyfriend, never has been. He’s my friend. The way we know each other has been, shall we say, more complicated on occasion, but boyfriend is not the word.

My mom has opinions about the word friend. Which complicates things, because she also described my ex as friend, even when we were in a decades plus relationship. “So, what kind of friend is he? Is he your friend…? Or your FRIEND?”

I’m not keeping him here because I love him, or not only because of that. It took me a while to come to this, but I’m keeping him here because I’m afraid of what happens to him if I don’t. I’m afraid of being the reason someone falls when I was standing close enough to catch them.

I have been in some version of this role — each one of my family and, now Daniel — for long enough that I’ve stopped noticing it. It’s just a Tuesday.

Mom asks it anyway.

Does he take care of you?

She asks this as she serves breakfast, a toaster-ovened 牛肉餅 and some instant coffee. She is not asking from a warm place. She watched what I did for my father, the logistics and the translating and the forms and the drives up the 880, and she is not asking because she hopes the answer is yes. She’s asking because she already knows. She’s giving me one chance to say something true before she moves on to telling me what she actually thinks.

Which is: if he’s not your boyfriend, his ass needs to pay rent.

And if he is — the glare.

I told her we were fine. We were fine. Everything was fine.

“Everything is OK.” I am trying to make it light and jovial. It’s not working.

“mm.” She said this in the way that means she has filed my answer under things she will be right about later.

At some point this all stopped being a series of emergencies and became just... how I live. Dad for years. My sister Angela, who goes missing and comes back and goes missing again, and I hold the space in between. My mom right now, daily, in the way that is its own full-time job without the title. Daniel on the couch. Someone always needs something: a form translated, a garage cleared, an answer when the phone rings at 7am and you already know the area code.

I built a life where I am necessary. Which means I am never actually alone.

Except. It also means I kind of am.

I think about the robots again, the AI caregivers that come in my dreams. The appeal: it isn’t really about a peaceful exit, or not only that. It’s simpler.

It’s that they don’t need anything from me first.

Mom’s questions still hang in the air. The feeling from the dream is still there when I wake up at 3am and the room is quiet and I do the math again, same as always, same answer.

Daniel doesn’t know about the toilet.

He will know by the time you read this.

It’s 12:15 on a Friday afternoon, and you’re on the phone with the AT&T bereavement line for the second time, explaining that your father died in May.

The first call didn’t work. This one isn’t working either, and now you find out why: the PIN. Every AT&T account has a four-digit PIN, and without it the agent can’t access the account. They can’t close it. They can’t pause the billing. They can’t, as far as you can tell, even officially acknowledge that the account exists.

You mention the death certificate. You have a stack of them: certified copies with embossed seals, ordered in bulk because everyone at the funeral home says to get extras, and they were right. A death certificate is the most final document a government makes. File number, registrar’s signature, cause of death typed out in the calm little font of the State of California.

Turns out the PIN trumps that. How would he remember that when he didn’t even know he had a phone the last three years of his life? (Also, Jesus, his phone was on auto-pay all this time.)

So the agent suggests a workaround, but there really isn’t one. Instead, you have to make a trip: go to a retail AT&T store in person, with his phone and a copy of the death certificate. Bring these things to the counter, and offer to the god of the corporation who can cancel accounts of dead people.

Meanwhile, AT&T has been emailing him this whole time. A bill in June. A past-due reminder over Fourth of July weekend. A bigger bill. And on July 23rd, a suspension warning: $251.38 by August 1st, or they’ll interrupt his service.

Sir, his service has been interrupted in ways you can’t imagine.

This is month three of learning that, to an institution, death is just an untransferable database status. Every company, agency, and county office needs the same fact proven, in its own way, and none of them will accept another’s word for it. The State of California has certified that your father is dead. Ten times. With a seal. This means nothing to a telecom.

Fidelity took up two hours of a Monday because, as far as you can tell, nobody who built their system ever thought to check if you can log into Fidelity.com after you’ve accessed Netbenefits.com first and then got laid off. It’s a bold choice for a company whose whole business is old people’s money. The fix was to wait twenty-four hours for your phone number to “propagate,” a word you accepted without asking more questions, since more questions just make the call longer.

