Back to Coding

I've been working on tutorials and other projects to keep myself in the practice of coding, but lately it's been harder to do it consistently. I think it's because of the pandemic. The news has been getting more dire since Monday, when the number of deaths due to the coronavirus in the U.S. went above 3,000. Today it went up to 6,000. I'm finding it hard to concentrate. I can't help watching the news because I've been a news junkie probably since I first started watching the evening news with my dad when I was a kid, but I think it's taking a toll on me. I've tried to make myself feel better with social time. I tried using the Netflix Party extension in the Chrome browser yesterday so I could watch a show called Locke and Key with my sister Monika, who lives in Seattle. The show itself is all right as a teen-oriented magical reality thriller, but a lot of the fun came from the chat feature on Netflix Party, which let's you chat with other viewers while you watch the show. We made jokes about the scary imagery and characters. That was last night. Today, I only connected with people on Facebook, which is starting to feel insufficient.

I worked out with an hour-long cardio video in the morning. That helped, I think. Strangely, watching an episode of The Handmaid's Tale made me feel better. Watching Elizabeth Moss navigate a dystopian future world controlled by religious fanatics for some reason felt better than the reality that I'm actually living in. I'm by myself in a studio apartment and I'm not supposed to have social contact with people because of a highly contagious plague for which there is no cure. It's like house arrest. It may be that just allowing myself to be in another world for a while was helpful, even a world as awful as Gilead.

After watching the show, I saw on LinkedIn that I got a message from my boot camp instructor, Zane. He was checking in to see how I'm doing. I think that helped. I was eventually able to get back to working on a WordPress tutorial that I had dropped earlier this week. I don't know how much WordPress will help me as a web developer, but progress of any kind feels helpful. I'll work on it more tomorrow. It's not like when Shakepeare was writing King Lear during the plague.

"Day 6: Ben Jonson must have written, like, six plays by now."

What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague

The Bad General

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, "The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him." This means that a good general prepares to defend his nation from a attack instead of assuming that the nation is safe from all enemies. We have a president with no military experience who has claimed that he knows more about Islamic State (known as ISIS to many) than the generals. On January 20th, a man who traveled from Wuhan, China, to Washington state became the first person to be diagnosed with a coronavirus or COVID-19 infection, the same disease that killed thousands in Wuhan. On the same day, the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in South Korea. The South Koreans acted swiftly to deal with the disease, testing thousands of people and putting them into quarantine, in effect, fighting the attack with a fast counterattack. Two months later, they have almost finished winning the battle. They have few than 4,000 active cases. Total deaths: 169.

How did our president rise to the occasion of defending America from this global pandemic? Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Trump claimed that we have it totally under control. "It's going to be just fine," he said.

Sun Tzu: "Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand." When the Chinese first deciphered the genome of COVID-19, they converted it into a data file that they uploaded to the internet so that everyone could use it to create tests for the virus. The Germans did this immediately and have succeeded in keeping the number of cases down as a result of massive testing of their citizens. I began to look at the growing numbers on sites such corona.help and worldometers.info to calculate how the numbers were rising exponentially. I learned that the exponential curve needs to hit an inflection point before it can level off into what's called a logistic curve. Even though there were only 66 active cases in the U.S. at the beginning of March, I was alarmed because I saw how the exponential growth could raise that to the hundreds of thousands, even as much as a half a million,
depending on what measures we took to reduce the growth rate, measures such as social distancing. Most other people were not alarmed. Trump was saying this was a hoax created by the Democrats to stop his election. "One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," he said in February. But the numbers kept rising like the grains of rice in that story about the king of India who paid the inventor of the game of chess by doubling the number of grains of rice for each square on the chess board. There are just a few grains in the beginning, but after a enough squares are added, the number of grains is so high that that rice has to be stored in warehouses. Only in the middle of March, when fears of the pandemic made the stock market crash, did Trump declare a national emergency. He had the gall to call himself a "wartime president" even though he had spent six weeks dismissing the disease as no threat. As of this writing, over 5,000 Americans are dead. There are over 200,000 active cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and the numbers are still spiking. This is not a wartime president. This is a fool who has the blood of thousands on his hands. Recent scientific models created by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who works for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, show that the number of cases could go up into the millions and the number of dead could be between 100,000 and 240,000 before the numbers level off. The biggest threat to America isn't a foreign enemy. It's the president.

