Early Retirement

I'm waiting for a packet of disability stuff to come in the mail. Why do companies still use paper to do business?

I've been trying to figure out how to retire at age 30 on 3 years of savings. Hmm... how can I generate passive income if I can't work? Heh, I'll be lucky if I get $5 per year from those AdSense ads. So, recently I tried searching in vain for easy money-making schemes. Duh, wishful thinking. I found that the people making the most money off of that are probably the Web site owners for those types of info-portals. Better results come from searching for "telecommuting", but those are pretty much normal jobs, and if I could do that, I'd be doing it. The Amazon Affiliate program appears to be the most real of all possibilities I encountered. Played around with that idea and figured it would add another $5 to my yearly income.

Next idea... win the lottery.

Or, become a super-duper investor of my not-enough savings.

Little did my sisters know that they might have to support not one but two unemployed siblings for life, and have one less help doing so.

There's also living off of parents' retirement funds. Gee, not only must one be financially stable before having kids, one must also prepare to be financially well off enough to support your children, and heck.. grandchildren, for their lives as well in case the need arises.

Winning the lottery might be nice, but then I really realize that money cannot buy time nor health.

Okay, I hope to become all better...

Bookmarks

Confronting Lyme Disease: What Patient Stories Teach Us

Chronic Lyme disease: psychogenic fantasy or somatic infection?

The Complexities of Lyme Disease: A Microbiology Tutorial

Additions to LymeRix Vaccine Victims’ Stories and Related Articles

LymeRix Vaccine Victims' Stories

Status Report

Sunday, I went *outside* and walked about three times around the tennis court. That's the first time since October that I've done any unnecessary expenditure of walking energy outside. When people say that with chronic fatigue, you have to build up exercise tolerance minutes or seconds at a time, they mean it. So after that, I rested about three days before taking a walk around the tennis court again today. I wonder if I'll ever be able to dance something like the CanCan or the German again, or both back to back....

Yesterday night, I picked up a magazine from the Oprah magazine subscription my friend gifted to me. (Gifted... I'm talking like an Indian...) She had also renewed my subscription to Utne. They have unfortunately been piling up every month because I haven't been able to read long enough to read a magazine. I used to normally go through about five magazines in one sitting, as "doing nothing".

Today, I called up my health insurance company and LabCorp to try to straighten out some stuff, as my accomplishment of the day, and did not totally sound like I was retarded. Last time, the customer service persons thought I was retarded, because, well, I was asking probably retarded questions and going around in circles.

But many tasks in the queue....

Mencius

My Google-sleuthing has found this quote my mother mentioned. Trying to search for it in English produced no results, but I heard her say the first five words in Cantonese to my younger sister. So I made my guesses as to how to pinyin-ify four of those words into Mandarin, but really I only knew what two of the words were, and along with using quotation marks to search for phrases, I found what I was looking for.

天將降大任於斯人也，必先苦其心志，勞其筋骨，餓其體膚，空乏其身，行拂亂其所為，所以動心忍性，增益其所不能。

Google-searching only produced this much pin-yin of the quote:

tian jiang jiang da ren yu si ren ye, bi xian ku qi xin zhi, lao qi jin gu, e qi ti fu, ? ? ? ?, xing fu luan qi suo wei, ? ? ? ? ? ?, ? ? ? ? ? ?.

My lack of Chinese reading skills thinks that the last part says "suo yi something xin something something, something something qi suo bu neng." However, that's just reading pronunciation without meaning. Help!

Okay, here are various English translations, but the Chinese-ness seems to be lost in the translation. I'd actually prefer to know a more literal translation.

"Thus, when Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his minds, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompentencies." (Translated by James Legge in The Works of Mencius)

"So it is that whenever Heaven invests a person with great responsibilities, it first tries his resolve, exhausts his muscles and bones, starves his body, leaves him destitute, and confounds his every endeavor. In this way his patience and endurance are developed, and his weakness are overcome." (Translated by David Hinton in Mencius)

Open Door Policy

Yesterday, I did my bi-weekly trip to my condo to pick up mail and move tiny bits of stuff at a time back to my parents' house. Tiny bits, because apparently I have trouble picking up a Stor-All box these days.