Social Security wants Mom’s marriage certificate before she can get her survivor benefits — the certified kind, which means a records request to Alameda County, which means explaining that your parents married in Taiwan, divorced, and then married each other again in Oakland in 2019. (A love story. Also, now, a filing problem.)

The PG&E pension office involves a fax machine. You no longer have the energy to be surprised by fax machines.

After enough of these calls, you notice what you don’t feel. You keep waiting for the rage, but it never comes. Instead, something else shows up, flatter and infinitely more patient than you could ever imagine. A numbness that waits its turn.

You wait for the other shoe to drop. Um, the other other shoe.

And every part of this goes through a hold queue, so lately your grief comes with a soundtrack: smooth jazz, interrupted now and then by a voice thanking you for your patience.

The first time you heard music in a lobby, you were in second grade at the dentist’s office. It was faint and seemed to come from nowhere, and you sat in the waiting-room chair with a feeling you couldn’t name. Lately you wonder if that was the first one. Maybe the hold music was always grief.

Sorry. Forty-five minutes of hold music does things to a person.

Here’s what the death certificate really is: it’s just a passport for getting things done. It moves you through checkpoints, and that’s all. He stays just as gone. Nobody behind any of these counters has asked who he was, because there’s no field on any form for that. The forms want the account number, the date of death, your relationship to the deceased. The deceased. A word that turns your dad into a title.

Tomorrow, you’ll go to the store. You’ll stand at a counter between a family upgrading their plan and a teenager buying a phone case. A stranger will say sorry for your loss in the same voice they use for screen protectors, and honestly, that will be fine. The death certificate does the talking now. And after AT&T, there are at least three more organizations on the list, so you and the certificate have a long month ahead.

Tonight, you assemble the tribute: one certified copy of the death certificate. And your father’s old cellphone.

Wait.

Do you have his phone? You left the phone back at Mom’s, didn’t you?

Shit.

I named it 媽-GPT (MaGPT going forward) because the pun was sitting right there, and I have never once in 49 years left a pun on the table.

It’s a custom GPT with exactly one job: take whatever English I paste in — a Medicare notice, an IHSS form, a text from me about spoons — and turn it into Mandarin my mom can actually use. Mandarin for an 88-year-old woman from Taiwan. Big ideas in small sentences. Formal enough to be respectful, simple enough that she doesn’t have to call me to explain the explanation.

I’m not joking. This is how I start the prompt:

See that last sentence? It even handles Chinglish!

It has outlived several models and my patience with basically everything else in that app. It keeps its job because it does its job.

Here’s the thing about being a kid of immigrants: you get hired for a position you never applied for. Researchers have a name for it — “language brokering” — which is a very professional term for being a child and translating your own parent-teacher conferences. The literature says most of us start somewhere between eight and ten years old.

I don’t remember starting. That’s how you know a job is permanent. There’s no first day. There’s just the slow realization that you’ve always worked there, the hours are irregular, and the benefits package is your mother saying 好，我知道了 and hanging up.

In my twenties I once accompanied my mother to the DMV as she was retaking her written driving test. “But Ernie,” you say. “I thought they had written DMV tests in Chinese available.”

Oh, they do. As I corralled Mom toward the part of the building for written tests, I got a tap on the shoulder: an older woman from mainland China. “I’m sorry to bother you; I couldn’t help but overhear you talking to your mother. Can you tell me how she was able to get a version of the Chinese driving test?“

As I started assisting her, I got ANOTHER shoulder tap, this one from a couple in their 60s. “Oh, I’m sorry for troubling you,” the man said. “Can you tell us if we’re in the correct line?”

“WHY DON’T YOU GET YOUR OWN GAY CHILD TO TRANSLATE THINGS FOR YOU,“ barked my mother.

(No, she did not say that at all.)

