Claire Cain Miller and Jonah Engel Bromwich defines snowplow parenting in The New York Times:

[C]learing the way for their children to get in to college, while shielding them from any of the difficulty, risk and potential disappointment of the process.

In its less outrageous — and wholly legal — form, snowplowing (also known as lawn-mowing and bulldozing) has become the most brazen mode of parenting of the privileged children in the everyone-gets-a-trophy generation.

They also wrote about A Vietnamese student:

Cathy Tran, 22, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is the daughter of people who immigrated from Vietnam who did not attend college. “They do give me a lot of emotional support, but they haven’t really been able to tell me about what I should be doing, like next steps,” she said.

Clearing her own path to college had some benefits, Ms. Tran said. “I actually think that I have a sense of independence and confidence in myself in a way that some of my friends whose parents attended college might not have,” she said. “I had some friends who didn’t even know how to do laundry. I guess in some ways I feel like I was forced to be an adult much earlier on.”

For parents, the entire article is worth-reading.

The weekend is here and the weather is beautiful, and yet I am conflicted about it. Weekends are supposed to be relaxed and to be with the kids, but I have so much chores to do. The guilt is depressing the hell out me.

Instead of riding bike or going to fun places with the boys, I need to do work around the house. The floor needed to be swept and mopped. The wrinkled carpet needed to be stretched out. The shed needed to be reorganized. The cracks on the driveway needed to be filled. The deck needed to be repainted. The basement needed to be decluttered.

Owning a house comes with so much responsibilities. I hate it. I want to do nothing on the weekend, except chilling with the family. When I used to rent, I did not have to worry about any of that mundane crap. I wanted to go back to living a minimal life, but I am no longer living alone and I can’t make all the decisions.

I wish I can throw away most of the things in our house. One of these days, I will. The conflict between cleaning the house and taking the kids out is killing me. The guilt of letting the house untidy is bad. The guilt of cleaning up the house and letting the kids glued the iPads is even worst. Either way, I am fucked. I might as well just take a week or two vacation time to do what I have to do around the house.

Petula Dvorak writes in The Washington Post:

George Mason is filled with strivers, not schemers. No one with money is struggling to get their kid into Mason. Yet it is a showcase of the American Dream, a haven for middle-class families seeking college degrees for their kids without taking out second mortgages or saddling their children with insane amounts of debt.

And this is a college for the children of immigrants, who are often the first in their families to get a degree.

I am proud to be part of the Mason Nation.

The day I decided to reactivate Facebook, it’s down. Oh well, I guess I shouldn’t log back in.

So what’s up? Neomi Rao has been confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Good for her.

I am still debating whether I should do a small website for someone who is connected to the a prominent Republican. Well, It’s all about the Benjamins, baby. Will see.

My MacBook Pro is dying. It takes forever to boot up. Microsoft Word fails to open. Adobe products take forever to open. I should hold off on upgrading to Creative Cloud until I get a new MacBook Pro. I am not looking forward to transfer everything over. I guess it is time to clean up everything.

I am reading Stormy Daniels’s memoir. I haven’t come yet. Just kidding. She has good story to tell. I’ll blurb it when I am done.

What else is there? Still stressing the fuck out about everything. I am about to head home soon for the day. This post is super random.

James Edmondson shares:

While logotypes can be simply typeset, it often makes sense to put another level of care and attention into how letters exist within their unchanging context. Type design is a compromise. Decisions are made about the structure of a drawing to excel best in the greatest possible number of contexts. This changes a lot for logotypes. When words are drawn as a single image, opportunities arise to get a little more own-able, without worrying about the letters jumbling up again.

Useful tips and examples.

Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky write in The Washington Post:

Authorities said the crimes date back to 2011, and the defendants used “bribery and other forms of fraud to facilitate their children’s admission” to numerous college and universities,” including Georgetown, Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California and UCLA, among others.

It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.

My current title at Scalia Law School is Director of Design and Web Services. I supervise a part-time employee who helps me out with updating content, managing MODX and WordPress, and putting together HTML newsletters. As for my role, I am still involved hands-on with design and development.

For design, I am still kicking ass in Illustrator, Photoshop, and typography—I wrote two books on it. I still work with the Dean’s office, admissions, alumni, and various centers to design print materials ranging from magazine ads to invitations to conference’s programs.

For the web, I am still kicking ass in HTML and CSS. I design in the browser and have not touched Sketch, Figma, InVision, or any UX tool. I write a bit of JavaScript and PHP. I can develop sites with content management system including MODX, WordPress, and Kirby. I have not touched any design or JavaScript frameworks.

I am not in the market to look for a new job, but I wonder if my skillsets will still be useful. My current director role isn’t conventional because most design and creative directors aren’t hands-on. By keeping my hands in the technical side, I understand exactly what designers and developers are doing. I know about performance, accessibility and usability.

The web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee writes in the Web Foundation:

The web is for everyone and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.

Yes, let’s make a change.

I feel bad for not being a good son. I have not done anything to pay back for all the pain I have caused my mother since the day she gave birth to me. I feel bad for not being a good husband. I have not compensated her for all the sacrifices she made for family. I feel bad for not being a good father. I have not been there enough for my sons.

I carry these bad feelings with me all the time and they make me depressed. I often told myself to do better tomorrow, and yet the more I tried the further I sank. Life gets less satisfied as the day passed. I simply can’t shake off all the guilts and they often come up when I am alone. I can’t take a quiet walk without those bad feelings creeping up on me. They are eating me alive.

Alcohol gives me temporarily relief from all of these bad feelings, but it also gives me gout, which is even worse. I only therapy left is writing on this blog. I am not looking for any sympathy. I just need to get it out of my system.

Gregory Cowles writes in The New York Times:

“Write what you know,” young writers are often told. But for readers, the corollary is pretty much the opposite: Read what you don’t know. To the extent that books grant you access to another person’s mind, they provide a sure path to new ways of seeing. And in reading as in life, the more you expose yourself to other perspectives the broader your horizons will be.

A fantastic guide to tap your inner reader.