This History Today series aims to document what life is like in this period of history. I update whenever I feel like it.
Aspects of daily life:
- A good friend of my fiancée died yesterday. She was only 33 and left behind two teenage boys. I didn’t know her that well. But she had just been helping us a few weeks ago moving a new couch into our house. She was surly and quiet about her problems. She had health problems, but the way she acted, I wouldn’t have guessed. I think she believed in heaven.
- I went for a ten mile walk today, even though it was raining. I enjoyed being alone in public.
- Bernie Sanders had a rally today I think. Apparently he is going to run for the presidency again. My fiancée thinks he’s going to win this time. His campaign raised almost 6 million dollars in 24 hours last week, according to CNBC, with an average donation of $27. I wonder what the median donation was.
- I visited Forever 21 — the store — for the first time in what feels like a few years. I finally understand the outfits I see on some of the instagrammers I follow. I thought they were digging up stuff from the 80s (or maybe 70s? I’m not up with the fashion decades), but stores actually sell this stuff. And it’s cool. Funny how fashion is cyclical.
- Coming back from a trip in North Carolina, I met a woman named Catherine (I didn’t ask the spelling, so I’m just guessing). She had pure white straight hair to her shoulders, and she journaled. In fact, for a majority of the flight, she was writing in her journal, handwriting it. It was pages and pages. She was very friendly and told me about herself. She used to teach, but now she edits, freelance. Her daughter has a PhD in French and is a professor. I learned way more about her than I would’ve expected, but the interaction made me want to go back to handwriting. I type instead of handwriting now, because it makes editing easier. But there is a sort of magic in handwriting. It makes you closer to the words. It feels less like work, I think. Maybe that’s why I find it so hard to write nowadays.
- Girl Scout cookies are still $5 a box.
- Crop tops are back in fashion.
- Trader Joe’s has bags of Orzo for $0.99. I think pasta in general is probably the best thing to eat for high calorie content on a small budget. Or big bags of rice.
- I’m shopping online for clothes and shoes more than ever. It’s so much more convenient. Amazon is super helpful with this. Interestingly, I don’t always get the best prices on Amazon.
- Amazon’s new HQ2 is not moving New York City. Sometimes I worry about Amazon becoming a monopoly or too powerful as corporation. I researched a bit about them, and they’re willing to accept “razor thin margins,” a phrase I saw a lot. I’m not sure they can actually become a monopoly in the online retail space, because the barrier to entry for new e-commerce stores is incredibly low. However, their Web Services infrastructure is huge. A few years ago in 2017, that infrastructure went down because of some employee accidentally taking too many servers down, and lots of huge companies websites didn’t work. The Internet shouldn’t be so easy to temporarily crumble. Internet infrastructure, like the railroads back in the early nineteenth century, is incredibly important to daily life currently, and anyone having a monopoly there is worrying.
- Tesla always seems to be struggling to meet its demand for the electric car, but I’m super stoked to see self-driving cars become the norm. I think personal travel will become more accessible than ever. Automated Uber-like services will be the future in my opinion. Owning a car and only driving it twice a day or less is incredibly inefficient.
My walk made me very thoughtful.