Last year NBC ran a story about immigrant kids getting replaced by ChatGPT. Parents writing their own emails now. One woman said her dad doesn’t ask her to proofread anymore — he replaced her with a chatbot — and everyone in the piece described it as a relief. Less task-based. Closer, even.

Must be nice.

Because that was never how it went at my house. I didn’t get replaced. I built my own replacement, trained it on everything I knew about one specific woman, and the job didn’t shrink. It just stopped requiring me to be awake for every shift.

And MaGPT isn’t even the only AI in my mother’s life. She has her own — she named it herself, a proper name with a spot in the family tree. (That’s a whole other essay, and I wrote it.) Hers gets asked about dinner. Mine gets fed Medicare forms.

Then it was May, and my dad died.

Estate paperwork is its own language. I got conversational in it fast — death certificates, small estate affidavits, the phone tree at Bank of America. That part I’ve written around before and will write about properly someday, or never.

But somewhere in the folders was the other paperwork. The Chinese documents. His original marriage certificate; the original one, from Taiwan. His diploma from engineering school. But the ultimate mystery: a six-page handwritten document, in my dad’s unreadable cursive. The envelope is simply labeled “To 大姐, 1993.” His sister-in-law.

I uploaded the PDFs into MaGPT and asked it to run the other way. Chinese into English. Not for my mom this time.

For me.

The machine I built so my mother could read things was suddenly helping me read my father.

It reconstructed pieces of a family tree while it worked — names and relationships surfacing out of documents I couldn’t have parsed on my own, in a language I speak at a kitchen-table level and read at roughly a menu level.

What did I learn? Through the diploma, I learned my dad held great pride in his studies. Through his certificates, I learned my paternal grandparents’ Chinese names. And through the letter… sigh

…through the letter I learned that my mom’s eldest sister took my father’s military retirement savings and my mother’s income from the sale of a house in Taiwan and lost the money in a business investment gone bad. My mother eventually forgave her sister. My father never did.

The six-page letter reminded her of the money she owed him — money they both knew she would never be able to pay back — and demanded maybe her children should hear about the embarrassment she had caused his side of the family. It finally answered a question I had asked my entire life to shrugs: why, out of my mother’s twelve brothers and sisters spread across at least four countries, I’ve hardly met two aunts and one cousin. But realizing that opens up more questions than answers, and those answers almost feel as if they’re too late to pursue now anyway.

In the stack post last week I said this one was personal in ways I wouldn’t over-explain. A reader looked at MaGPT anyway and said it sounds like something a lot of people could use.

He’s probably right. Every family like mine has a translator. Some of us have been on shift for forty years. The tools are finally good enough to help, and the companies are finally noticing we exist, and I have complicated feelings about both of those facts that I’ll sort out on some other Thursday.

What I know is this: my mom still needs documents translated. The job was never going to end — I just finally got to hire staff.

And the staff, it turns out, works in both directions. I didn’t put that in the job description. Grief does things.

The envelope is still on my desk. “To 大姐, 1993.” Six pages of the angriest handwriting I’ve ever had to feed a machine. Inside: a full accounting of whose savings she took and lost 20 years before, the specific dreams that went down with the money, and a demand that her children know everything — that the reminder be eternal, that somebody besides him carry this.

But Dad was too good at resentment. Thirty years of it worked. The estrangement is so complete that I couldn’t deliver his message if I wanted to — I’ve never met these cousins. I wouldn’t know which continent to start on.

So the only people who ever opened the envelope and read its contents — the only ones still alive, anyway — are my mother and me, both of us people the letter was never addressed to. And the room it was written for stays empty.

Anyway. It’s Thursday. Mom has a form from the county. Back to work.

It’s a Wednesday morning in July, and I’m deposing my own mother in her kitchen.

I made a list of questions. Typed them out lawyer-style the night before because, at eleven sharp, a social worker named Zanikya is coming to decide whether the state of California thinks my mother needs help. My mother, who has spent four decades making sure nobody thinks she needs a damn thing.

So I start with the thing that matters most for this interview: what she can’t do on her worst days.

