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.

The last time I visited my parents in California, I greeted my sister, kissed my mom, asked how everyone was, and then my mom started yelling at me.

“Your Chinese is beginning to be awful,” she said to me in Mandarin. “The longer you spend with those Spanish people, the more you won’t be able to talk to your mother.”

“You should move home,” she concluded, as she often did.

So, not-so-dirty secret: my first language was Mandarin. That’s what you get when your parents moved to the United States from Taiwan in the early seventies. My sister was eight when she moved here, so Mandarin was her first language too. I remember digging through her elementary language books as a kid, finding worksheets where she wrote out complex answers in bopomofo, a fake alphabet created for Chinese kids since they were too young to memorize every single character. Then our family moved, and thanks to a steady stream of children’s public television and a penchant for getting reference books instead of new toys, I was the four-year-old Kindergarten Christmas narrator, reading out the script when none of the other five-year-olds could.

Dad has always been able to speak broken English—Engineer’s English, he calls it. For twenty-five years, he wore a tie and dutifully studied corporate office building schematics and read engineering books while my mother tended to the children as a housewife. Known during the day as “Jimmy,” he spoke in heavily accented but passable English, more comfortable with terms related to flow systems and air conditioning than asking his co-workers if they wanted to go out for drinks afterward. At home, he was strictly Chi-Ming, his Chinese name. His home was his domain, and he ruled his family with an iron fist because, between the military and the way he was raised, that’s the only rule he knew.

Mom never really needed to speak. My mother used to take English lessons at the local adult school when I was a kid, and that’s where she met Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Chang, and her Japanese friend, Yoshiko, who would visit every so often. But she let her skills slip away after years at home as a housewife, speaking Chinese to family members and cashiers at the local Asian food market, Ranch 99.

So we have these moments where we speak to each other, but we don’t really communicate. Sometimes I hear my friends talking to their parents about things, and I wonder: Am I able to talk to my mom about that? And sometimes the answer is no. She asks if I get exercise and what I’ve eaten. I ask her if she’s gone on a daily walk. She asks me if I can help her burn some CDs. Other times, Angela acts out, and Mom tells me that she doesn’t feel good, that my sister gives her high blood pressure—nothing past that.

Do we talk about what will happen if she gets too old to care for herself? Do we talk about what will happen with Angela? I’m not sure we could have those conversations. I’m not even sure we’d want to, even if we could. It feels automatic now; she’s learned to use only certain words with me, almost like she can only speak to me as if I’m still a kid.

My parents enrolled me in weekend Chinese school, like all the other Chinese parents who had Americanized kids. The purpose was to keep up with their language and culture. It was also held at a local church, where the Chinese school headmaster was also the local minister.

Before moving to Miami, my knowledge of Spanish was limited: two years of awkward high school Spanish, then I decided to refocus on relearning Chinese, because I thought it would be great if I could speak to my parents fluently in their language, like the ending of The Joy Luck Club, except with a little less estrogen. Also in high school, I went on a missionary trip to Mexicali, where I learned the phrase “lo siento” and a praise song we sang multiple times a day: “Yo tengo gozo, gozo, gozo, gozo, en mi corazón.” Which is great, because then I can go to Rodolfo, the handyman who works at the boyfriend’s theater, and tell him I have joy in my heart. And then he could ask “por qué,” and I would bow and shake my head and be all, “lo siento, lo siento.” I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

I shake my head a lot now, a thousand mini-bows like what my parents used to do whenever they didn’t understand that. I do that whenever I see there’s a family function and my boyfriend’s grandparents are there. “CHINO!” she screams at me from across the room before we go in for the standard besitos.

My sister-in-law turns to her and starts yelling. She is saying the word chino a lot, and she’s pointing at me, so I assume that she’s saying the word isn’t appropriate.

Abuela yells back, and my sister-in-law just turns to me and rolls her eyes. “She says she’s not being racist when she calls you chino. Because, you know, she knew a Chinese person back in Cuba.”

I turn to abuela and give a thumbs up. “Knowing Chinese people, AOK,” I telepathically communicate with her.

