During the past two years, partially due to all my surgeries then COVID, I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos. Views are typically split between K-Pop music videos, clips of Korean variety shows, science/technology vlogs, and whatever random content recommended by the YouTube algorithm.

Here is my YouTube journey from last night:

• Season 9 episode 1 of I Can See Your Voice (Korea) was available online, so I downloaded and watched it. One of the tone-deaf contestants turned out to be a world-class violinist.
• I searched for her name on YouTube and found many videos.
• One of the videos was two Asian guys talking about a 12-year old prodigy. That turned out to be a TwoSet Violin video about Chloe Chua. Researching further, those two guys are professional violin players, and Chloe Chua is a violin child prodigy.
• Watched a few more of their videos, but this one caught my attention. In it, Chloe is supposed to be giving Brett and Eddy lessons on playing Paganiniana. I do not know if they are playing worse on purpose, but she is awesome.
• Here is the sheet music and performance by Hilary Hahn, another violin prodigy. This is supposed to be one of the most difficult pieces to play on violin.

• Watching all the notes fly by reminded me of another piece of music. I used to play trumpet from junior high though first year of college, then for a few more years while I was working. I am not that good. I can play most orchestral music but have problems with high or fast notes like 16th and 32nd notes. I also do not improvise well, so any jazz solos are usually pre-written out. Anyway, something like Paganiniana on the trumpet would be Variations on ‘Carnival of Venice‘ (for trumpet or cornet) by Jean-Baptiste Arban. He published The Arban Method for trumpets and cornets in 1864 and I have a copy of it (not the original of course), though I could not play anything in the book.
• Here is the piece played by Wynton Marsalis.

Chloe has a YouTube channel and there are several performances with a classical guitar that are great.

Today (February 1, 2022) is Chinese New Year. This year, it is the year of the tiger. Here is a list of all the Chinese zodiac animals:

Our family had dinner Sunday night. We ordered some dishes from Lunasia in Cerritos instead of cooking ourselves. People traditionally eat dumplings as a New Year’s food, but we did not order any. Chinese or Lunar New Year is a much bigger deal in Asian then in the West. People here may know about it and a few coworkers tell me Happy New Year, but for most people, it is just another day.

新年快樂

I just realized you can embed a song from Spotify. Cool.

Why is there so much blank space in the block though? Playlist?

Oooh, you can see all the songs in the playlist and choose too. I wonder if it will play ads every so often.

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Well, the playlist was fine for the first four songs, but would play wrong songs further down the list. Not sure if this is true for all playlists. Girl Krush is a Spotify curated playlist.

I made several posts in the past about being a fan of K-Pop, mostly female soloists, and groups. Here is a page from my Spotify 2021 review thing:

I also watch a lot of Korean variety shows, which feature many K-Celebrities. I have noticed a lot of them talking about their MBTI type, especially younger people. This was not a thing until recently. MBTI stands for Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator. From the Wikipedia article:

In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test attempts to assign four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, such as “INFJ” or “ENFP”.

Though the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it has been criticized as pseudoscience and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in the field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator

My first introduction to MBTI was during MBA school orientation. It was more of an ice-breaker exercise, and no-one talked about it afterwards, except whether they were E (extrovert) or I (introvert). My guess is that most people in the US do not know or care about their MBTI type, and it is seen as pseudoscience entertainment, like astrology or Tarot cards.

However, MBTI is very popular in Korea. I have seen the cast of many variety shows discuss their type on-air, like their obsession with blood types. It is probably just for fun, but like every attempt to label people, it become bad if used by government or companies to set policy or make employment decisions.

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A quick search on YouTube for “Amazing Saturday MBTI” returns a bunch of video clips. This is the episode I just watched that prompted this post. Sorry, no English subtitles. If you have never watched this show, it is really funny. Moreso if you speak Korean or can find subtitles.

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Since it was so long ago when I did my first MBTI test, I went online to try again. The first Google search result for “MBTI” produces this link to 16Personalities. I answered their long list of questions and it said my type was ISTJ-T. I guess there is a bit of science in pseudoscience since some of the descriptions agree with my self-assessment, but that is also how fortune-telling works. The career portion was most “accurate” since I do work in a field that is mentioned in the resulting report.

The House of Small Cubes or つみきのいえ is an animated short subject film by Kunio Katō. I downloaded this several years ago but just rewatched it.

The film starts off with an old man sitting in a small room in a house that is surrounded by water. We soon realize that due to rising water levels, he needs to keep building upwards to stay dry. As he is moving all his belongings out of the old, waterlogged room, he drops his pipe down the hatch that connects to the submerged room next level down. He decides to get some diving equipment, and proceeds to dive down to retrieve his pipe.

What follows is a trip down multiple levels of his house, all the way to the bottom floor. The dive also becomes a journey through his past: taking care of his sick wife, his daughter getting married, daughter as a small child, and to when he met his wife. We also see both of them building the small original house that now serves as the foundation of this submerged tower.

At the bottom, he finds an intact wine glass that he brings back with him to the surface. In the very last scene, we see him pouring out two glasses of wine during dinner. I assume he is toasting his now deceased wife.

Climate change message aside, I found this film really sad. I guess there are multiple perspectives: he could have lived a long, happy life and not is content with his retirement (other than the rising water). However, I see a lonely, old man looking back at happier days. That probably has to do with how I feel. Even though it has been a year since my kidney transplant, my life still feels very precarious, as if I am still on dialysis.

Even though I am not as old as the man in the film (maybe), and I did not have any children, I do have lots of regret when thinking about the past. I still think about my ex-wife, even though the divorce was over 15 years ago. Since she is still alive and (presumably) happily remarried, the sense of loss I feel is harder to define. There is also regret in the poor health decisions that lead to my bypass surgery and kidney failure. Overall, there is a fear that my life will become just like the film: sitting alone at home looking at old photos and thinking about what could have been.