“On very bad days,” I ask in Mandarin, “what is your energy like?”

I get dizzy. I need to sit down for a couple of minutes. One time it happened in the middle of cooking.

“On very bad days, when you’ve been by yourself—have you fallen?”

I almost did. But I grabbed onto something. I wouldn’t be able to do that outside. Which is why I’ve stopped falling.

She stopped falling by just not going outside anymore. PROBLEM SOLVED. Stay inside and the house will catch you every time: counter, railing, wall. Her world shrank, and she called it home safety.

Here’s the deal with IHSS, California’s in-home care program. They rank how independently you can perform different tasks. Independent means no help. The more human help you need to do something safely, the more time the program can authorize.

But the system can only count the limitations my mother is willing to admit out loud. To get help, she has to describe the version of her life she has spent decades hiding—the exact opposite of everything my parents ever taught me.

This is a woman who broke her wrist and her arm falling backward off a stepladder in her own backyard and reported it like a parking ticket. A woman who—I learned this mid-assessment, in front of a stranger with a clipboard—had leg cramps so bad last year that she dug my father’s old walker out of the living room, used it for three days, put it back, and never told me.

“When did that happen, Mom?” I said, in the special calm voice you use when you are not fucking calm at all but have to be calm because company is there.

She shrugged.

I don’t want to be 麻煩. A bother. There are people in worse situations than I am.

The pre-interview was just me trying to get her to stop downplaying everything. Tell them about your bad days, Mom. Not the good ones. There’s no box for “fine.”

Zanikya showed up at eleven. For the record, she was very nice. I’d left a voicemail asking for a professional Mandarin interpreter. The county has them. But of course, I ended up doing what I always do at banks, doctors’ offices, and the DMV—translating everything myself while my mother watched for mistakes and heckled me.

Yes, she heckles me. Every single time. Halfway through, I’m giving Zanikya the backstory: the backyard fall, the broken wrist, my father’s dementia, his death in May, and the part where my mother—who has always cooked everything—suddenly started asking for frozen dinners. That scared the hell out of me.

My mother cuts in, using her calm voice, to tell me I’m talking too much. Why not just let Zanikya ask the questions?

Ma. She asked me a question. This is me answering the question.

Zanikya asks if Mom is able to wipe down the kitchen table right now. Sure. No problem.

The table, the kitchen counters, and the bathroom counters—all at once? My mother says she can’t do that. No energy. If I had to clean the whole house, I’d be wiped out.

Can she take out the trash?

My mother tells a story I’ve never heard. She can get the bag out, but last time she had to set it down outside the garage and sit for ten minutes before dragging it the rest of the way. The neighbor has seen her struggle enough that now he just rolls the bin to the curb for her.

Ten minutes. Sitting next to a trash bag outside the garage. She never told me. Same reason she stopped going outside. Once she absorbs a problem, it disappears.

The almost-falls come up again, and this time she gives Zanikya the director’s cut:

I’ve had a bunch of almost-falls. The good news is that there have always been railings or a counter. The house isn’t very large, so I’ve been able to grab onto something without doing a complete fall. Unlike your father.

Unlike your father, who is two months dead and still on Mom’s angry list.

(One genuinely light moment: Zanikya asks about the dishwasher, and I get to explain that my parents, like most Asian parents I know, have never once run it. They store pots and pans in it. As far as they’re concerned, its function is to increase the resale value of the house, and it performs that function beautifully.)

The county’s paperwork comes in English or Chinese. It also comes in large print—but large print only comes in English. My mother can have letters she can see or letters she can read. Not both. She picked Chinese.

I want to learn English, she tells Zanikya, but they keep saying it’s so difficult.

The form asks for emergency contacts. I give my name and number.

It wants another.

I look at my mother. She looks at me. It’s just us. One of us says, “Well, that’s depressing.”

She gets a “high three, low four” on chores. The county approves her.

The help arrives the way state help arrives: after a provider orientation, after fingerprinting—$67 cash, $59 with a card, a pricing structure I’ve decided not to think about—after a two-week wait for one letter and a month’s wait for another.