Which makes me uncomfortable because that’s exactly what my mom does when she talks in English to people she doesn’t know: she shakes her head and apologizes all the time. And I’m all holy fuck, I am turning into my mom.

So now I’m trying to learn Spanish, or at least get started with it.

Now I have an app, some flashcards, a boyfriend who helps me with pronunciation, and an Abuela who calls me chino, which I’m told is meant with love. I can order food. I can tell Rodolfo I have joy in my heart. At family gatherings, I can mostly keep up, nodding at the right moments and laughing just after everyone else, so it seems like I got the joke.

Mostly, I just shake my head and smile.

Which, yeah. I know.

Thirty years ago, I went through my sister’s bopomofo worksheets because I wanted to speak to my parents in their language, fluently, like the Joy Luck Club ending but with less estrogen. I never made it. My Chinese got good enough to argue about heart medication, but not good enough to stop my mom from yelling at me every visit that the Spanish people are stealing it from me. The longer you spend with them, the less you will be able to talk to your mother.

She’s not wrong. She just has the wrong language.

Here’s the thing: I crossed an ocean of vocabulary to get to Miami, but I ended up in the same place. I’m a grown man in a room full of people who love me, head bowed, hands a bit helpless, apologizing for words I don’t have: lo siento, lo siento. Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Chang, and Yoshiko—except now it’s all in Spanish, and I’m the housewife letting it slip.

The only thing I ever got fluent in was apologizing.

Lo siento, Ma. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —

I wrote this at three in the morning in August 2005. I was twenty-eight. That summer, my relationship had ended, and my parents had separated, and one night the thing I’d been outrunning for years finally sat down on my chest and started talking back. This is the first time I had ever tried to put depression into words on this blog. The elephant came back that December. He never fully left — but he did, eventually, get less obtrusive, exactly like he promised.

Lately, it’s showing up more. Always late. Always when I’m alone, sweating in a bedroom that feels like a sauna, hacking up phlegm from too many cigarettes. I try lying on my back. Nope, that’s useless. Flip to my side, face in the pillow, hoping something—anything—will just knock me out cold so I don’t have to think for a few hours.

It’s there. It’s back.

A thought pops up. Not a voice. I’m not that far gone. Just this idea: It never left. It’s always been there. Years of negativity, self-doubt, all the usual greatest hits—work, family, life—swirl together into this heavy, dark cloud. Except now it’s shaped like a giant white elephant, and it’s parked right on my chest while I’m just trying to get some sleep before work.

Look, I’m not losing it. There’s no actual elephant in my bed. It’s just a metaphor. Roll with it.

“The fuck you doing here?” I would ask, theoretically.

And the elephant would answer, “Fuck am I doing here? I’ve always been here. Was there when you were a kid when you dealt with the family, was there all through college. I’ve never left. You’ve pushed me in a corner for the last two and a half years, I’d say. I was, maybe, a tenth of the size I am now. But I’ve never left.”

Hack, cough cough, sputter wheeze.

“You need to stop smoking,” says the elephant.

“Fuck you.” I pause for a second. “I’m going to pull through this, you know. You’re going to go away, for good.”

“Fantastic. Maybe someone will do a Lifetime movie on your life, Meredith Baxter-Burney. You don’t believe half the shit you say.” Goddamn elephant, he sees right through me. “Besides,” he says. “I’ll never really go away. I’ll get less obtrusive, perhaps, and maybe you’ll forget about me down the line. But I’ll still be here.”

Now the sheets are soaked, pillows a mess. I get up and start remaking the bed. So, I ask, when are you going to be less annoying so I can actually sleep?

“I don’t know,” the elephant says. “When I feel like it. When you feel like it. Days, months. Not so sure. But in the meantime, while you’re sulking and feeling sorry for yourself, I’ll be watching infomercials.” Since this is my imaginary sequence, the elephant can pick up my remote control, turn on my cable television, and change channels. “You know, Ernie, you can become a millionaire just by working from home, thanks to tiny, tiny ads.”

