In the past three weeks, I had been working late nights to edit my aunt’s stories about our family. I wanted to turn it into a web book similar to Vietnamese Typography. I wanted to add old photos as well as profile information for the characters in her stories, which included my mother’s parents and her siblings.

Although I volunteered to put the website together, my main focus was on editing. I had been blogging on this site for 20 years, but it was the first time that I edited someone else’s work. It was a daunting task to edit both English and Vietnamese. What I looked for were spelling errors, cutting down repeated sentences to make the flow better, and consistency—particularly in English to keep the stories in past tense.

I had the impression that when my aunt wrote these stories, she wanted to get the words from her head to the page. As a result, she didn’t pay much attention to the technical part of writing. As an editor, I came to her stories from a fresh perspective; therefore, I had an easier time to spot the errors. I had learned quite a bit editing someone’s writing, but I don’t enjoy it as much as writing.

In addition to editing the stories and designing the website, I wrote an epilogue. I wish I could share the entire book, but it was intended as a family project. I will share my piece on this blog.

The final draft is almost finished. I just wanted to get it done so I can get back to my normal routine and catching up on sleeping. I had a booster shot yesterday and my arm is sore.

Last night, my classmates and I took our ice skating test for Freestyle 2. Our coach graded our skills using the pass-or-fail system instead of the 1-10 scale. I passed the jump sequence, ballet jump, and half-lutz jump. She didn’t test us on the dance step sequence and the edged spirals. To the coach, as well as mine, surprise, I pulled off the one-foot spin. It was like a miracle because I had been struggling with it throughout our 10-week lesson. I could barely spin for 3 revolutions, let alone meet the requirement of six revolutions. Even earlier today, I couldn’t get my spin together during practice. Somehow I found my groove during the test.

I can now relax a bit for the holidays. Learning ice skating had been quite stressful at this level and I just wanted to learn for fun; therefore, I decided to stop after Freestyle 2. The techniques were becoming more challenging and I would need more time to practice. Unfortunately, my kids are no longer interested in ice skating. Đạo and Đán are learning ice hockey. Xuân is still taking figure lessons, but his heart is not in it. He hadn’t practiced and he couldn’t do the techniques at his level.

I don’t see the point for me to continue if my kids are not doing it. I felt guilty going to practice by myself while the kids stayed home with their mom. She had also been complaining about me going to practice. In addition, I have trouble spinning. I have all the excuses and legitimate reasons to quit. So yes, this is the end of my figure skate learning journey for me. I am glad I have made it this far. It was a wonderful experience.

My Dearest Sons,

You are my lifelines. You are my saviors. Without you, I have nothing. Reality is harsh, ruthless, and brutal, but I accepted it. When my mother passed away, part of me had died. Even in her dying days, I came close to losing everything, but you saved me. I am forever grateful to each one of you.

The other day, I felt miserable. I went for a drink and headed to the skatepark. I shouldn’t drink and skate, but I needed to clear my head. As I was ready to hit the ramps, I was reminded it was time to pick you up from school. I packed up and left the skatepark. You saved me once again. I am telling you this because I don’t want you to ever do what I was about to do.

I want you to know that nothing can replace my love for you. Everything I do for you comes from a place of love, even tough love. Whenever Đán was frustrated with me, he would tell me, “I wish I had a normal dad. Why can’t I have a normal dad?” I don’t want to be a normal dad. I strive to be an extraordinary dad. A normal dad would drop you off at a skatepark, watch you skate, and tell you what you want to hear, “You skate so well. I am so proud of you.” I wanted to join you and to take on the challenge with you.

Most of the time you would rather sit in front of the screen than go to the skateparks with me, but you went because you wanted to make me happy. You might think nothing of it, but I treasured every moment of it. As the days get shorter and the nights get colder, I enjoyed rollerblading with you in the skateparks that had bright white lights. The thrills of dropping in the bowls, riding around the ramps, jumping off the benches made me feel like a kid again.

I am proud of the progression that we had made together. As Đạo pointed out, we were intimidated by the lowest ramp when we first started out. Now we can skate on almost every ramp in the skateparks. I hope that one day, you will think back and remember our time together. Thank you for making these unforgettable memories for me. Soon you’ll head to college and live your own life, and I will miss having you around.

Thank you for taking on this journey with me. As Xuân is picking up rollerblading, I can’t wait for Vương to join our crew.

I love you guys.
Dad

When Vik and José sought out my advice on Vietnamese diacritics for one of their award-winning font families, Bree already supported the Vietnamese language. Upon reviewing the typeface, I noticed its diacritical marks were lacking the handwriting qualities that gave Bree its friendly yet distinctive voice. In addition to their generic shapes, the marks were strangely connected to each other, specifically the acute was attached to the right side of the circumflex and the grave was attached to the left side of the circumflex.

Based on my suggestions, José did a complete overhaul of Bree’s diacritical marks. With attention to the details, he incorporated the handwriting touches and organic shapes from the base letters into the diacritical marks. In particular, he redrew the tilde to give it more curves and added the bottom tail to the hook above to give it a humanist touch. In combined marks, he detached the acute and the grave from the circumflex and repositioned all the stacking accents to the right of the circumflex for consistency, which helped with readability on long-form texts. He also reworked the ư and ơ horns to make sure they were harmonized.

