Crying in H Mart and a Snoopy Day

Hey some life updates, chronological order not followed :p

Life Updates:

1. We got a dog at my home place, this Raksha Bandhan when I went home to meet my parents and brother. My brother came home with a golden retriever, with all the sweet happy moments comes the responsibility of taking care of a living moving expressive being. We are all still scared of the 50 day old puppy. It mostly sleeps around and barks when hungry or wants someone to play with him. After going through varied names and asking ChatGPT, we ended up naming it Snoopy!
2. I got a surgery done for correcting my eyesight, now I can see life without glasses. The changes? There is a lot of a peripheral vision i.e.  having a view without actually looking at it directly by moving your head. I am still practicing to walk down the stairs without directly looking at them, will take a lot of time to unlearn that and trust my balance. The scary part? I got shinigami vision for one day, i.e. right after my surgery when I opened my eyes, I saw everything in red-black tint like from a horror movie. It was scary, one can only sleep it off and close the eyes.

The Book(s):

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

This is the book I listened to last month and consequentially me catching a flight to see my mother. The author is Michelle Chongmi Zauner. It’s a story of grief, of a daughter trying to go back to the beginning to understand her mother’s tough love – fully Asian style. Being an Indian made it more relatable for me. How going to doctors is bad, how to avoid taking medicines at all costs until you are not functional or a really high threshold.  Her mother always scolding Michelle for crying with the saying “Save those tears for when your mother dies”. It is heart sweltering and the poignant emotions emancipated makes one definitely miss their mother. The author talks about how she always wanted to be more American than Korean in her teenage years, but now after her mother her main heritage to Korea, does she have any claim to say she is Korean. Her internal turmoil with her identity. The book not only shows the happy parts, it shows the dark side of humaness, the lengths we go to keep those whom we hold dear and the strong attachment. Her conversation with her Dad, when he said, I know you wished it was me, who should have died and her dad adding I wish that too. The anguish she felt dressing up her mom after rigor mortis has set in, for the funeral. Celebrating some happy moments to forget the current pain, Michelle’s wedding, getting married to Peter, how she wanted to do it when her mother was alive. Her mother practicing to learn to dance with the groom, shelving out that energy from the last of her reserves. The audiobook is soft to the ear with her ever quivering trembling voice naturally bringing the book to life.

H Mart is a super store chain with Korean food and spices more accessible. For Indian context, can think of DMart.

I cried and paused and continued again with the book. I like how she shares her thoughts unfiltered, of how she is so brave to share them.

The Tech:
I dived a little deep on to how to use the .lastIndexOf method in Javascript with especially with the position parameter. I had to read the MDN document multiple times what was happening and at last it made sense.
The use of lastIndexOf with position is poorly communicated, it does search the substring from end. The index position is counted from beginning index. It searches till that given position from beginning. For future me, read the last 3 lines clearly if ever forgetting. Context: I was trying to implement a Autocomplete search component when I stumbled upon this being used. Now if the string was “`aa aa bb ccc d eee ff bb“`  think of the position parameter as the brackets for this substring and it will give the last occurence, say were were searching for b  and with position index as 11 then doing 0 based indexing it would be 7. For imagination purpose  “[aa aa bb ccc] d eee ff bb”. Even Bard couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer, hence the drilling and sending feedback : )

Note to my future self:
Touch upon Barbie movie and how women are presented in the anime.

I started listening to by the end of the month to How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur (produced about 10 episdoes of  The Office, and The Good Place)

Word from the book:
procellous: (adj.) stormy (Moana sailed through the procellous sea with the demi-god by her side.)
The word procellous was used by Peter (Michelle’s spouse) in his wedding vows.

Thanks for reading so far : )

One blog at a time!
~Calra