But I’m not paying attention, because I’m on my bed, curled up in a fetal position, wishing everything — the dark elephant-shaped cloud, my coughing fit, myself — would disappear forever.

A couple of weeks ago, my dad’s side of the family all got together at a Chinese restaurant. We hadn’t done that in about twenty years. The last time all my cousins and I were together, I was three, and we were just playmates—not the “smart cousins,” the “popular cousins,” or the “freak cousins.” (Angela and I are, of course, the freak cousins.)

The reason for the gathering was my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I love her so much. She’s amazing.

Everyone loves their grandma, of course. But has your grandma ever had to share a husband with two other women, escape both the Communists and the Japanese, and then move to a country where she didn’t speak the language?

That’s why I think she’s a trooper. When I was four, I used to spend whole afternoons at her apartment, looking through old photo albums. There were pictures of my family in the 70s, when my mom was pregnant with me, then earlier, when my grandfather was alive, and even earlier, when he was in his twenties.

“Nainai,” I would ask in my tortured Chinese, “who is he?”

“That’s your grandfather, honey,” she would reply. “Here, have some more orange slices.”

She always bought the sourest oranges in all of Oakland Chinatown, but I would eat them anyway.

“Where is Grandpa then?” I would say “Grandpa” in English because I didn’t know the Chinese word.

I honestly don’t remember what she said to that. I probably wouldn’t have understood the whole story anyway. My grandfather was in the Chinese military, fighting under Chiang Kai-Shek. My grandmother was the second of his three wives, and none of them got along—they argued with each other and with him. I can’t imagine my dad going through the same tough family stuff I did. My grandma is a strong Christian, and from what I know, wife number one was a Buddhist. I’m not sure if that made things harder, but I like to think it did.

But what she did say to me was this. She would give me a look I can’t really describe—somewhere between sentimental and troubled—and simply say, “He is a very good man, but he has many faults.” Then she would kiss me on the forehead, and I would smile, eat more sour orange slices, and watch Grover explain near and far on Sesame Street.

She’s been through so much in her life. I’m sure she’ll live another ninety years.

Alright, so I have this thing for video games. Call it Asian upbringing, call it parental rebellion. When I was ten, I’d go to a friend’s house and watch him play Kid Icarus and Metroid on his Nintendo, mesmerized.

“Dad, can I have a Nintendo?”
“No, you should be studying.”

Months later…

“Hooray, it’s Christmas!”
“Open your present, Ernie.”
“Is it a Nintendo? Is it a Nintendo?”
“No, even better.”

Unwraps Christmas present

“Uhmm… Dad? This isn’t a Nintendo.”
“I know. It’s an Encyclopedia.”
“This is only volume 2. Where are all the other volumes?”
“Too expensive.”
“Oh.”

Video games have always been my escape. When my parents were fighting, when there were issues at school, when I was dealing with the whole sexuality thing, I went back to them. Some habits die hard, I guess.

This year’s video game of the moment? Dance Dance Revolution. DDR is one of those things every trendy Asian kid in California knows about and has some type of experience with, similar to going to a rave or rebelling against your parental units. In case you’ve been living under a rock, DDR is a music-based video game where, instead of a joystick, there are giant floor panels marked with arrows. The arrows come up on the screen, and you step on the correct arrow panel to the beat. Kind of like karaoke, except you’re dancing.

The songs, for the most part, are cheesy Japanese pop tunes about lost love or dancing to the beat. Anyone who plays the game is so concentrated on stepping in the right place that they leave their hands to their sides, so it looks like they’re doing a bad Asian Irish jig. And usually the DDR machine is flanked by flashy, multi-colored lights and placed in an easily visible area of the arcade so everyone taking a break from their miniature golf can point and laugh. A lot.

A dollar a game. That’s how much it costs. You get such a workout playing a couple of songs that you’re out of breath by the time the game is over, reminding everyone watching you how chubby you are playing video games instead of, say, taking a walk. It’s embarrassing.

And I’m totally addicted to this game.