After many rounds of revisions, I was happy to see that the diacritics have become part of the letters. I appreciated José’s commitment to get it right. He sweated every detail to make the diacritical marks flow with the base letters. I can’t wait to see more Vietnamese texts set in Bree.

Donda is a dud. It is impossible to sit through the entire album, which consists of 27 tracks and clocks in an hour and 49 minutes. It is a work progress, not a polished album. Guest stars are almost on every track and Kanye is rambling on almost every track. The album has been heavily edited to remove all the curse words; therefore, the lyrics are hard to understand. This is easily Kanye’s worse album of all time.

Let’s talk about shame. Shame is part of my life. I can’t live without shame. All I can think about is shame. Shame is ruining my life and my relationship. I am ashamed of shame, but I can’t help myself.

Maybe I need therapy to get shame out of my mind. Maybe I am living my world full of shame. The more I try to ignore shame, the more shame takes over me. Just the thought of shame makes me miserable. I need a cure for my shame. Shamefully, only one could save me from shame.

I don’t know what to do with shame. I guess I just have to live with shame. Dealing with shame is hard. I wish I could get over shame. I wish I could resist shame. I wish I could conquer shame. I wish I didn’t have to talk about shame. I wish I didn’t have to write about shame.

It’s a damn shame.

The Times Book Review has released its list of “The 10 Best Books of 2021” and I have read none of them. I bookmarked it. Will pick up a few of them over the winter holiday break after I finish editing a family book. If you don’t see me blogging much these days, it is because I am working on a family project and it takes more time than I had anticipated.

As my boss is counting down to her retirement, she wants to make sure that all of her responsibilities are taken care of before she checks out. Although she is an associate dean, she has been very hands on. She is more technological savvy than her peers.

For instance, one of the tasks she took on was organizing and running the school calendars for over a decade. The program she had been using was no longer supported. She would have to pay $25,000 to get it upgraded to the cloud. As a result, she tasked me and the assistant director of technology to find alternative solutions. My first priority was to use the web to solve the issues. For public events, I turned to WordPress using the Events Calendar plugin. It worked out great. Instead of entering the events myself, I created accounts for stakeholders to post their events themselves. To solve class schedules and room reservations, we decided to use 25Live since the university already had a deal with the program. We just need to customize it a bit to match our brand. We saved the law school 25 grants.

Another item on my boss’s list was the TV screens around the building. She used a program that allowed her to display news via RSS feeds, weather forecasts, slideshows, and events. That program was also outdated and would cost $12,000 a year to keep it up to date. She assigned me and the director of technology to find a solution. In our initial meeting, I just asked if the screens could display the browser and the answer was yes. Once again, the web saved me. I recreated all the features using pages in WordPress. I created a page to parse RSS feeds, a page to display events, a page with slideshows. Once I had all the pages, I combined them together using the header refresh (via meta tag). We saved the school another 12 grants.

She was very pleased with the simple solutions we provided and they were free thanks to the beauty and flexibility of the web. She was also relieved that we took the weight off her shoulders. She has been an amazing boss and I wish she would continue, but she deserves her retirement. I will miss her dearly after she leaves. I am not sure what our future boss will be like, but I am not going to worry about it now. Que será, será.

Đán’s English teacher reached out to us because she was concerned about his expression of feeling sad and lonely. He drew sad faces on the back of his assignment sheets and often placed a sad face on his online profile. He made passing comments that he had never felt real happiness. He thought that no one liked him.

After reading his teacher’s note, my wife and I had a talk with him. He told us that he felt lonely during recess at school. When he played football with his friends, no one passed the ball to him. He sat at the “buddy bench,” but no one wanted to be his buddy. We didn’t even know about the buddy bench until he explained it to us. The bench was intended for any students who didn’t have anyone to play with and would like someone to play together. It seemed like an interesting concept, perhaps.

We asked Đán if he felt lonely at home and he said no because he had his older brother Đạo to play with. He also shared that he felt sad sometimes when we rushed him and raised our voices in the morning trying to get him to school on time. We promised him that we will make that change. Later on, when we were driving home from their ice hockey practice, Đán told Đạo that things had changed after Đao left for Robinson. He said that kids sweared a lot more. We had the impression that he missed having his brother around at school.

Now that we are aware of his emotions, we check on him more often. We should also give him space to hang out with his friends outside of school. We usually have family activities like scouting, learning ice hockey, going to the skateparks, and eating out.

We appreciate his teacher for sharing her concerns with us. It shows that she cares about his well being as well as his happiness.

In his memoir of 2020, D’Aguiar reveals in detail his battle against prostate cancer and the challenges he faced during the pandemic. Although his writing is engaging, entertaining, and enlightening, the book feels really long. Maybe I am more interested on cancer than other topics. Even when he waxes poetic prose on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, I just want to get back to the cancer result. It is definitely an informative book for me, God forbid, if I have to go through what he went through.