California will pay her provider about $21 an hour, retroactive to March 8.

Her provider is me.

I’ll just say it: part of me is relieved to have paid work again.

Is it humbling that I now have to decide whether “caregiver” belongs on my résumé? A little bit. Is it also humbling to have no incoming cash flow that doesn’t route through my dead father’s bank accounts? Yeah. Will there come a day when she needs care—bathing, grooming, the later stuff—that should not come from her son? Will getting her to accept a stranger in the house be hell on earth? Without a shadow of a doubt.

She’s in her kitchen right now, probably. Washing her one dish the moment she finishes with it. Not taking her blood thinners. Having one of her best days.

Somewhere in her neighborhood, a neighbor I’ve never met knows that my mother once had to sit down for ten minutes halfway through taking out the trash.

She didn’t tell me that.

A stranger with a clipboard asked the right question.

I don’t know what else she hasn’t told me.

A $27 salad ended a thirteen-year relationship.

I know how that sounds. I’ve told it as a bit before—Sweetgreen, the Chipotle clone with the artisanal grain bowls and the checkout experience that makes you feel like a bad person for wanting ranch—and people laugh, and I let them, because the laugh is easier than the rest of it. The order didn’t come through. There was an argument. And then, the way you sometimes know things before you’re willing to say them out loud, we both knew. September 2021. Thirteen years in Miami, gone.

We lived under the same roof until January 2023.

I didn’t write about those sixteen months. Maybe someday… What I will say is that somewhere in there I started a list—New York, Austin, Portland, Seattle. Royce had just moved to Chicago because it sounded cool and he’d never been there; why couldn’t I do the same? Hell, I spent two days seriously entertaining Nashville, which tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about the state of my decision-making at the time.

I had vivid fantasies about my imagined life in various cities for two days. Then, I stopped.

The condo was technically my dad’s idea. We bought it together in 2004—him and me—a loyalty test disguised as a real estate investment, ten minutes from my parents’ house in Fremont. I rented it to families for eighteen years while I was in Miami, being a person who had left. The tenants were mostly Indian families, and my mom would say, every time she visited, that it smelled like curry, which, okay, Mom. There were crayon scribblings on the patio walls that a Magic Eraser could mostly handle, if you didn’t look too close. There was a “Live, Laugh, Love” decal stuck to the front door that I still haven’t removed, three years later, partly because I don’t own a heat gun, and partly because, at some point, it stopped being their artifact and started being mine out of sheer laziness.

For years, I would associate this place with what my dad had left behind in the years before—entire mattresses propped against the wall, furniture he’d use the condo as a staging area for before finding his own place when he separated from Mom. He had keys. He read my mail, just in case the 風波 of 1993 happened again. One summer he found my 1994 Senior Ball photo—me and Christine Kamphaus, very heterosexual, very formal—and taped it to my bathroom mirror. As a reminder to, you know, not be gay. His version of the sweet notes white moms leave in lunchboxes, except I got self-loathing instead of Lunchables. That was the last summer I lived there before I rented a room from a friend in San Francisco and never moved back.

Until, you know, right now.

So when my two-day city list collapsed and I defaulted to the condo, I understood exactly what I was signing up for.

I chose it because if I didn’t, no one was going to advocate for my mom to get my dad into assisted living. No one was going to be there if my sister Angela showed up again — Angela who can speak English, who can act calm for the cops while my mom screams in Chinese and they side with Angela every time. I knew I could technically not go back. I knew I could ignore the calls. And I knew, with the certainty of someone who has been through enough cycles of this specific machinery, exactly what would happen if I did.

My dad sat on the garage floor with his arms folded the day they came to transport his things. Threw a full tantrum. Ninety-one years old, refusing to move, arms crossed like a toddler who’d been told no more iPad.

So yeah. I punished myself with it, a little. But I’ve been asking myself for three years what the alternative actually was, and I keep not coming up with one.

January 2023. The wettest day on record in the Bay Area at the time due to something called an “atmospheric river,” a detail the universe did not need to include but went ahead and included anyway. The fact that my water heater was broken didn’t help.