It all started innocently enough. You move to a new city; you don’t know anyone. Hey, there’s a video arcade nearby; I think I’ll go! What’s this? A new video game? Hey, I like music! So I started going a couple of times a week and putting in more money.

Now I’m at the point where I set the difficulty to hard and play both sides at once. I can draw a little audience and get applause from the white people and dirty looks from the Asian ones. The kids at the arcade know me.

It’s like being a heroin junkie, except with cheesy J-Pop music. God help me. Or at least help me find the nearest DDR machine.

People keep telling me I need to talk about my “unique experiences.”

You know the advice—every career article and every spotless LinkedIn strategist preaches it. Your unique story is your edge. Lean in. Stand out.

But that only works if your experiences are photogenic. Mine were, at first. Then, for years, they weren’t.

Life became a loop: condo, parents’ house, assisted living, repeat. Screens everywhere. Emails you don’t answer. No conference swag, no business trips, no team dinners with awkward small talk. Just the fluorescent buzz of decline. Someone is always dying. You juggle paperwork and job boards and hope nobody notices you’re failing at both.

That’s what caregiving looks like from the inside.

But let me back up, because the story doesn’t start there.

I moved to Miami for a relationship. This is, as I have said before, a thing people do. Miami is many things, but it is not, historically, a great place to maintain a career in engineering if you are the kind of engineer who needs a certain kind of infrastructure around them and didn’t think too hard about what that meant before getting on the plane.

So I found work. Remote gig for a Texas company. Civic tech fellowship. Almost started my own thing, but turns out I need other humans to bounce ideas off, not just my own echo. Joined my friend’s startup. Cue the usual: burnout, forced sabbatical, fired the day before I was supposed to come back. So I taught. Until I didn’t.

Everything had a Tech label. I didn’t ask if it was real engineering. The titles sounded good. Good enough.

Spoiler: it wasn’t.

What I was actually doing: teaching people to become programmers instead of being one myself. Writing curriculum. Building the apparatus that explains the thing rather than building the thing. I was good at it. It kept the lights on. Each individual step made sense. Collectively, they added up to a resume that, by the time I looked up, no longer read as “engineer,” even though the 20 Under 40 profile in the Miami Herald said otherwise.

Didn’t even notice it happening. Still sitting with that.

I moved back to the Bay Area three years ago. I was going through a breakup. And my parents needed me — that part was true and real, and I’d do it again. But I also came back with a specific, quiet confidence about the job situation. This is the Bay Area! There is always demand here! Surely, with my background — Code for America, civic tech, years of experience, all these words on a page — something would materialize.

I want to be fair to myself: that logic wasn’t crazy. It just turned out to be wrong.

Caregiving went from background noise to full volume. Dad’s decline wasn’t something I flew in for anymore. It was every day. Packed his stuff. Took him to the hospital. Had to get him sedated because he’d get angry if we tried to get him on the shuttle. Four blocks away, but might as well have been Mars. Back and forth. Parents’ place. Assisted living. Condo. Paperwork. Screens.

And running in parallel, or trying to, was the job search. Which, in practice, meant it ran in the background. Which, in practice, meant it ran badly.

The Bay Area has demand. Just not for whatever showed up in my particular resume.

About a year in, I made it through the first round at a FAANG company. This felt like something. Progress. Evidence that the logic hadn’t been completely wrong. I had been cramming for the DSA exams like a Japanese teenager trying to pass a University entrance exam.

Then, a few days later, you get a call.

“You were being interviewed as a mid-level engineer,” they told me. “Not senior. With your years, we can’t keep you there—you’ll retake it at the senior bar.”

Which was the opposite of what I wanted. Mid-level was the point. I’d come in hoping to be measured against a rung that matched the actual shape of my career, not the one my resume implied.

I tried to explain: the Miami years, the teaching, the pivot that wasn’t really a pivot so much as a slow drift I didn’t notice until it was already the shape of my life. A special case, I said. Couldn’t I come in a level down, where the bar matched the work I’d actually been doing? I’m a special case.