I ran into all of my neighbors, because our little quadrant likes to keep their doors open. It's almost like living in the dorms. They actually notice when I drive up, or am getting my mail, and come outside. The last time I did this, the new neighbor downstairs didn't recognize me, since it had been half a year, I had my glasses on, and had just thrown on whatever mismatched clothing that weren't my pajamas. And being ill changes your face. Especially the eyes.

During my first year as a graduate student, people walking by my room in CroMem would ask me why I kept my door open. Apparently, it was weird. I thought, what a weird question, it's weird to not keep your door open. Then my neighbors started keeping their doors open too. It didn't really catch on when I went to live in the Studios the next year.

I wonder why all the neighbors in my corner keep their doors open, and not the people in the other two quadrants of the building. Probably a combination of geography and trend-setting. I think our corner gets the most sun, so the units get pretty warm, and we open our doors for the cooling air. And when one neighbor starts doing it, then all the others think, hey that's cool, we get to talk to our neighbors, so we keep doing it. Even when residents move out and new residents move in, it keeps catching on.

There they were, all enjoying a warm lazy Friday evening, watching television, or eating dinner.

PV = nRT

Is any random reader of my blog a chemist and can explain this phenomenon? The last time I made it out to my condo to pick up mail, I noticed the bottle of olive oil I had bought from The Milk Pail Market had squished like a shampoo bottle after being on an airplane. No one had been living there and the bottle hadn't been opened for half a year. I loosened the cap and indeed air sucked in and the bottle popped back into shape.

I thought, well, the air pressure outside hasn't changed, and the temperature hasn't fallen that much, so it seems that some chemical reaction is sucking some of the gas molecules. You normally don't notice this because olive oil or cooking oil isn't normally stored in flimsy plastic bottles left alone for half a year. What's the chemical equation for oil going rancid? Yeah, so this is what I think about during my twenty minutes of functional time per day.

By the way, The Milk Pail has very good olive oil. And very good asparagus, especially asparagus tips, in asparagus season, which is coming up in April. I can't comment on much else since I only went there a few times, but it's very convenient to do your shopping there right before DL rehearsal. It's a good place to get inexpensive gourmet produce and cheese.

Peace, Love, Hope, Faith

I think this is now six days straight in bed. I have to lie down after taking a shower. Sometimes I feel a little bit better by 11pm, but I'm exhausted from being exhausted all day and for six months, so all I can do is click on a blog or two. Blogging and blog-surfing used to be what I would do when I wanted to take a break and had nothing else to do. Now it's about all I can do. I'm too tired to figure out how to apply for disability.

Bookmarking some pretty pictures from Lara's site. I believe the inscription is from somewhere next to the church at Stanford. After seven years of walking the Stanford campus, it was something I only discovered last year. And for whatever pensive reason I was walking around the Quad, it helped.

Back to Bed

So I spoke too soon... back in bed for the last forty-eight hours.

5% Work

With a mild 5%-ish improvement, I've actually been trying to do some work the last few days. Today consisted of alternating between 10 minutes of work and 30 minutes of lying down over several hours. My mind is slightly ahead of my body. Telekenesis might help so I could type what I'm thinking while recuperating in bed.

Quack Quack

Somehow I find Quackwatch to be one of the most annoying sites on the Web, and it turns up in far too many search results. (Of course, by linking to it, I'm just adding ever so slightly more to its Google PageRank.) Maybe it's because there are people who spend all their time quacking that everything is impossible. It eludes me how people think they are making sense when they try to debunk entire medical systems, like chinese medicine and ayurveda, that have been developed and used for thousands of years by billions of people. Especially with a page of nearly all inaccurate information. With those kinds of false claims, you could debunk anything.

And you'd be surprised how many people still say things are impossible even after other people are already doing those things. I've heard plenty, even in the small world of computers and the Internet, like... in 2000, "online ticketing will never happen" (I think it had already been in existence in some form for several years)... and "Google will never make money"....

It just occurred to me how scary it is that some people don't even have enough imagination to imagine things that exist in front of their eyes!

