Big shopping trip

 Up around 4 maybe. Today was to be a big shopping trip, maybe not this kind of big shopping trip: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kik%C5%8D

But some serious shopping at Nijiya. I was out the door at 8 after 5, got all kinds of stuff, and by 6 I was back here starting in on the "school lunch" bento I'd bought and a tall can of Asahi beer. I call this one bento "school lunch" because it's got all kinds of different things in it and seems like the balanced meal they'd serve in a Japanese high school. I'd also gotten some pork, some chicken, some tofu, veggies, even a jar of oysters that were on sale. I even got some natto for something healthy to eat for breakfast besides nuts. This all cost me $48-odd.

The thing is, if I'm not going to eat beef, it doesn't make sense to still eat cheese or eat yogurt etc. It's all supporting Big Cow. So I have to get used to having other things around. I looked it up and other ruminants like sheep and goats are also big methane-emitters so to be consistent I have to avoid those also.

So pork, fowl, and all the seafoods are OK. 

Since this is wartime or something like it, time seems shifted 3 hours forward. Coming in at 6 feels like it used to, coming in at 9. And it's in the mid-30s outside at night so it's cold and now for the next 5 months cold will be a factor and I'll run my little heater fan a lot. It's all pretty depressing. I don't know if the Orange Idiot is going to find a way to pull some kind of convoluted trick and get himself installed for another 4 years. Which basically means as many more years as he wants for him or his chosen successor. Am I living in Germany, 1938? 

At least I was smart to get that ukulele when I did because now Guitar Center's gone bankrupt. Guitar Center! In the '08 crash, they did well because tons of people were out of work and were maybe living in their cars but at least they had the time now to learn guitar. Maybe everyone's still got their guitar from the crash. Then they'd just need some new strings from Amazon.  

How many sets of guitar strings I bought from them back around that time without even owning a guitar ... No more favors to bums from me! I have a Left perspective, but I agree with the findings in this book by Theodore Dalrymple: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_at_the_Bottom

The Left's measures in England like council houses and free night school and all that would work out great if the population was Asian, but whites are so self-destructive that you help them, at least the lower class ones, that they'll take the food basket you gave them and sell it for dope and throw rocks at you the next time they see you. And in England they pretty much did all but burn the council buildings to the ground. This is how hyper-individualistic people act. You don't see this kind of crap in Asia. China lifted a billion people out of poverty by essentially giving them stuff. Mao hung the landlords and hey presto, free housing. You wanna tractor? Here's a tractor. Here's a cow and a bull. Etc. 

In the documentary Century Of The Self it's mentioned that the Labour Party in Britain, whose very constitution called for their doing all they can to better the lives of the common man, were dismayed that "We do all these things for them and then they read a copy of The Sun (notorious tabloid) and vote against us" (a paraphrase from the documentary). And we in the US have millions upon millions who voted for a guy who, if he got a second term, would bring back debtor's prisons, child labor, lynching, etc. So never help a scum; they are your enemy. Help a homeless guy in Asia and you've got a solid friend. A homeless in this country would, if they think they could get away with it, would stab you to "own the libs". 

It's the difference between "red in tooth and claw" individualism or "we live in a society and have for thousands of years". I am only realizing now much of that Confucian "we live in a society" culture rubbed off of me, growing up in Hawaii. 

I've also been reading on Reddit, the r/hapas sub-reddit. Hapa originally meant half Hawaiian half white, but the term is sort of drifting, generally meaning half white and half something else. It's interesting to read about the various hassles some of the people on there have had, and it helps me see things that have gone on in my life. My aunt is so deeply invested in being "white" (and stays in all the time and has blue eyes vs. my mother's hazel) she's not going to discuss it much, but she interestingly mentioned to me when I visited how good-looking we kids ended up due to the mix of my mom and my dad. My dad's side have not wanted to have anything to do with me even though I moved here to California and am fairly nearby. They didn't want my dad to marry my mom, the "steerage immigrant". 

It makes sense that we'd have moved to Hawaii. Even now, in this modern time, there are all kinds of hassles happening to people in r/hapas because those of mixed race are actually pretty rare on the mainland and people are still dicks. This is really strange to me because back in Hawaii, people bragged about being mixed. I don't get the gut-level hate whites here have for blacks. Yeah there are black people I might avoid because they look dangerous like "Takes A Swing Guy" but it's not blanket, it's individual. And the people who have been picking on Asians because covid somehow... don't even get me started. The stupidity, it hurts...

Hawaii may have its problems but compared to here it's pretty sane and normal.