“Doesn’t matter when you have the experience,” they said. And then, there was nothing they could do.

I’ve thought about that sentence a lot: You have the experience. As if the experience I had was the thing they were measuring, and the gap between what they saw on paper and what showed up in the interview was just a performance problem, a calibration issue, something I could fix if I prepared better next time.

What they couldn’t fathom — what the rubric doesn’t have a field for — is that special cases exist. A resume can tell a true story that the industry’s hiring pipeline isn’t built to read, because why bother with the special case when there are literally 100 other people in the pipeline, fifteen to twenty years younger than you, who did exactly what they wanted them to do?

“I understand,” I blurted out. I didn’t. I said it was fine. It wasn’t.

So I retook it at the senior level. I failed.

The industry has a specific idea of what counts. Titles at recognizable companies. Continuous tenure. Output that can be expressed as scale — users, systems, team size. The narrative of someone who kept moving forward on the approved path, who didn’t stop to do anything messy or hard to quantify or god for-fucking-bid human.

Caregiving has no metrics, besides “try not to have them die today.” But there’s no good way to put “kept two elderly parents who hate each other alive and functional for several years while managing their finances, their medical decisions, and the slow bureaucratic machinery of decline” on a resume in a way that parses. It doesn’t compress into a bullet point. It doesn’t have a title. Nobody gave me a performance review for it.

Teaching? Same problem. At least if you’re trying to get slotted into a box. You can explain it, and it makes sense, but by the time you finish, the rubric’s already moved on.

The specific cruelty isn’t being rejected. Rejection, I understand. The specific cruelty is being told: you have all this experience — and having that be, simultaneously, true and completely beside the point.

Three years in, the money is draining. I’m not going to dress that up. My dad died in May. I inherited some of his savings. I have opinions about all of these things.

The Bay Area I came back to is doing its thing: building, funding, pivoting, AI-ing. Everyone has a deck. Everyone is in a moment. The energy in this city is, as it has always been, the energy of people who know exactly what they’re doing and are moving very fast toward it. They throw terms I was unaware of before I left for Miami, their new mantras: 996. Permanent underclass.

I’m not one of those people. Not right now.

The question I keep not quite answering is this: who am I here, professionally, if the version of me that existed before I left is no longer relevant? I came back expecting to find that person waiting. The industry looked at my resume and said, “We don’t see him either.”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by. I do think it made all the difference. And I’d do it again. But I’m still paying for it.

All three of those things are true at the same time, and I don’t have a tidy way to end that sentence. So I won’t try.

The inbox is still open. I’m still looking. There are no photographs.

The last time I went to church was for a candlelight Christmas Eve service. The actions to go to church seem so mechanical… My sister and I jump into a car. We drive through the Berkeley hills. We park in the compacted parking lot a block behind Telegraph Avenue, and instead of getting your nose pierced or buying a water pipe (for tobacco use only), you enter the familiarity and sanctity of the House of God, Presbyterian denomination.

But have you ever been to a place that feels familiar, yet not comfortable? That was exactly how I felt. I recognized a couple of faces: teenagers I spent countless Sundays with six or seven years ago, now marked by facial hair, breasts, or wedding rings. None of them recognized or acknowledged me. Maybe they don’t even recognize each other anymore.

And that’s okay.

When I was in high school, I was heavily involved with my church. I had joined the church and its youth group for very selfish reasons, however. I was one of those guys in high school who would dread lunchtime. It meant walking around the campus by myself, figuring out what the hell to do for the next 45 minutes. People in high school didn’t know what to make of me. I was the “weird guy,” the guy who would hang out with a clique of people and then quietly wonder why they wouldn’t invite me to their poker nights on Friday. You wanna know how I was known at graduation? I was “Ernie, the weird guy that got crapped on by a seagull that one day in April.” I wish I were kidding.

So going to the youth group on Sunday became a social outlet for me, not to mention a great way to escape bickering parents. I even played piano for the church high school choir, going on trips to Alaska and Chicago every summer. From there, I developed friendships with a group of guys, and we would hang out during the week, when one of us had access to a car anyway. All I had to do was somehow survive Monday to Friday.