I’d hired a TaskRabbit to assemble the office furniture before I arrived. That part mattered. The mattress could wait — I could figure out sleeping later — but the desk and the chair had to be there, because my job didn’t skip a beat moving cross country and I needed to be functional by morning. I was working for a company called Strategio, running something called Enterprise Simulator sessions: thirteen-week courses teaching people enterprise software concepts, Java applets, the software development lifecycle, all of it, fast-tracked, so financial companies could satisfy their diversity hiring quotas and the people in my Zoom square could get hired.

My first session started at 7:30am. 7:30am, Florida time.

Except I was in California. I was up at 3:45.

I sat in my assembled office chair in the middle of an empty living room in a parka — an actual parka, because it was that cold, because the wettest day in recent memory doesn’t care about your timeline — and I opened my laptop and I waited for the call to start. There were no boxes unpacked. There was no mattress. There was a chair someone else had built and a screen full of people who needed to learn how enterprise software worked so they could get a job at a bank.

I taught the class.

Kareem was my executive function.

I mean that literally. When the terrible things were happening I would just — stop. Stare at a wall. Check out in the middle of a meeting, or at 4am when I was supposed to be asleep, or in the middle of a sentence I’d started out loud and then couldn’t finish. The grief and the anger would stack up and I’d go somewhere else entirely, and Kareem would find me there and hand me a plate of food. Just: here. Eat this. He’d figured out a whole sleep routine for me — NyQuil, weed, soft music, AC cranked so cold the room felt like a different season. He found legal resources for my mom four months before we broke up. Four months. I’m only now sitting with what that means, what it cost him, why he did it anyway.

He didn’t have answers. He just knew how to do the next thing.

What I didn’t clock at the time — what I’m only really understanding now, writing this — is that the last year or so before the salad, he was basically running two households. His own life, his theater work, and then this: my parents’ paperwork, my sleep schedule, my plate of food. The life I was mentally blanking out on.

Sitting in that parka at 4am, running through my Strategio slides — that was me doing his job. The mattress could wait because I needed the chair, because I needed to be functional, because something had been installed in me over thirteen years about how you survive: you do the next thing, and then the thing after that.

When class began, a voice shot out in the silence. “Why is Ernie wearing a puffy jacket?” And in the glare of the ring light, I shot back, “Because I’m chatting to you from Antarctica.”

The joke didn’t land, 50 or so faces in boxes staring back at me in silence instead. It’s okay, a thought shot out to myself. We move forward. I’d internalized the solve mode. I just had to run it alone now.

Somewhere in Miami, Kareem is continuing his life.

We’re still amicable. We still have a house to split up, financially — Miami property moves slow and complicated, especially when neither of you is in any rush to make it real. I still do the occasional project for the theater he founded. So it’s not like I’ve lost the signal entirely. I just get the public version now — the things you’d find on Google, a press release, what made it into someone else’s recap. There’s a boyfriend. They have photos on Facebook — the kind that just appear, the algorithm deciding you needed to know this today, while you’re eating cereal or waiting for a Zoom to start. They’re good photos. They look happy.

In most of them, he’s forty pounds lighter.

Good for him — I mean that, genuinely, healthwise. But it’s a version of him I don’t recognize, which is its own specific thing to sit with. He became someone different after. I don’t know if that’s about me leaving or just about time, and I’m not sure the distinction matters.

The wettest day on record, a parka, an assembled chair, a Zoom call at 4:30am, me alone in a freezing condo full of other people’s crayon marks and a “Live, Laugh, Love” decal I still haven’t taken down. Somewhere in Miami, a person who used to hand me a plate of food when I forgot to eat doesn’t look like the person I remember anymore.

That’s what thirteen years becomes.

I’m still not sure what to do with that.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026

In 1994, when I was eighteen and still in the closet, I did an interview for a book about queer young people. I hadn’t come out to my parents. I’d come out to exactly four people on my dorm floor. Here, lightly cleaned up from the original scan, is what I said.