Social Time with Speed Racer

I've been avoiding people in order to comply with the stay-at-home order and yet today (March 30th) was a bit more social than usual for me. I had an online video chat with some Facebook friends. I had scheduled this as a lunch event in a Facebook group I run called Liberals. There were some problems in the beginning. I used the app to call the three other people who said that they were attending, but no one showed up at first. Eventually, a lady named Faye came online, but she was sick and couldn't stay. Another lady named Carol, who is the mother of my friend, Leta Lambert, came into chat but didn't say much, other than that she is shut in like everyone else and has food delivered to her. She wasn't visible in the video. She didn't want to be seen. My college buddy Jerry showed up. Jerry and I studied theatre arts togethe. This was great because I haven't seen him in years. He's working for a live theater in Michigan called The Barn. The owners are letting him live rent free in a nice house they own. We had a lot to catch up on, and also reminisce about, like our experiences trying at standup comedy when we were in college. I showed him the tie that I was wearing, a Speed Racer tie. It's one of a number of several conversation piece ties that I inherited from my brother James after he passed away. I wore the tie with a button-down shirt because I was tired of wearing sweatpants and T-shirts all the time. I had to cut the call short at one o' clock because I had an appointment with my therapist, but it was still great chat.

I Facetimed Paula and we talked for about 50 minutes. She's been my therapist since after my mother died. She says that I used to beat myself up a lot back then, but I'm better now. I know I'm different. We talked about the need to love yourself and I told her about Shakespeare's Sonnet 10 that expresses that idea. I had recently seen Patrick Stewart recite the sonnet on Facebook. I told her about the people I've been keeping in touch with, like my cousin Chris. I also told her about my last meeting with Alycia. There's probably nothing I can do for her. It's good to have a therapist you can talk to about your problems, especially during difficult times like these. I'm writing this past midnight, which is why the date is off, so I'll have to end this here.

I Ching Reading: Revolution

I often use the I Ching as a way find out where I'm at emotionally. Today I got Hexagram Number 49: Revolution. It implies that chaos rises out of order. The I Ching is based on Taoist philosophy, which teaches us how to find balance in a world that may seem out of balance. I'm not involved in a political revolution right now, but I believe we are all in a time when the COVID-19 global pandemic is forcing people to think in ways that were once considered revolutionary. Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate, was considered revolutionary for suggesting that every American should get $1,000 a month from the government. It seemed that our government would never try any policy that seemed so socialistic as too be impossible and yet Congress just passed a bill to give everyone at least $1,200 to help us get through the economic difficulty that social distancing has caused. But in what way am I supposed to find balance in this hexagram?

Ever since I graduated from a coding boot camp last December, I've been avoiding substitute teaching and staying home so I can apply to web development jobs and study whatever technologies I might need for a new job. Now that the world has turned upside-down, everyone else in California is living a lot like the way I've been living. For me, the main difference is that I can't study at Starbucks or go to the gym to workout. Everyone else is applying for unemployment like the way I've had to apply for unemployment when I can't get teaching jobs. In a strange way, everyone has been brought into my world. It's a little disorienting. What am I to make of it?

This hexagram came with what's called a "changing line," which means that there is an extra hexagram after this one, in this case Number 63: After Completion. I've seen this before. After a project is completed, there is always more to do. I knew it would take some time for me to find a job after I graduated from boot camp, but now that the economy is paralyzed, it's hard to tell if I can even hope to get a job.

Today, I had a phone interview with a lady who works for a company called 8th Light. They offer apprenticeships to junior coders. We talked about how much I would be paid and the company's philosophy of coding as a kind of craft. I told her about how I would prefer a front end job, which has to do with the way a web site works. She seemed nice and we had a good chat, but when we ended the call she said that there are many candidates and only one position available. That doesn't make me feel optimistic, but this is part of the process. I'll just have to keep applying and hope I can get more interviews.

Wake Up Call

I woke up at about 3:30 this morning. It was my friend Alycia calling. She had just rear-ended a parked car. The police had already come to deliver their report and left. This was bad news for more than the obvious reason that her car no longer worked. She had been living in her car after having left the halfway house she had been living at for a year. Before that, she had been living with me because she had no place to go after she got out of jail. Long story short, she was convicted of the crime of being mentally ill. Since she was taking medication this time, I had agreed to help her. When she was living with me, she was anxious and depressed all the time, which was a burden to deal with. After she moved to the other place, she changed. She became a completely healthy person. She was even joyous, a lot of fun to be around. Lately, she had been taking steps to improve her life. She had passed a mortgage license exam. She was applying for jobs. This picture of her and me was from her birthday last month. But then, unexpectedly, she turned to the dark side again and left the halfway house. This issue, according to her, was a dispute with the owner about her medication. With the pandemic becoming worse, the was the perfectly wrong time for her to be living in her car. I've heard that there is a correlation between pandemic infections and psychosis, but the true cause may never be known.

I kept falling asleep while she was talking to me. I couldn't let her stay with me due to the governor's call for social distancing. I told her it's too late for me to help her and we ended the call.