But it was never about God. Mind you, I believe in God, whatever that entity may be. But I was angry at God. Maybe I’m still a little bit angry.

If there was a loving and just God, like everyone at church said, why did my parents fight? How could God explain what happened to my sister? I won’t even touch the issue of my sexuality with a ten-foot pole, but you can probably imagine. Looking back, Christianity wasn’t my religion; my friends were. I know how cold that sounds to anyone who once saw me as spiritual (which was a long, long time ago), but it’s true. My friends filled a niche I desperately craved.

Eventually, I went off to college with a plan: “I’m going to start over,” I thought to myself. “I’m not going to be an outcast anymore.” So I did.

Not to say I abandoned my spiritual side outright. At college, I joined a Christianity group for the first couple of months. But they were very intellectual, very matter-of-fact about their spiritual matters. I remember falling asleep in the middle of a five-person bible study. Not good.

But the nail in the Christianity coffin came when, during my first year of college, I came out to one of my close church friends from high school over the phone. He was then attending Northwestern University and planning to enroll in Seminary school. After I told him, he fell silent, then muttered something about living in a den of sin. “I’ll pray for you,” he said, and then hung up. I haven’t heard from him since. I was never angry at him for that—just a bit sorry. I’ve moved on. (A quick Internet search later showed he’s now married and works as a case manager for an adoption agency—good for him.)

By now, it’s after midnight, and everyone is in a sudden rush to get 200 cars out of a parking lot that only fits one hundred. The air is cold and damp, and I quickly reach into my pocket to light a cigarette.

I get a lot of dirty looks, but no one tells me to put the cigarette away.

And right there, I realized that in seven years, I had transformed myself. I went from a piano-playing Chinese boy on a mission for Jesus, sitting in the front row, eager for each hymn, to a person among hundreds walking quietly out of a church after midnight—tired from the late hour, confused because my beliefs conflicted with things that mattered deeply to me, and yet, just for the night, content because I had fulfilled my duty at a house of worship on a Judeo-Christian holiday.

And that’s okay.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —

This one’s from late 2018, when I was 42 and apparently had Feelings about it. The original subtitle — “Improv classes! A trip to Mexico! Crippling depression!” — does most of the heavy lifting as far as summaries go, though the actual essay is less zany-fun-year and more about aging parents, a city I’d lived in for five years without ever quite landing, and the specific weight of a depression that felt hard to claim out loud. I’m reposting it now at 49 mostly intact, which required reading it in full, which was a thing. I’m doing okay, for the record — not “everything is perfect and I’ve learned so much” okay, but okay enough to dust this off and put it back out there. Anyway. Here’s 42.

It’s been a rough year for me. Even though there have been some bright spots, I’ll remember 2018 as the year depression kicked my ass.

Okay, may not past tense. Maybe present tense, too.

This is the year depression is kicking my ass.

I don’t talk about my depression publicly. I don’t do that for several reasons — one, you don’t really bring it up in regular conversation. A friend of a friend or someone you have to call for work makes small talk and asks, “how was your weekend?” You’re not supposed to answer that with, “I woke up stupid early due crippling anxiety, go to sleep feeling resigned to the world around me, and spend the time in-between wanting to feed my emotions because it brings me brief but fleeting moments of satiation.” Instead, you reply with a polite, “it was fine. And yours?” And life goes on.

Two — if you know anything about me or read anything I’ve written at all over the past (checks calendar) sixteen years, you know that I have a very severely mentally ill sister, cognitively slow and unable to interact with another human socially on the good days, profanity-laced and physically assaulty on the bad ones. As this has happened since I was four — in an immigrant family on top of that — anything I feel would be deemed null and void, compared to what my sister goes through. “Aww, you’re depressed, Ernie?” I imagine my sister’s schizophrenia would say if it were an actual person. “Hold my beer.” And then poof, there goes Angela having a screaming fit in the middle of a suburban McDonalds, while we all shift our seats uncomfortably in the plastic booths.

