On the I Quit album opener, “Gone” kicks off with a strumming guitar then an angelic voice begins, “Can I have your attention, please?” Four bars in, she sings, “I’ll do whatever I want / I’ll see who I wanna see / I’ll fuck off whenever I want.” She definitely got my attention there. The track progresses from soft rock into an electric, propulsive production with soaring guitar solo. Haim is a trio rock band with the Haim’s sisters Danielle, Alana, and Este and they a thing or two about “Relationships.” Don’t let their sweet voices and the the bouncy beat fool you, “I think I’m in love, but I can’t stand fuckin’ relationships.” The album closes out with “Now It’s Time.” Over the hip-hop back beat, Danielle sings softly, “You never said the things that I wanna hear / You don’t even understand why I’m still here.” By the end, the hiphop-rock beat takes over and she leaves listeners with, “Am I reaching out to say / I never gave two fucks anyway?” I enjoyed the f-bombs they dropped on this album.

NaN Jaune, designed by Jérémy Landes, flips the script with its closed apertures, short extenders, text for display, and display for text. NaN Jaune comes in three flavors: Maxi (swells at display sizes), Midi (sings at text sizes), and Mini (maintains legibility at small sizes). NaN Jaune is packed with diacritical swags. For Vietnamese, its acute, grave, and hook above stack to the right of its circumflex. NaN Jaune is also used for my Björk project.

Chiều thứ Bảy vừa quá, anh bạn rủ qua nhà nhậu lai rai. Tối đến rủ nhau hát karaoke. Trong đám có mấy đứa cháu hát tiếng Việt cũng thú vị. Nó hát ca khúc “Tình đơn phương” mà khiến mình cảm thấy thèm thuồng vì trong lời ca lại có chữ “xào lăn” trong khi mình nhìn lên TV thì thấy chữ “sầu lắng”.

Gần đây nhậu nhẹt nhiều. Vì uống thuốc chống gout mỗi ngày nên không bị tấn công. Chân không bị gout nữa nên cũng không biết lúc nào uống rượu nhiều.

Tuần trước uống nửa chai Cordon Bleu và nửa chai XXO cùng với mấy người bạn, hôm sau đầu đau như muốn vỡ. Tự hứa từ nay không uống Cognac nữa. Tôi cũng uống qua mấy chai bourbon và cũng cảm thấy khó chịu muốn mửa. Thế nên tôi cũng bỏ luôn bourbon.

Chỉ còn lại whiskey là uống thấy ổn nhất là những chai whiskey Nhật như Yamazaki và Hakushu 12 năm trở lên. Tuy hơn đắt tiền nhưng uống chắc ăn.

Giờ đây tôi phải hạn chế nhậu tối đa. Không uống ở nhà bất cứ loại bia rượu nào hoặc đi ăn với gia đình. Chỉ khi nào đi với bạn nhậu mới uống. Nếu được chỉ thưởng thức whiskey của Nhật thôi. Tuy hơi đắt tiền nhưng đáng.

Nếu như bỏ rượu hẳn thì không thể được trừ khi sức khỏe không còn cho phép nữa. Vả lại giờ đây càng ngày càng lớn tuổi, sức khỏe rất quan trọng. Mùa đông vừa rồi tôi uống rượu rất ít vì tập trung vào skiing và snowboarding.

This book has two parts. The first part consist of 50 Notes on Book Design by Formal Settings. The second part showcases the books. The typeset of the first part is large; therefore; the text is easy to read. Unfortunately the big space and long indent are a bit disrupting. It would have been better if the noted book were accompanied by the illustrations so readers can refer to the design. It’s a missed opportunity.

This is another informative book in the 33 ⅓ in which Matthew Gasteier breaks down the illness of Nas’s Illmatic. Of course, I had to listened to this album countless of times and read about it a few times, but this one is still a fantastic read. It’s a good escape from the current political scene in the US and the world. That orange clown is dragging us to a war. Motherfucker!

This 500-page book features over 300 projects designed by Paula Scher. Adrian Shaughnessy wrote an informative essay about Ms. Scher and her social, political as well as commercial works. His interview gives us more insights into her life and work. I am a fan of Ms. Scher; therefore, I enjoyed reading about her life and flipping through 910 illustrations.

Ocean Vương’s début novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is 256 pages. His follow-up novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is almost 400 pages. Whereas Briefly Gorgeous is brief and poetic, Gladness is attentive and emotional. His writing is still poetic and his characters come to life. As an immigrant from Việt Nam, I can relate to the protagonist Hải.

His description of HomeMarket reminds me of Homestyle Country Cooking in Park City Center in the 90s. I started out as a cashier, but wanted to learn how to cook homestyle country dishes. When I switched to the kitchen, my job was to put pre-made food on the plates and hit the bell to tell the servers to serve their customers. The food was not homemade at all.

I must confess. Trying to read a 400-page book these days is not easy. It takes patience and concentration. I tried to slow down my pace a bit so I could understand the stories. With Gladness, it was worthwhile to slow down so I could stay with stories a bit longer. Since I had read pretty much anything Vương had published, I find this book to be his best work up to date. It is a beautiful, soul-searching, and sweeping read.

After watching all the seasons of Cobra Kai, Xuân wants to take up karate. I let him try out Vovinam last Sunday and he seemed to want to go for it. Xuân is athletic and when he commits to something he will stick with it.

Now that he’s taking summer break from school, he swims every morning and competes every Saturday and Monday. He wants to take up Vovinam on Sunday too. Even after swimming, he wants me to take him to the skatepark so he can ride his scooter. My rollerblade skills are stagnant, but his riding skills continue to progress. He keeps trying out and picking up new tricks. I am just in awe to see how much he has improved.

In the winter, we both skied and snowboarded. He picked up snowboarding fast. Last season alone, he progressed from the green trails to the double-black terrains. He might drop skiing and just stick with snowboarding, but I encouraged him to stay with both. We’ll see.

He still takes piano lesson every Wednesday. After the lesson, we would hit the skatepark for an hour before heading home. Xuân and I do many things together. He keeps my old-ass active and I appreciate him for that.

His older brothers think I am favoring him, but I am not. My invitation is always open for them to hang out with us, but they rather spend time on their digital devices. I cannot force them to do things they don’t want to do. The days of all of us hanging out together were long gone. Of course, I missed those days, but I had come to term that not everyone had the same interests.

While excelling at physical activities, Xuân needs help with his academics. Then again, he listens to me when I ask him to blog everyday during the summer to practice his writing. He is doing it. I will also need to help him with reading as well. If he is willing to make the commitment, I am sure he will catch up quickly.

Joshua Rothman writes for the New Yorker:

Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.

This shift has taken decades, and it’s been driven by technologies that have been disproportionately adopted by the young. Perhaps for these reasons, its momentousness has been obscured. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That’s a striking change, but modest compared to what’s happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics—which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration—found that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Predictably, college professors have been complaining with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.

I must also confess. It is hard for me to read a long book these days.