After lunch, she called me again. She wanted me to help her get cash because her debit card was no longer giving her cash from ATM's. Her car was parked six miles away in a neighborhood in Calabasas. She told me to call her when I was almost there because she would be getting something to eat and wanted time to walk back to her car. I told Siri to call her and text her warnings when I was was on my way, but she didn't answer. I parked my car up the street from her car. She wasn't in it. The front end was totaled. I took a picture of it and went back to my car. After I texted the picture to her sister, Alycia called me. She didn't even know that I had tried to call her. I drove to the Denny's where she was waiting for me in front of the restaurant, not inside, since it was closed, like most other businesses these days. We didn't hug. That's a bad idea now. I was wearing the mask and gloves I wear when I go shopping. She sent me some money online and I gave her the same amount in cash. She left to get something to eat and I said I'd see her later. I felt empty when I walked back to my car.

People are dying from the coronavirus. It has killed about 2,400 Americans so far as of this writing, and about 34,000 worldwide. As terrible as that as, we have to remember that mental illness is also a disease that destroys lives.

Energy Man Production Log 5/28

I just got out of a comic book store called Collector's Paradise in Winnetka to do a little research into the comic book world for my play, Energy Man. I talked to a man who worked there and told him that I was wondering what kind of symbol Energy Man should have. My initial thought was that it should be a letter or a couple of letters. He said that superhero symbols usually are not letters. Yes, Superman does have an "S" on his chest, but that's also the Kryptonian symbol for the word "hope." Most of the time, superheroes have an image for a symbol, like the Spider-Man's spider symbol. I had the idea of using a lower case "e," but he said that if I used that, it would have to be some really fantastic "e." I also had the idea of using a lightning bolt symbol, but it would have to be different from the lightning bolt symbols used by Shazam and The Flash. Before I left, he talked me into buying a short stack of comic books called "Incognito." The description I gave him of Energy Man reminded him of the down-and-out loser who is the hero of Incognito.

Back at home, I searched for electrical symbols on a search engine and noticed one symbol that might work, a lightning bolt with an arrow head on it. I'll have to discuss this with Geoff and Heather.

Middle School Drama Competition

As with with the high school competition, most groups were average. Still, I was surprised to see how creative and talented the middle school students could be. I was impressed early on with the lead actor in a piece about the Holocaust. I gave that group a good score, but they didn't advance for some strange reason. Another group did a good job with that scene from The Crucible when Mary tries to confess to faking the affliction from the "witches" and Abigail goes nuts with visions of birds attacking her. Some actors were weaker than others, bringing down the overall quality of the piece.

I noticed a curious trend in the large group comedies. Many groups seemed to favor obscure pieces of bizarre writing. I'm not against the use of such writing. Some of my own writing is very similar to one such piece which featured a kind of existential game show. The problem I found with some of these pieces that their experimental nature seemed a bit beyond the grasp of some of the students. Either that, or the writing was simply deficient. Sometimes the quality of the writing was hard to determine because the performance of the group was loud, fast, and frantic. I have no objection to such an artistic choice, except that several groups that I saw seemed to cling to this choice throughout their performance. The noise became a monotone, the speed was uniformly fast and therefore lacking in variety of pace, and the frantic energy eventually became tiresome and also lacking in variety. It seems to have become a common trend, and I find that disappointing.

I did enjoy the musical finals. Avenue Q and Suissical surprised me with their inventiveness and strong performances.

A Jack Sparrow Halloween

I dressed up as Captain Jack Sparrow for Halloween and joined my cousin and his family for a Fall Festival event at there church. There was a chili cook off and some trick or treating. I mostly just wanted a chance to show off my new costume.

Later, I went to Sardo's, a local karaoke bar. Two people I didn't know came up and asked to take a picture with me. Cool.

High School Drama Competition

I went to Valencia High School in Placentia, California, to work as a judge at drama competition for the Drama Teachers' Association of Southern California. Most performances were about average. Some of the student-written scenes were interesting. One scene was about the Japanese internment camps in California where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. The subject matter had merit, but the performance and direction were lacking. Another piece with merit was about Rosa Parks, but, for some reason, portrayed her planning in advance to sit at the front of the bus. That doesn't fit the facts. Strangely, two of the student written pieces were about Charles Manson. I placed one of them as my first place choice. Some of the monologue actors achieved a fine depth and range of emotion in their pieces. The last show I saw was an amazing performance of two young actors who did a scene from Moliere's Forced Wedding - in French! Almost no one understood what they were saying, but the scene was still hilarious. Of course, they won.

Yes on 87 Party

I spent the whole day yesterday trying to give my apartment a quick makeover. I was about to host my first party in my place and I wanted it to look good. The party wasn't really a party. It was a get together of sorts for Yes on 87. I ran out of time for the home makeover and ended up moving the mess in my living room into my bedroom.

The get together was nice. My five guests were mostly free-thinking people who, like me, would like the State of California to get the extraction fee from oil drilling companies that other states get. The oil companies have been getting a free ride for years and it's time for that to stop. We watch a video on my internet connection, but the conference call didn't work. The number wouldn't take a call from my Skype internet phone program. Whatever. It was still the first successful party at my place.