I’m not 100% sure what the trigger has been.

It may be my parents. They’re getting older, dad has gotten senile, and it’s clear some sort of intervention will be needed. The TL;DR version: my parents are divorced, but it would make financial sense for them to get back together, as they have to see each other on a regular basis because of my sister, and my mom can no longer pay the bills to their house. Her central heating has broke, and it’s too expensive to fix, so she’s wrapped herself in electric blankets and bought an army of space heaters. So they start to reconcile until they have a bitter argument and swear never to be in the same room again or my dad’s short-term memory loss kicks in, and he’s forgotten the whole part about reconciling. Repeat this two or three times.

My therapist says I don’t have any obligation to tend to my parents whatsoever; that we don’t live in a time where it’s expected for unmarried Asian children to drop everything, fly home, take care of their elders. My brain knows this.

It may be that after five years of living in Miami, I’ve inadvertently decided that the best way to cope with things around me is to isolate myself. I don’t have close friends here, tried to find a tribe, ended up in evenings where it’s easier to just lie on the couch watching YouTube videos of cats rather than the spent energy.

My partner has been supportive overall but is a staunch defender of where we live. “What’s to say you wouldn’t feel that if you moved somewhere else?” And a part of me passive-aggressively send definitions of “gaslighting” over Facebook messenger, but another part of me knows he’s probably right, the asshole.

So, I’ve poured it all into work. Ahhh, work. See, putting your anxieties into your job is fantastic, because it gives you a distraction from yourself, but then it just opens more opportunities to create more stress that you’re unable to cope with. But you don’t know what else to do, or what other creative or social outlets you have any more, so you spend that all on work! It really is the gift that keeps on giving. Maybe karoshi — that whole death by Japanese salaryman overwork thing — will kick in for me, and I imagine having a heart attack in the middle of the office, grabbing my chest before I dramatically slump over a keyboard. Until I do some internet research and most of them work a hundred hour weeks, and I would be too lazy to commit suicide by working too much.

I went to Mexico City with Kareem and some friends. That was nice, and the break was good, although I ate this chicken and rice dish at some themed restaurant where the waitresses are dressed as nuns and caught food poisoning for forty hours. So I missed the Day of the Dead and would just have to settle for celebrating the Day after the Day of the Dead.

So that’s where I am right now. Next month I’ll fly back to California again for an unspecific amount of time. My goal is to convince mom to sell her house, and at the very least consider moving into the condo I own. A part of me thinks I’ll be staying a while, even though I know my parents, separately or together, will drive me over the edge. But it’ll be something different, and something different is definitely need right now.

The email is two sentences. I’d have called it one, which tells you how fast I read it. I’m standing in the kitchen, phone in one hand, and I say it out loud, to nobody in particular:

OH, HELL NAW.

Here it is:

is everything you write ai generated these days?
if not, just fyi, reads like slop.

The lowercase is his. So is the fyi, which – and I need you to appreciate this – is doing a lot of work for three letters. “oh hey, I can be a jerk but i’m coming from a place that looks helpful” (I would know. I have an fyi of my own I owe somebody. We’ll get there.)

This isn’t a stranger off the internet. I’ve known him since the blog days – back when you paid actual money for a domain name and posted about your feelings into Moveable Type and a small, weird community of people you’d never meet IRL actually gave a shit. He works in AI now. The actual models part, not the people who say they’re part of the AI movement because they write listicles called “10 Ways AI Will Change Everything.”

So when my face works again after the temporary but seething blinding rage, I copy his one sentence into my Obsidian journal – where I keep the stuff I’m not ready to be publicly embarrassing about yet – and I write underneath it: obviously this has me on the defensive. instead of being reactive, how can I be better?

Look at me. So measured. So grown.

Narrator, in British accent: “He would then spend the next three hours being neither of those things.”

The thing you do

The thing you do, of course, is question whether everything you’ve published HAS been AI slop. You can’t just be offended. You have to find out if he’s right first. Which means you can’t sit there and stew – you have to go back and reread everything you’ve published in the last two weeks.