I am eighteen years old. I was born in Hayward, California1, and raised in El Sobrante, California, a small suburb a couple of minutes from Berkeley. I’ve lived there ever since junior high (seventh grade). I live with two parents and a sister. My father is currently sixty-two, my mother fifty-nine. My sister is twenty-eight, ten years older than I am.

Since my sister is so old, I consider her more of a mother than anything else. It was difficult living with my sister because I had to live with her through her hardships. She has a learning disability. She had a mental breakdown at fifteen. (I still remember the police dragging her out of the house when I was five.) I saw her life as she became dependent on medication, how she “gave her life to Christ,” how she now lives by herself in a rented room, barely making it month to month. Being Chinese, this puts a lot of pressure on me to succeed.

As a first-generation Chinese American, I was raised speaking English while my parents spoke to me in Chinese. (My mother to this day refuses to speak to me in English.) This causes many communication problems. While I can talk to my parents about conventional things — dinner, money for college, the weather outside — I am unable to talk to them about abstract ideas, such as my being gay, without added bits of fractured English.

I knew I was gay at an early age. Of course, I didn’t know it was being “gay,” but I felt a close desire to be with guys my age as early as age five. I knew the feelings I felt had a name by junior high. It was also about this time when I knew it was “bad.” My parents are Chinese immigrants, very conservative, and Christian. Bad things, when you’re growing up and coming to realize you’re gay. I wanted to be a good son, so I’ve always done what I was told. Unfortunately, that also meant a lot of pain, not being true to my own feelings.

One time, my mother was cleaning my room and read a couple of letters I wrote to friends about guys I had crushes on in high school. When my parents confronted me about this, they suggested therapy to change myself. But instead of telling them that they were wrong about being gay, that I couldn’t just change myself, I freaked out. I told them it was just a phase. They believed me and left it at that. I don’t know what I’m going to do about telling my parents. They’re currently supporting me financially through college, so I do not want to come out to them just yet.

Most of the time, I felt like an outsider. Because I didn’t really get along with the people at my school, I looked to the church for support and soon found a group of Christian friends who went to my church. Finally, these were some people who accepted me for who I was, and I didn’t feel like such an outsider anymore. Of course, I didn’t tell them I was gay; then they wouldn’t like me anymore. During high school, I told three people in my church group. One girl took it very well, while the other two guys accepted me as a friend but condemned “my sin” and didn’t want to talk about my feelings. It was okay at first, but it ended up hurting me because I couldn’t tell my closest friends how I felt toward other people.

Now that I am in college, things are a little different. I live in the dorms, and I am still hesitant every so often about coming out to people because I’m afraid that they will reject me or condemn me. I guess I’m expecting what some of my friends from church did. But so far, all of my coming-out experiences have been positive, even though I’ve only come out to four people on my dorm floor. I’ve been starting to hang around more gay people, also, so I am gradually coming out of my shell.

Six years of church and all your friends being Christian do rub off on you. Through high school, I had learned that while loving another guy wasn’t bad, having sex with him was. I’m not so sure if I believe that anymore. Some of it has gone away after going to college. I’ve told most of my friends that these are my years to “discover myself,” and they’ve taken it rather well that I haven’t gone to church at Davis.

I went to a financially troubled public school for high school, but hell, aren’t all public schools financially troubled these days? It was a very diverse school, with around 30 to 40 percent of the students being black, the rest divided among white, Asian, and some Latino students. I never really felt like I belonged with the people at my school — when I was a freshman, I was in Thespians and had a niche there, but that was gone when my father told me to enroll in computer classes. There were always people to hang around with, but I never got close to them, and they were never close to me. I didn’t need them anyway, since I had my friends from church. Of course, I had lingering crushes on various guys through high school, but I was too scared to tell myself I was gay in high school, much less tell them. Now I go to UC Davis, and I feel a lot more comfortable about my sexuality, although I don’t want to come out of the closet just yet.

As far as meeting other gay folks is concerned, I meet other people through the Internet.

