March 2024

What I got up to this month ...

It’s been a long month, and for me, another busy one, with musical, comical, and literary victories worth talking about.

Output

I update my comedy YouTube channel every Wednesday with a song or a skit, and every Friday with a short joke. The channel has had thousands of views this month, with highlights being this Chinese song, and this short joke.

My music YouTube channel has enjoyed an increase in camera and microphone quality, and going forward, all videos on it will be high definition, with a resolution of 1080, like this:

My Monday Mandarin channel is also going strong. This month’s videos included an introduction to Chinese humour. Starting Monday April 8^th, all Monday Mandarin videos will be high-resolution, which will help bring the channel to the next level.

Activities

It has been a good month for my literary career, with two articles published in Asian Cha, one on the history book ‘Kingdom of Characters’ and the other on the novel ‘Heart Sutra’.

Since late last year, I have been keeping a self-knowledge diary to help learn about myself. It is particularly useful when assessing my new relationship with alcohol and how I feel after drinking, as well as Hinge dates and why the women almost always say something like: “I enjoyed your company but didn’t feel a connection.”

It became obvious that there were some incidents from my past that I simply had to write about, and this manifested in the Substack essay ‘Middle-Class Takeaways’.  My job as a support worker is one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had, but I am often confronted with the conflict between being culturally middle-class (well-read, knowledgeable), and economically middle-class (the good kind of middle-class).

Wider World 

It has been a bad month for conspiracy theorists. Kate Middleton Princess of Wales’ apparent withdrawal from public appearances inspired theories about an extramarital affair, imminent divorce, and other things that may have undermined the monarchy.

The Baltimore Bridge collapse also spawned conspiracy theories. As did Boeing’s recent accidents.

As always, the truth is soaked in human weakness and incompetence, including a botched photoshopping job. The problem with conspiracy theories is that they are optimistic enough to posit that there are some grownups in charge.