Look. I’ve been publishing on the web since 1999. I have a whole bit about AI being the Adderall of the writing world: useful for getting something on the table, addictive as hell, and real easy to convince yourself what it wrote for you is you. I also have ADHD bad enough I once went a full year without writing anything, because the blank page is a terrible place to start a story when your brain refuses to give you a single drop of dopamine for building a paragraph. So I use AI as a tool. I’ve made my peace with using the tool. The line I thought I was walking was simple: AI does the boring scaffolding, I write the actual piece.

I know what slop looks like. I can feel it when I’m writing it.

So I reread. The old stuff I’d already flagged – that’s the easy category. There was a phase early on where you can practically see the novelty oozing off the prose; that specific brand of AI enthusiasm that reads like someone describing what a good blog post should contain instead of just writing one. Fine. Caught those a while ago. Embarrassing, but caught.

What I wasn’t ready for was the other category.

The words

Not “delve.” Not the em-dashes. Not “it’s not X, it’s Y,” which, yes, fine, the entire internet has agreed to be very annoying about.

These were words. Plural. A cluster of them.

I found phrases scattered through several posts – confident, technical-sounding vocabulary – that I cannot prove I ever used before there was an AI in the room. I’m not going to list them. The second I do, you’ll either nod like you’ve always known them or you’ll clock them as tells, and I don’t fully trust either of us right now. They were the kind of words you absorb from a smart magazine and just assume belong to you. You nod along while you’re editing. You think: maybe I know these words. Maybe this is just me.

Maybe this is me.

I sat with that one for a while.

The half he was right about

Here’s the fyi I owe you.

The email he got wasn’t a blog post. It was outreach – I’d been emailing a loose circle of people about freelance and consulting opportunities, and apparently I had gotten a little aggressive about it. The message he got, the one that read like slop: I didn’t write it. Not exactly. I drafted it with an AI agent I’ve been experimenting with, and then, per my own instructions, the agent sent it. On my behalf. Probably without any of the anti-slop rules I so carefully apply to everything else.

I handed the whole thing over. The drafting, the voice, the send button. I was juggling a lot of caregiving stuff at the time, I went hard on the automation, and I told myself that was just efficiency. Uhmm… oops.

So he’s half right. The half he’s right about isn’t my blog. It’s the email. It’s the fact that I let a machine talk as me to someone who’s known me for twenty years, and the machine got close enough that he couldn’t tell – except for the part of him that could, the part that fired off one lowercase sentence and then cause that teeny, tiny, low-key mental spiral you’re witnessing right now.

What you can actually prove

What I keep turning over is whether it even matters that I can tell the difference.

You can’t prove your writing is yours. Not really. Same rhythm, same vocabulary, same indefensible fondness for the en-dash – there’s no test you pass that a good model can’t also pass.

But you can prove it isn’t.

When the machine invents a word and you don’t catch it. When the agent hits send and you never read it. When you’re three paragraphs into defending a sentence and you can’t remember if you wrote it or just approved it.

That’s the part nobody tells you. You don’t lose authorship in one big dramatic sale. You lose it one un-read sentence at a time, and every single one felt like efficiency when you did it.

And it didn’t get me where I was watching for it. Not in the posts I reread four times. In the email that wasn’t even a post.

I wrote him back. Tried to be all casual. hey. you mean the email you recieved? or everything i’ve written lately?

Lowercase. Matched his. Didn’t even notice I’d done it until just now.

He hasn’t written back.

And here’s the part I can’t shake: I read that little message of mine four times before I sent it. To make sure it sounded like me. To make sure it sounded casual, which is a thing you only have to engineer when it isn’t.

Same trick the agent pulled. I just did it by hand.

There’s a companion piece coming in Late to the Future about the words. The mechanics of how it gets past you, and how you actually catch it. But Ernie, you say, aren’t YOU one of those people who write about AI through an AI Substack? Hey – what’s that thing in the sky?