Why are pharmaceutical drugs believable, and herbal medicine not? Penicillin was derived from mold, morphine from opium, caffeine comes from tea, coffee, and other herb-ish substances, etc. Marijuana is used for pain. Where do people imagine the drug discoveries come from originally? The medical community does seem to recognize that herbs can cause problems when taken with pharmaceutical drugs, and doctors regularly ask if you're taking any herbs. Duh, so what does that mean... about herbal activity...? Does this idea of using chemistry and computers to study the chemical compounds in herbs help? Why should that make a difference whether it's believable that herbs work? The herbs don't change from not working to working after such scientific studies.

A lot of the time, it isn't even known how pharmaceutical drugs work anyway, and many uses are discovered by accident. Like the whole class of selective serotinin reuptake inhibitor anti-depressant drugs, apparently it's just a theory that what they do is inhibit serotonin reuptake. Now some people think they actually work by growing new brain cells. And apparently, the first anti-depressant drug discovered was actually an antibiotic being used to treat tuberculosis.

The problem seems to be that if people don't have the means to figure out how something could be working, to some people it's unacceptable and therefore isn't real, doesn't exist. Well, it's going to be a while before we can dissect every single molecule in the human body and follow all their actions in a lab. Science requires abstract thinking and imagination as much as logic and proof. Someday after we surpass Star Trek levels of technology, we'll be able to describe all of the quadrillion molecular activities that make up "qi" flowing through the body, "meridians", and "blockages"... or balancing vata, pitta, and kapha.... These are actually describing biological systems much more complex than the current science and technology can break down. Maybe it's a bigger number than quadrillion, how about googol?

This reminds me of a time when a friend told me how she remarked how wondrous and beautiful the stars they were looking at were, and her pre-med boyfriend at the time replied that they're just some gaseous material. Hrm, ok, well, the artist does not deny that stars are made up of gas, but apparently many "scientists" don't care to see that they can be anything more than that.

Copernicus was a quack. Anybody who ever made a discovery, invented anything, or produced new knowledge was pretty much a quack. The biggest quacks are those who call everything quacks.

Self-sufficiency

I have this daily bipolar-ish cycle where my brain seems to turn on just when I need to go to sleep. So when I'm trying to fall asleep, sometimes my brain starts thinking things like, I really want some dosas and samosas from Udupi Palace. Pretty tasty for oily dough, potatoes, and spice.

And pondering the consequences of societal trends such as late marriage and childbirth and having a single child. The media has talked about China's generation of only children, with problems such as each married couple has the responsibility of caring for four grandparents all by themselves. Things start getting more interesting after two generations. With the first generation, one doesn't have siblings. With the second generation, one also doesn't have cousins or aunts and uncles.

Nowadays it's not uncommon for women to not have children until around 40 and men even later. There are things to worry about such as parents' age by the time the children are out of college. After two generations of such, one would have to wait till 80 years to see any grandchildren.

Put these two trends together, and you really lose a lot of family both horizontally and vertically. It's basically just mom, dad, and child. The concept of "large family gathering" and "relatives" sort of disappears.

Insurance Benefits

If you're working, young, healthy, and without dependents, you probably don't pay an enormous amount of attention when the time comes every year to renew your benefits.

I mentioned to one of my coworkers and his girlfriend that during this process when I came to the long-term disability option, I thought "I'm never going to need that..." so opted for the minimal. To which the girlfriend responded, "Yeah, I remember thinking that too." Even if not never, what are the chances...? (And statistics is one of my favorite subjects.) Considering it only costs a few extra dollars a month, I must have thought the chances were really low. Probably thinking along the lines of, I run, dance, haven't been to a doctor since my pediatrician, feel like a fifteen year old at almost thirty, work hard easily, don't have dependents, etc.

Not only that, but it may actually be prudent to get your own individual insurance outside of employer-sponsored benefits, since what could happen if you changed jobs, or were not employed for some time? It's when you're young, healthy, and think you don't need it, that's when it's dirt-cheap and probably worth getting.

And health insurance too. While employer-sponsored health insurance might cover alot more than most individual insurance options, it's nice to lock-in low rates when you're healthy so in case you can't work for a long time, you still have affordable insurance. Because by the time you're too sick to work and COBRA runs out, you probably can't get affordable individual insurance. And it's no guarantee that you'll qualify for social security disability and get Medicare.

You're probably still thinking, what are the chances?

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.