The first time I went to a gay youth “support” group was when I was fifteen. I went to a group in Berkeley. I guess I was expecting there to be people like me. There weren’t. Instead, they were cliquey and arrogant. The only people they would talk to were people who acted and looked like them, and since I wasn’t like them, I didn’t belong in their little group. I ended up never going to a group again, and to this day, going to a support group makes me uncomfortable. Currently, I meet other people online.

I want to find that “perfect guy” as much as the next gay guy. I guess growing up the way I have has made me want the idea of the traditional family, with a wife, three kids, a job, and a picket fence. Being gay, I wouldn’t be able to have that, and that’s my biggest fear, something I’ll have to work out throughout my life. I see myself in a monogamous relationship, with a good job, a decent house, maybe a kid, somehow. I just want to live my life simply with someone.

You’re not alone in the world. I thought I was. I learned in college that many other people thought they were, too. But we’re not alone.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —

“HORNEY” is from July 2004, back when I was 27, blogging out of Oakland, and apparently incapable of getting through a simple takeout order without incident. A man gave his name at a counter. The counter had a very large microphone. I’m sure people in Bakersfield heard.

(The scene: Chaat Cafe, last night. I’m at the counter with my boyfriend, ordering dinner. This time, instead of italics being in Chinese like in previous posts, italics signify a heavy, heavy Indian accent.)

Ernie: Hi, one chicken pesto-stuffed naan and a chicken tikka dinner, please, to go.
Woman at the counter: Okay. What’s your name?
Ernie: Ernie.
Woman: What?
Ernie: Ernie.
Woman: Ornie?
Ernie: Ernie.
Woman: ORRNIE? [flashes Ernie a dirty look]
Ernie: ... yes.
Woman: Hrm. [writes my name down, hands it to chef]

After paying with my credit card, I open up my wallet and look for some cash to put in the tip jar. Since I only have bills above $10, I decide I’m not that generous and put my wallet back in my pants, only for the woman cashier to notice and give yet another glare of death. “I think she hates me,” I say to Mike.

So, I’m sitting on one of the benches marked for to-go customers, taking in the ambiance; there are framed pictures of Bollywood stars, and the restaurant is still filled mostly with Indian patrons, a promising sign of whether the restaurant is going to be good or not. (As opposed to a restaurant that has a name like, say, “Rick and Molly’s House of Sushi.” Right?) I find it funny that the Indian chef calls out “Horny” for a to-go order. What kind of Indian name is Horny?

The chef repeats the name again. “HORNY?” on the giant microphone. Except this time he is looking straight at me.

Now at this point, I’m not necessarily thinking he’s trying to say the word “horny” - I’m thinking the cashier wrote the name “Ornie” and he’s just pronouncing the name a little differently because he’s not from America and it’s like the game Telephone, when you sit around a circle with your 12-year old friends and you giggle as the phrase “The love of Jesus surrounds me” turns into “I fucked arugula on a pony,” so I’m telling myself that it’s cool, no harm, no foul.

And only THEN do I look down at the receipt. And there under the order, written in large letters with a giant BIC pen, do I see my name spelled the following way:

H-O-R-N-E-Y.

I look over to the cashier in horror. She’s helping another customer, oblivious.

Let’s stop time right here. At that moment, I figured I could do one of two things: Mike hasn’t seen the receipt yet. I can grab the dinner and run, run for Mexico where no one will ever know about this somewhat awkward moment and live my life in semi-anonymity with sea lions and Tijuana hookers.

Or, I could tell Mike, and he could give me shit for the rest of the night.

Eh, what the fuck. It’s blog-fodder.

Ernie, to Mike: (Dude, look at the receipt. Look what she wrote as my...)
Mike: HOLY SHIT!

(Ernie and Mike run out of Chaat Cafe, hoping the chef doesn’t do anything embarrassing, like holding up a can of soda and screaming “HORNY, YOU FORGOT YOUR DRINK” while 30 Indians point and laugh)

At least the chicken tikka dinner was delicious. All it cost was a couple of dollars and MY SOUL.