Mark My Words: The Saddest Vacation

This week I had my first of several vacations this year. Vacations are supposed to be fun, but the circumstances surrounding this vacation are sad.

A few months ago, my brother, David, lost his science job. Unfortunately, this occurred right around the time of the Trump administration, and with all the funding cuts, it is extremely difficult to find science jobs in the United States right now. So he is moving his family to Taiwan, which is where my sister-in-law, Ya-ping, is from. I wanted to visit them in California's Bay Area before they leave. They moved into this particular apartment last year, so it was the first and last time I saw it.

Guys, this is the reality of the Trump administration and DOGE. If you voted for Trump, I'm ashamed of you, and you should be ashamed of yourself, especially if you continue to support him.

I flew into California on Tuesday, and they were taking things down to get rid of them. Ya-ping asked me to take old pictures of my niblings out of their picture frames. As I did so, some of the photographs stuck to the glass, leaving splotches behind. (Good thing we live in a day when the original files are digital!)

This picture is from June 2012, when the kids were seven, four, and two. They were at my cousin's wedding, which they stopped at while they were moving west from Tennessee to California. Seeing the blotches on the photograph is a reminder that that period is long past now, thirteen years later.

The year 2012 is forever etched in my mind as one of the most significant and memorable years of my life: I had my most important editing and geology classes; I got my first internship, which plunged me into an unexpected career in Mormon history; I made various friendships; I first came out to my mom; and of course, I saw these adorable kids in California.

Thirteen years later, the oldest, Preston, is in college, so only the younger two, Franklin and Amity, are at home. They spend a lot of time playing computer games, and they objectively aren't as cute as they were in the 2010s.

I got a dose of cuteness instead from their cat, Pudding. I met Pudding when I briefly visited in July 2023, but I got to spend more time with him. He is a playful cat, but he also spent hours cuddling with me.

When the light shone through Pudding's ears, I could see the blood vessels outlining his ears

Pudding and Reggie are very different from each other.

Wednesday and Thursday night, we played Jackbox games. During the game Quiplash, Amity and I had to answer "The three best birthday gifts for a very sad man." We both, independently, put Pudding and Reggie in our answers.

During the days, I spent a lot of time doing reading for work.

On Thursday, my brother took me to a nearby nature trail. It was fun to see forget-me-nots, redwoods, and thimbleberries (which we also have in Utah).

And he also showed he Mortar Rock, a Jurassic volcanic outcropping where Indigenous peoples ground grains. It's kind of a park, except that it's just a block in a random neighborhood.

On Thursday evening, I boarded Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to go from Albany to San Francisco to meet a friend, Dave, I met at the Gather conference in 2023. I was surprised how noisy BART was. I just sat there on the train, instead of looking at my phone. One good thing about this trip was that I got time to just sit and do literally nothing, instead of flitting about from job to job, to chores, to trails, to stores, etc.

Once I got to my stop in San Francisco, I walked through the neighborhoods. It was fun to see the iconic steep roads with the houses close together.

I stopped in a little neighborhood grocery store, since I love grocery stores, and I was surprised to see they sold grapes in paper bags! I have never seen that before. I might buy grapes more often, except that I feel guilty about the plastic. But I didn't buy anything in this store.

And I stopped in a bookstore called Bird & Beckett Books & Records, which was overpacked with books. They happened to have a used copy of a book that a colleague had recommended to me, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, so I bought it. It's about historical memory (in this case about the American Revolution), a topic that interests me.

I met my friend, and we walked through the streets, where there was some kind of street fair going on. He showed me a quirky store that sold various animal skulls and taxidermy items, as well as a few fossils. The employee assured us that everything was ethically sourced—the taxidermy was all secondhand, and all human specimens (!) were retired educational specimens, but I didn't notice any human items.

We went to a Mexican restaurant where I got butternut squash tamales, since butternut squash is almost pumpkin (even though it's not pumpkin season), but the corny outside drowned out the flavor of the squash.

Then I had to get on BART again before it quit running for the night, and I had my last evening with the niblings.

I said goodbye before they headed to school Friday morning. I don't know the next time I will see them again, or Pudding, sadly. It was hard to visit when they lived in Tennessee, and Taiwan will be much harder. But at least they're older now, so I'm not worried about them forgetting us.

If you want to help out, you will not vote for MAGA candidates, so we can restore some sanity to this country and they can come back.

Anyway, that's all for the trip.

You might have noticed that my most recent posts haven't included the AI dreams, because my dreams weren't that interesting, and I'm getting a little bored of the concept. But I did have some interesting dreams this week, including one about a grocery store that had a lot going on.